(by Private Notice) asked the Minister of Defence whether he will make a statement on the tragic deaths of Captain R. Edwards and Sapper J. Warburton.

There is little I can add to the statement issued by my Ministry yesterday. One officer and one other rank were reported missing, believed killed, in an action near the Dhala Road on 30th April. During the course of Wednesday, 13th May, two headless bodies were found by a patrol near to this spot. The bodies were in British denims and from personal belongings found with them it has to be concluded with deep regret that they are the bodies of these two soldiers.

The next-of-kin were informed yesterday.

The funeral is taking place in Aden this morning.

I am sure that it would be in accordance with the wishes of the House that I should express our deepest sympathy with the relatives of these brave men.

Hear, hear.

I am certain that the whole House would want to agree with my right hon. Friend in his expression of sympathy to all the relatives and families. May I ask him whether, at the funerals, full military honours will be given to the two soldiers? I am sure that that would be the wish of the House. Will my right hon. Friend take all possible action to see that the world realises the barbaric nature of the tribal attacks on the peace-keeping forces in the South Arabian Federation? Will he ensure that a full investigation is carried out to ascertain whether arms and funds for these attacks emanate from Egypt?

Lastly, will my right hon. Friend ensure that the officer commanding—whose reputation, in my view, has been unnecessarily besmirched by certain Socialist attacks—and his officers, as well as all his troops, know that they have the support of this House in fulfilling the hapless and most difficult task assigned to them?

These men will, of course, be buried with full military honours. I should not wish to broaden the answers to this question, since these are grave and distressing matters, except to say that these tribes are undoubtedly—and there is no secret about it—armed and equipped from the Yemen. I think that the publicity which this case has received will ensure that the situation there is very widely known throughout the world.

May I, first, associate the whole of the Opposition with the feelings of sympathy which the Minister expressed for the families of the soldiers concerned, and, indeed, for all British troops fighting in Southern Arabia against tribesmen who have long been addicted to these barbarous and primitive practices?

There is one question which I can, perhaps, pursue with the Secretary of State. It has been reported that the initial statement about the exhibition of the heads of the British soldiers in Taiz emanated not from the General Officer Commanding Middle East Land Forces, but from the Southern Arabian radio and that the British official concerned has since been allowed to resign.

If this is the case, I wish to express my regret that I fixed the personal responsibility on the General Officer Commanding, because it is clear that in this case he was only commenting on a report which was already public knowledge.

I do not want to apportion blame to any Englishman on the subject of this matter. There were rumours about this. They were reported and, alas, in a tragic and distressing particular they have been proved to be only too true.

rose—

There is great difficulty. There are other matters and this is a day which is allocated by the House to private Members. Events mean that we have a lot of business before we even start on the time allocated to them. I must be ruthless about questions.

On 28th April, I gave tae House an interim report on the progress of the Basutoland Conference.

The conference completed its work in the early hours of this morning and we have just this moment signed our report. Agreement has been reached on the introduction of a new Constitution which will be followed by independence a year later, if the desire for it is confirmed by the people of Basutoland through their Parliament or through a referendum.

On independence, it is intended that the Paramount Chief should become Head of State. Prior to independence, he will be Her Majesty's Representative in the territory. During this interim stage, the British Government's Representative will be responsible for external affairs, defence and internal security, and for the time being, for the public service. He will also have the necessary powers to ensure proper financial administration.

There will be a Legislature composed of a Lower House, elected on the basis of universal adult suffrage and a Senate with delaying powers composed of the Principal Chiefs and persons nominated by the Paramount Chief. The Constitution will, of course, contain safeguards for Human Rights.

Our policy will be based on the expectation that the Basutos will confirm their request for independence one year after the elections are held under the new Constitution. In the interval, we shall delegate to the elected Basutoland Government responsibilities in regard to external affairs and internal security as fully and as quickly as circumstances allow. We shall also take steps to increase the number of locally enlisted public servants.

The report of the conference, including the outline of the draft Constitution, will be published at once, and will be presented to Parliament as a White Paper as soon as it can be printed.

Is the Secretary of State aware that we are grateful to him for telling the House about the conclusion of this conference so very quickly and before we adjourn for Whitsun?

We shall want to study the White Paper when it becomes available, but is he aware that there will be a general welcome that agreement now appears to have been reached between the Secretary of State and the delegates at this constitutional conference on the timetable for independence?

Can the right hon. Gentleman say anything about the financial arrangements in relation to independence, as at the moment about one-third of the Basutoland budget is met by grants in aid from this country?

I do not think that I can say any more than I said in reply to a Question from the hon. Member for Eton and Slough (Mr. Brockway) the other day. The right moment for any financial arrangements to be negotiated will be when we have an elected Basutoland Government to deal with.

With permission, I should like to make a statement.

The Report of the Court of Inquiry which I appointed under the chairmanship of the Rt. Hon. Sir Colin Pearson, to inquire into the causes and circumstances of tie recent dispute in the electricity supply industry, is being published as a Command Paper this morning. Copies of the Report are available in the Vote Office and have been given to the parties.

The Report identifies two underlying causes in the recent dispute: delay on the part of the electricity boards in putting forward and developing their status proposals; and breaches by the unions of the three-year agreement reached in January, 1963, and of the constitutional agreement in that they evaded the obligation to allow their difference with the boards to go to arbitration.

The Report commends the status scheme as a very worthy conception and one which both parties have accepted in principle as being in the overall best interest of the electricity boards, the employees and the consumers. The Report recommends that the two sides should resume negotiations on the scheme in an atmosphere of renewed vigour and purpose. I hope that they will do so.

I should like to thank Sir Colin Pearson and his colleagues for producing a most valuable and constructive Report.

I am sure that the whole House will join with the Minister in hoping that there will be an immediate resumption of the negotiations now that clarification has been brought to a rather confused situation.

I am grateful to you, Mr. Speaker, for having given me the opportunity of raising the question of didicoi this morning. It is very pleasant to be able to come to the House with the knowledge that one will be heard. So often one sits pregnant on the back benches throughout the day only to find that one has laboured in vain. I do not normally speak for more than 15 minutes, but this morning I shall have to exceed that a little. Before I begin, I should like to take the opportunity of thanking my right hon. Friend the Minister for having come to the House himself to answer the debate.

The problem which I wish to raise this morning has two aspects. The first is the human aspect—how can we help didicoi to lead a normal life for the benefit of themselves and, above all, their children, and the second aspect is the social one—how much longer are we to tolerate the hideous and insanitary mess which they make of our rural countryside? The second aspect affects far more people than the first, but although I do not want to exaggerate it—there are many other people who dis- figure our countryside, as the Keep Britain Tidy Group well knows—it is not a trivial matter which gives offence only to the unreasonably fastidious.

First, then, what are didicoi? I am indebted to the hon. Member for Fulham (Mr. M. Stewart), whose theory it is that the word comes from the Greek, which means followers or successors—originally of the troops of Alexander the Great. This is an ingenious theory, because the word "gypsy" itself comes from Greece, which was then called "Little Egypt." I am grateful to the hon. Member for telling me. It means, incidentally, that there is no "s" at the end of the word. The point is that these people are not gypsies: they are not true Romanies. They are more the "flaming tin-men" of Thomas Hardy, otherwise itinerant caravan-dwelling tinkers. A Dublin report of last November said that there were no fewer than 100,000 Irish itinerants in this country today, and one asks why.

There is nothing wrong in living in a caravan. This is a free country, but liberty has here degenerated into licence. The fact of the matter is that these people do not give one of their own proverbial cusses for what they do in and around the places where their caravans have rested. They trade in junk and scrap metal and find it much cheaper to ply their trade on grass verges, paying neither rent nor rates and leaving local authorities to clear up the mess, if and when the arm of the law drives them round the bend—which is about as far as it ever does drive them. That is why I have described them as a menace.

Whereas otherwise they would have met with the good-natured tolerance of most country folk, they have forfeited their right to that by showing an utter disregard for other people's enjoyment of the countryside and a carelessness for their neighbour's health, convenience and property which goes well beyond the bounds of the tolerable. They have no latrine discipline; they pester neighbouring householders for water and anything else which they may be able to scrounge; they pull down trees and fences for firewood; and they dump such scrap as is unsaleable by the roadside or on private property.

Local authorities in Hertfordshire and elswhere, from the country council downwards, have been bombarded with complaints not only from local sufferers, but also from passing motorists, who resent the transformation of our green and pleasant land into a rusty and very unpleasant refuse dump. A letter in The Times not long ago spoke of grass growing high round old cars on the Watford by-pass. The writer said that

"Thousands of miles of motoring on the Continent has shown nothing remotely approaching this horrible sight of miscellaneous rubbish wantonly dumped."

They also afflict many other parts of the country outside my constituency. They are in Kent—there was a photograph in the Daily Telegraph two days ago—they are in Lincolnshire, and at this very moment a public meeting is going on in a British Legion hall at Corfe Mullen where the Poole Borough Council and the Wimborne R.D.C. and goodness knows how many private citizens are protesting against the decision of the Dorset County Council, not that there should be a site for the didicoi down there, but that the site should be placed where the county council suggests.

My hon. Friend the Member for St. Albans (Mr. Goodhew), who is in his place this morning, raised the matter in the House on the Adjournment of 20th February last, and my noble Friend, Lord Hawke, raised it in another place on 23rd January last. I can only say that I respectfully hope that I shall get a more satisfactory reply than my hon. Friend received on 20th February. I must tell my right hon. Friend that it is really not so much a question of "awakening the social conscience" to the plight of these people, but rather of awakening their conscience to their duty to their neighbour.

It is now well over a year ago since I first became involved in this matter, and I have large files of correspondence with no fewer than three Departments of State, goodness knows how many private citizens, and four local authorities. I turned, first, to the police. I discovered that they have no power to use force to move people off property; that one has no redress if other people dump rubbish on one's land, and that didicoi simply move to and fro across county boundaries as and when the pressure is put upon them.

Nevertheless, in 1962, no fewer than 593 prosecutions were brought by the Hertfordshire Police and 287 by the Metropolitan Police, either for causing litter—maximum penalty £10; or for camping on the highway—maximum penalty £2; or for lighting fires close to the highway—maximum penalty £2. The police have certainly done their stuff, but these ridiculous fines make little impact upon the thick wads of Treasury notes generally carried under the skirt—and even they are not always recoverable.

I should have thought that the fact that the nuisance continues to increase despite this large number of prosecutions was proof enough that the law needs strengthening. My constituents feel that the authorities do not make enough use of the existing law, and that is, perhaps, because, on human grounds, they are loath to take action if there is nowhere for the evicted to go.

I turned then to the county council to see what it was doing. It informed me that the Ministry's solution, conveyed in Circular No. 6/1962, was that sites must somehow, somewhere, be found where these didicoi could bring their caravans to permanent rest, with a proper water supply, hard standing and sanitation; and whence their children could be properly educated, and discouraged from following the same way of life themselves.

If this solution is the right one, it is inescapable that local authorities must collaborate by providing sites; but the Hertfordshire County Council found that it was one thing to be told to "find sites", and quite another to persuade any district council to receive these people within their districts. Violent opposition from the neighbours not unnaturally met any proposal for any given site.

But, quite apart from this difficulty, I have myself never thought that this expedient would solve the problem. Last November I wrote to my right hon. Friend explaining why, and suggesting that his Department should give it fresh thought in conjunction with the Home Office and the Ministry of Transport; and that such joint consultation should be followed by concerted and energetic action. I sent copies of my letter to the other two Ministries and to all the local authorities concerned. Incidentally, that is part of the trouble—so many Departments are involved, as well as so many local authorities.

Meanwhile, my own contribution was to suggest, first, that dealers in scrap metal should be licensed; secondly, that regional co-operative efforts should be made to dispose efficiently and economically of old motor cars and other bulky junk; thirdly, that the maximum penalties for these misdemeanours should be increased; and, fourthly, that a better way of coping with this difficult problem would be to settle each family, or family group, separately in separate villages. I should like to record the present state of play on each of these suggestions.

On the first point, my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary replied that Section 86 of the Public Health Acts Amendment Act, 1907, provided for the registration of dealers in scrap metal but only in those areas where local authorities had adopted the provisions of the Act. He told me that in my constituency, out of four district councils, only one—the Rickmansworth Urban District Council—had adopted the provisions.

It is some years now since an official working party recommended that registration should be mandatory and universal instead of just permissive, but successive Tory Ministers have, as I believe rightly, hesitated to tamper with the decision of the representatives of the local electors on the spot and have left it to the town hall rather than Whitehall—a good Tory principle.

My hon. Friend the Member for Leeds, North-West (Sir D. Kaberry) has now introduced his Scrap Metal Dealers Bill, which the Government fully support, and which will so provide. The admitted object of registration is

"…to help the police in the prevention and detection of thefts of metal…"

not to preserve amenities; and my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary does not

"…think it would be reasonable to impose a licensing system on the whole of the scrap metal trade because of the activities of a certian type of dealer."

He adds:

"The working party considered and rejected suggestions that the registration authority should have power to refuse or cancel registration of persons considered unsuitable—which is what a licensing system would involve."

I am not sure that I agree, but at least something will have been achieved when all dealers in scrap metal must register.

On my second point—about the disposal of old cars and the like, I was informed by my hon. Friend the Joint Parliamentary Secretary that discussions were to take place between his Department, the Ministry of Transport and the local authority associations on the disposal of unwanted motor cars. On 3rd March, in answer to a Question in which I had pointed out that on the Continent it is common practice for machines to dispose of large old cars at the rate of 15 an hour, reducing them to an amount that can be wheeled away in a barrow, my hon. Friend told me that as a result of a meeting with representatives of these bodies his right hon. Friend

…hopes…to be able to give local authorities some useful advice."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 3rd March, 1964; Vol. 690, c. 1101.]

I would be grateful if he is now able to tell us what advice has been given.

My hon. Friend also told me that the Minister had set up a working party on refuse collection generally, under the chairmanship of Mr. H. H. Browne, of his Department, and comprising, among others, a housing manager, a borough treasurer, a works study specialist, a housewife and an engineer—and, also, I was glad to see, the Secretary of the Keep Britain Tidy Group.

When I asked whether the setting up of this working party had been necessary because there is much more refuse than there was or because its character has changed, my hon. Friend replied that it was

"…for both those reasons; and also because of the development of alternative means of dealing with refuse."

That sounded to me much more hopeful, and since then I am glad to have been informed by my hon. Friend that some of the local authorities in West Hertfordshire are discussing the possibility of

…making joint arrangements for the disposal of old cars…but that whether it is worth acquiring a very large baling machine must depend on the number of cars for disposal in any particular area."

May I again suggest to him that there will be an ever increasing number of obsolete cars in every area, and that it is high time that the appropriate authorities did take thought for their disposal.

Thirdly, as to the penalties, my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary told me on 23rd January that the Minister of Transport and he would consider an increase of the penalties for depositing rubbish and camping on the highway

…when an opportunity for legislation occurs."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 3rd January, 1964; Vol. 687, c. 1252.]

So it is at this point that my right hon. Friend the Minister of Transport enters the picture. He was good enough to write to me on 30th January last, and his letter describes the utter inadequacy of the Highways Acts in the face of this problem.

The Act of 1959, he tells me, contains various penal provisions about

"the unauthorised placing of things in highways".

An offence is committed if the highway, or any user of it, is damaged by the "thing", or if "rubbish is deposited" upon it. But, he adds:

"the deposit of scrap metal is not necessarily an offence in itself."

Moreover, even if it were an offence, the maximum penalty is only £2, and I am glad to say that my right hon. Friend considers that, by present-day standards, that is an inadequate deterrent. The difficulty of enforcing even these inadequate penalties would admittedly be much reduced if the plan to make the offenders

"more or less permanently resident in an area"

succeeds.

In his letter my right hon. Friend goes on to describe two other Sections of the Act which it is clear are quite useless for our purposes. And if anybody should think of asking whether or not verges are part of the highway, my advice to him would be, "Don't", because it could not matter less. My right hon. Friend informs me that to take legal proceedings for trespass upon verges is "a very slow business", and by way of illustration he mentions a dealer

"in scrap and miscellaneous junk"

whose determined delaying tactics staved off a decision by the court for three years.

So much for the Highways Acts and their penalties. As for the Litter Act, on 24th March my hon. Friend the Joint Parliamentary Secretary informed my hon. Friend the Member for Brighton, Kemptown (Mr. David James) that he had no reason to think that the maximum fine for offences under that Act was inadequate, and my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary appears to agree with that view. I do not, and I have a further Question down on this matter for Answer on 2nd June.

I turn, lastly, to my fourth point: how best to resettle. This is the human picture, and with this we return to the sphere of responsibility of my right hon. Friend the Minister of Housing and Local Government. In pursuance of the Ministry's policy, the Bushey Urban District Council has offered a site, which it considers to be one which will least damage the amenities of the neighbourhood, for a maximum of 16 caravans for a maximum period of 10 years. Everyone in the neighbourhood objects to this proposal, and I have forwarded to my right hon. Friend a petition against it.

As there is to be a local inquiry on 20th May and the matter is, therefore, sub judice, I will not comment on this particular site—but on the merits of the proposed solution of the problem generally I have long since made my objections clear.

First, who is to choose the 16, and where are the others going? Secondly, how will we prevent other caravanners "muscling in" on Hertfordshire's efforts? In the beginning there were 89 in Hertfordshire, but that number has already risen to 100. In his reply to my hon. Friend the Member for St. Albans on 20th February, my hon. Friend the Joint Parliamentary Secretary said that

"as soon as there is rumour of a site, all sorts of people come in who have nothing to do with Kent…or Hertfordshire, as the case may be…"

He went on:

"Now we have the situation that Kent, having taken the lead, instead of getting any alleviation of the burden, is tending to attract the didicois…from areas which have not been as consciertious."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 20th February, 1964; Vol. 689, cc. 1531–2.]

He added that his right hon. Friend had no direct powers in this matter, which was a local authority responsibility and that the Minister could rely only on persuasion.

Thirdly, if they continue to deal in scrap metal, where will they dump what they cannot sell? Fourthly, I have several little pockets of law-abiding, hardworking, caravan-dwellers in my constituency who have been given notice to quit their sites. Why should not they, too, be provided at county expense with pukka sites? They have nowhere else to go.

I think that this is the wrong way of going about it mainly because these didicoi will continue to be isolated members of the community. But if, for the time being, some of these people are to be resited, I hope that it will be beyond dispute that the sites chosen should be as far removed as possible from anywhere where they may cause offence either to local residents or to the landscape. I hope that the occupants will be charged full economic rents; that their children will be effectively controlled; and that if they deal in scrap they will be at least registered, if not licensed. I hope that there will be no dumping or litter of any kind, and that no more will be allowed into the county.

But surely it would be better to parcel them out, by families, among the community, so that their children may be educated without overcrowding any particular school; so that they may ultimately, if they so wish, qualify for council houses, and so that, in short, they may be painlessly assimilated into the community.

To sum up, here are twin problems—how to prevent our countryside from being used as a rubbish dump for unwanted scrap, and how best to deal with the people who are largely guilty of so using it. Cannot all dealers in scrap metal be licensed? Cannot there be closer and more effective co-operation in the disposal of bulky junk? Ought not the maximum penalties to be considerably increased? Would it not be better to resettle the didicoi by families or family groups, and not in larger numbers? Finally, if they are, for the time being, to be given sites, at least let the conditions that I have just stipulated be fulfilled.

Since there may be other hon. Members who wish to speak in later debates I shall not detain the House for more than a few minutes. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Hertfordshire, South-West (Mr. Longden) on raising this matter and on the immense vigour with which he has pursued his researches for over a year. I also support him in everything that he has said and, in particular, in regard to the remedies for which he has so wisely asked.

I hesitate to use the word, but there is an element rather of indifference on the part of a number of Government Departments involved. I am sure that in theory they are anxious to help, but they seem not to be able to offer any really constructive thoughts. Today, my hon. Friend has done so, and has put forward obvious steps that need to be taken if a solution to the problem is to be found.

This matter affects not only Hertfordshire and Kent, but Surrey—indeed, it arises everywhere in the green belt, and I would imagine that it is to be found in other parts of the country, around the great conurbations. I have great experience of the problem in my constituency, and in my own village in the constituency. There is one admirable local site where caravan dwellers are living, and I hope that they will remain there. The caravans are fulfilling a very good purpose. There is another site, however, which some didicoi acquired about 15 years ago, which has become a scene of increasing and appalling squalor.

The county and the rural district councils have taken a very long time to take such action as is open to them. It is now under way, however. The authorities are in the throes of obtaining control of this site, and they will be able to impose controls on the inhabitants. I hope that it will then become less of a menace to health, and not such a scene of squalor as it is now.

In addition to that, since I live in a village which is surrounded by common land I have the problem of itinerant didicois. Let me give one example. Within 100 yards of my village church—which is on a common—on what is National Trust land intended for the benefit of the public, just off the verge there is a caravan which settled there about eight weeks ago. As owners of the land, the National Trust has asked the police to move the caravan on. The police are faced with the fact that the woman in the caravan is pregnant, and has a doctor's certificate to say that under no circumstances must she be moved on. Quite frankly, this is irrelevant to the problem. I can understand why the police are rather hesitant to face failure in the courts, but this is typical of the way in which the efforts of the police and local authorities are baffled.

If the didicoi can be settled on a site there is every hope of progress. I revert to the site in my constituency, which has been there for many years. The children go to the village school and, as a result of great diligence and enthusiasm on the part of the local headmistress, Miss White, there have been some remarkable successes. Some of the children have gone on to secondary modern schools and have been very successful there. They then elect to choose another way of life.

It is clear that success in this matter can be achieved if only the methods which we adopt are made slightly more severe. If that were done we could solve the problem. I support my hon. Friend in everything that he has said, and I thank him, on behalf of all fellow sufferers, for what he has done in drawing attention to the matter.

I am grateful to my hon. Friend—my formidable friend—the Member for Hertfordshire, South-West (Mr. Longden) for going so deeply into this difficult, almost intractable, subject. I am grateful, also, to my right hon. Friend the Member for Reigate (Sir J. Vaughan-Morgan) for adding his comments.

The didicoi, as my hon. Friend said, are not the true Romany. They are people who have for one reason or another, good or bad, chosen to lead an itinerant form of life. They are generally attracted to the perimeter of prospering conurbations where they can earn money by carrying out a number of trades such as we connect with tinkers or car breakers; and they do a number of constructional jobs as well, making up gravel drives and that sort of thing. They tend to increase in number, but I must reject entirely, categorically and dogmatically the suggestion of my hon. Friend that the figure that he draws from Government sources of 100,000 itinerants really has any relevance at all.

My hon. Friend spoke of 89 families in his area which had increased to 100. I would say that we are dealing with a large number of hundreds or a small number of thousands in the country as a whole. These are people who have a perfect right to live in the way they want to live, provided that they do not do anything to damage their neighbours or to offend against the criminal law, or to live in such an unhygienic or unsettled way as to damage the environment of their children. People, after all, have the right to live the sort of life that they want to live subject to this restraint on un-neighbourly behaviour.

Would not my right hon. Friend agree that there is another aspect which he has omitted in his summary, and that is the question of people earning an income in these cases obviously without paying any tax on it? Surely this is antisocial, to say the least.

We are dealing with people who are, by hypothesis, itinerant and, therefore, relatively hard to pin down in this way. My hon. Friend the Member for St. Albans (Mr. Goodhew) has raised a fiscal issue which the mover of the Motion did not cover. I have no evidence that these people escape the tax net, though I suspect that my hon. Friend's assumption may have some truth in it.

However, it all comes down, as I shall seek to show, to the fact that these people shift rapidly from place to place, and much of the trouble of which my hon. Friends complain, including, in fact, the fiscal allegation just made, flow from this. What the House is interested in is what is being done and what should be done about it. I am going to comment on all the suggestions made by my hon. Friends, but I must state clearly what, in the Government's view, needs to be done.

These people need to be settled. They need to be offered the opportunity to lead a more stable, a more civilised and a static form of life, and the local authorities must be encouraged, as the Government have been encouraging them, to provide the necessary sites. I very well understand the reluctance of settled communities to accept that sites should be near them, and I know very well the passionate outcry that occurs when a local authority proposes to locate a site near a settled community. However, it really is not possible to tackle the problem if the attitude of the public is always going to be, "These people should be settled, but not near us".

My rather invidious job as the Minister responsible for land planning is to take into account, when the inevitable decisions come to me, all the factors involved, including public opinion, and to make the decision. I should like at this point to pay tribute to the patient work of my hon. Friend the Joint Parliament Secretary to my Department who has for the last nearly two years been working with the councils to try to secure an increasing number of sites. I thought that my hon. Friend the Member for Hertfordshire, South-West was very right in saying that if a particular county or district does offer a site then there is always the danger that on that site will descend scores, if not hundreds, of didicoi families drawn from all the way round, and this inhibits individual counties and districts from being cooperative. The only way out of the dilemma is that the Government should press all the councils involved to act simultaneously.

Our efforts at the moment are directed towards pressing the local authorities, the counties around London in particular, to set up as many sites as are needed at about the same time. The progress has not been unsatisfactory. There are now, or are about to be established, nine sites for itinerants around London and a large number more are in the pipeline. Most of these will involve a planning decision by myself, and, therefore, I am grateful to my hon. Friend for his restraint about the particular proposal at Bushey that is going to inquiry next week and on whose merits, therefore, I cannot comment. There is now an acceleration by the counties involved to provide a sufficient number of sites, all of them provided at about the same time, thus avoiding the danger of a descent by these people on one county alone.

Many of these people will have to be cajoled into using the sites, because they are by nature people who have opted, for this form of life often because they are feckless by character or have for some reason, good or bad, become antisocial—people who by character do not like the idea of the stable life. But if we can provide a settled way of life for them and if we can settle them in stable communities, then all the evils of which my hon. Friend so justly complained will, I believe, be far less evident.

Let us go through some of the problems. We know that these people inhabit verges and common land and provide a disturbing, unhygienic, and, indeed, anti-social influence. We know that they pester housewives at the door. We know that they leave rubbish and litter about, and we know, whether it is a connected or quite distinct phenomenon, that we are having a rash of old car bodies and other junk left lying about the countryside. In so far as these things are the result of the didicoi, then the settling of them in communities with, it may be, some special welfare supervision—though this is not as yet a particular Government decision—should eliminate the anti-social and unhygienic effect which their present peripatetic way of life tends to produce.

My hon. Friend has made a number of individual suggestions with which I propose to deal. He urges that in so far as some of these people deal in scrap they should be registered, and he rightly points out that at the moment these powers are adoptive rather than mandatory. He said that the Scrap Metal Dealers Bill, in the name of my hon. Friend the Member for Leeds, North-West (Sir D. Kaberry), would provide powers for the registration of scrap merchants, but he has failed to recognise that registration of scrap merchants, either under existing legislation or under my hon. Friend's Bill, depends on the scrap merchant being a resident in the area concerned. The essence of the problem is that these people are not resident and they will not, therefore, be caught either by the present legislation or by my hon. Friend's Bill.

Surely it would be an encouragement to the didicoi to become resident, which is what we want.

I fear that my right hon. Friend is drawing the wrong conclusion. If they are people who wish to avoid the trammels of civilised life it will be a discouragement to them to settle if, by settling, they become subject to registration. Despite that, I think that our objective is the right one. Let us settle them by every means of persuasion that we can use. One of the results of settling them will be that they will become liable to registration, and the benefits which my hon. Friend foresees from registration will then flow.

The next subject to which my hon. Friend referred was that much more should be done about the disposal of bulky junk and in particular "dead" motor cars. I can tell the House that the draft circular which will contain the advice that I propose to give to local authorities will be going to the local authority associations and to the trade associations involved for their comments in the near future. I shall hope, therefore, that, before many months, the circular containing advice on motor car disposal will be officially issued.

Motor car disposal is obviously a growing problem. Local authorities already use quite a large number of light presses to dispose of parts of motor cars, but the massive presses needed to pulp, or to press into very small compass whole motor cars at a time, are not in use in this country, so far as I know, in any numbers at all. I must add that the one press of which I am aware can handle whole car bodies only after certain parts have been removed, such as the cylinder block, which do not respond to this sort of treatment. It may interest the House to know that one firm in the Principality of Wales has quite a thriving export trade in these presses of different sizes but, alas, at the moment, I believe, no home market.

It may well be that after the circular has been issued, local authorities will recognise that, either alone or in groups, they will have to go in for more elaborate machinery both for cars and for bulky junk. Local authorities will have to recognise that the continuing burden of the cost of disposing of heavy rubbish will be one which they will have to face in the future. In the case of less bulky junk the capital involved is not heavy, but the task is a continuing one and is an additional burden on local authorities.

The working party on refuse collection as a whole, of which car bodies and bulky junk are only two parts, will be in action this year and, I hope, will have its report ready some time about the turn of the year, although I cannot commit myself to a precise date. The short answer to my hon. Friend is that the draft circular on car disposal will be out fairly soon.

My hon. Friend went on to attack the present level of penalties. It is not just a question of the weight of the penalty. It is, above all, a question of getting the penalty paid. I must tell my hon. Friend that even where one of these characters is caught red-handed in the deposit of litter or junk, it still is a very different question to get him into court and to get him condemned, because magistrates do not always levy the whole fine. The £10 fine for dropping litter may not sound adequate to my hon. Friend, but it is not always exacted even when the offence is proved, and it is very difficult to get these wanderers, by summons, into a court.

All this would be much eased if we got them into stable communities. My hon. Friend, with a humanity which know is his, spoke of his preferred policy of settling these families in individual units in existing communities, rather than disrupting, as he put it, whole neighbourhoods by imposing upon those neighbourhoods a group of such families. I must tell him that there may well be a need, for the short-term, to isolate from existing stable communities the more unsettled of these families who comprise the majority of the people concerned. We might be able to persuade local authorities to pick out fairly balanced and stable groups of individual families and put them into existing communities. But these would be only a very small minority. The majority of these families need to be settled in small communities of their own for the moment, under possibly benevolent but firm guidance, in the hope that trey will then become much more stable and so able to enter normal community life.

There are some encouraging results. In my hon. Friend's own county the county council has provided a temporary camp, and all the children, I am glad to say, are now going to school. It may be through the love of the parents for their children and the concern of the parents to give their children a better opportunity than they had that we shall be able to persuade them to enter these camps. Insistence upon economic rents and any suggestion that we can control families—though how we can do so in a free society I do not understand—would discourage the didicoi from entering into communities. We have got to persuade them to enter. The acceptance of school life by those who have entered is an encouraging sign.

It may make a good sentence in a speech to say that no more of these people should be allowed into this country, but, really, we have to face the fact that this is a free society. This is not a police State, and I do not see how we could go about stopping people coming to this country by means that are legitimate, and then immediately, or later, becoming didicois. What we have to do is to make sure that a stable form of life is available to those who make the decision, for one reason or another, to be unsettled in a settled world.

I am sorry to tell my hon. Friend that I can give him no immediate panacea, but the number of sites provided is increasing. The Home Counties, in particular, seem now to have fully recognised the problem and have accepted that the current proposals are the right way to tackle the problem. From the stabilising of these people will follow the clearing up of the various problems of which my hon. Friend has understandably spoken with considerable heat.

There is a need for some sort of public awareness of the combined proposals that the Government have in mind. Perhaps the need, above all, is that we should know more about why people take to this form of life. We know that they are not Romanies. We know that they have adopted this way of life for various reasons, good or bad—in some cases fecklessness and in some cases revulsion against a settled life. It may be that by research we shall have to find out more about the origins of what are still a small but a growing number of problem families, and that is a course which the Government will be examining.

I do not want to detain the House merely by talking for the sake of talking, but it would be wrong not to say, on behalf of the Opposition, a word of sympathy for those who have to tackle this extremely difficult problem.

My main constructive point I got from my hon. Friend the Member for Fulham (Mr. M. Stewart) and it was mentioned by the hon. Member for Hertfordshire, South-West (Mr. Longden), namely, the meaning of the word "didicoi". I can only say that what little experience I have of this problem has been with the tinkers in the Highlands of Scotland, which is a very old problem. They are not Egyptians at all, and they create the same kind of difficulties, and have been doing this for many centuries, so far as can tell.

The only constructive suggestion that I can offer is that I am sure that in trying to assimilate people of different ways of life, one should start by not generalising too much about a whole group. Once we label people, whatever the label is, we tend to make it more difficult to get public opinion to accept them and more difficult to deal with those who can be settled.

The right hon. Gentleman rightly said that in some cases it would be easy to assimilate, and the right approach to this problem is to pick out people, to take them on their merits and try to get them settled, but it is obviously a gesture of charity by a local community to be prepared to make the effort to welcome these people and give them a stake in the community. If this is not done, the problem will continue.

I was interested to hear the right hon. Gentleman say that didicoi were performing an economic function. A didicoi woman would not pull wads of pound notes out of her skirt unless she were earning in a competitive society, or had been unusually fortunate in a visit to a bookmaker. They are performing a function and if there is a profit to be earned, that in itself, as I am sure the right hon. Gentleman will agree, is not inherently wrong. While they are performing an economic function that should be encouraged, and they should be encouraged to do it under reasonable conditions.

I quite agree that we have to be tough with them if they are breaking the law or being a nuisance to the community. But we have to leave the door open in the direction in which people can settle down and perform a useful social function. Certainly, they are not the only people to earn money without paying tax. If we were to condemn them for that we should have to condemn a very large section of the community.

I agree with almost everything the right hon. Gentleman said, but I have two qualifications to make. One is on the disposal of old motor cars. The other day I went around a very large machinery plant in my constituency. It is one of the largest in the country. What frightened me was the thought, on the lines of "everything that goes up must come down", that all that metal was pouring through the machinery hour after hour and coming out as new cars and that eventually it would all be got rid of as scrap.

This is a problem which will grow with tremendous momentum and we have to modernise our ideas about it. We are trying to face a mass production age with Victorian methods. The parties are competing about modernisation. Here is a field in which they might usefully compete in trying to bring these matters up to date. I am sure that we shall never get rid of the temptation to leave litter and the rather bogus methods of scrap dealing so long as people are faced with the overwhelmingly difficult problem of getting rid of old cars.

The other point I make is on the size of the penalty for leaving litter. It is pleasant to see the Joint Under-Secretary of State to the Home Office on the Government Front Bench. Perhaps it is a little unfair to take advantage of that fact, but I believe she is looking at the problem of modernising and bringing penalties up to date. I think that the Minister was wrong in saying that there is no need to look at this matter. It is not enough to say that the litter penalty of £10 is never enforced.

The point is that what Parliament fixes as a maximum penalty is taken as a maximum. Courts, naturally, consider that if Parliament suggests that £10 is the maximum for a very gross offence, perhaps for the second or third offence, moderate offences will be dealt with somewhere lower down the scale. It is very important that monetary penalties should be brought up-to-date. Otherwise, they will not be regarded seriously and as effective.

I say again how much I sympathise in this problem and realise the difficulties. We shall give every possible support to what individual hon. Members and the right hon. Gentleman and other Departments concerned are trying to do, but this is an intractable problem which only patience and charity can solve.

I am very glad to have the opportunity to raise jointly with the hon. Lady the Member for Plymouth, Devonport (Miss Vickers) the subject of au pair girls. It is many years since I raised this subject and a good deal has happened since then.

The words "au pair" conjure up a variety of images in the minds of different people. Originally the arrangement was an exchange between two members of participating families, but that has now almost completely changed. For families in England it is regarded primarily as a sort of domestic help arrangement. There may be a sudden family crisis. There may be a family where there are a number of young children and the mother finds it too difficult to cope with her work unaided. There may be elderly people who need help, or a mother who decides to take up work outside the home and needs someone to look after the domestic chores while she is away from the home.

All these people and many others look to the au pair girl to help them in their domestic difficulties. During the nine years I have been in this House I have had a dozen or more au pair girls who have come from seven different countries into my household. Like many other people in a similar position, I recognise that I would have been very much at a loss without their assistance. This is true of many families.

The girls themselves think of an au pair arrangement as primarily enabling them to come to this country without expense to themselves to learn English. This is their prime object, coming to learn the language afresh or to perfect their knowledge of it so that when they go home they can take a post where English is part of the qualifications. Many of them wish to take examinations here.

There are on both sides people who exploit the situation and some hostesses in this country demand too much from the girls. It is difficult to be precise, and probably very few do this deliberately, but most housewives are very busy and tend sometimes to forget that what they do themselves it is not always right to expect a young girl on an au pair arrangement to undertake. Similarly, some of the girls, particularly in recent years, have come over here with the idea simply of enjoying themselves and not of wanting to fulfil domestic responsibilities.

The popular conception of an au pair girl, we must admit, is sometimes as a status symbol, part of the effort to "keep up with the Jones" who have an au pair girl. For them it is similar to the idea of having a second car in the garage or a weekend cottage in the country. To some it is a glamorous and exciting, but often a disruptive, influence in the home.

To the popular Press it is a likely source of rather succulent news. The subject of this Adjournment debate has little in common with this popular image. It has nothing to do with the scantily-clad young lady who appeared to come from an Eastern harem and was introduced as "Our au pair girl" in the Morecambe and Wise show on television last Sunday. More often the girl is nervous and rather frightened by the alien formalities and the regulations she meets at the point of entry. She is bewildered by meeting strange officials in a strange country with strange customs and unfamiliar food and a language which when she hears it spoken appears utterly incomprehensible, however complete her knowledge may have appeared at school.

These girls are coming into the country at the rate of 20,000 every year under au pair arrangements and another 20,000 under Ministry of Labour work permits. A hostess wanting au pair help sends a letter of invitation to the girl she has selected, having usually obtained the girl's address from an agency or an advertisement. The first point I make is in regard to the letter of invitation. It would be immensely valuable if there were a simple standard letter of invitation available which the hostess had to obtain from the Home Office—or some other Government Department, but preferably the Home Office. This would have a certain value because it would enable the Home Office, when sending the letter, also to send a booklet about the conditions of having an au pair girl and to remind the intending hostess that the au pair girl is to give only light domestic help and that if the hostess wants full-time domestic help she should obtain a Ministry of Labour permit and employ a girl in that way. A good deal of misunderstanding and difficulty could be avoided if all English families appreciated the difference between these two schemes.

A standard letter would ensure, too, that the hostess explained to the girl before her arrival what was required of her and explained that she would not be expected to do more than five hours work a day, that English classes would be available, what was the amount of pocket money, and so on. A girl receiving such a standard letter would be in no doubt that this was a document which she had to produce when she came into this country. The letter of invitation at present sent by hostesses to these girls is sometimes not understood by the girls to be a document which must be produced at the point of entry. About 4,000 girls are refused admission every year, not all for this reason, but undoubtedly some of them because they have not the correct document.

If it were a condition that this invitation had to be endorsed by an official in the girl's own country before she came, this would enable the official in her country at that point to tell her a little about the scheme and to give her a booklet of explanation and a briefing about the customs and conditions in England. There cannot be too much of this kind of preparation before they come if there are to be satisfactory relationships over here.

First impressions, of course, are all-important. Many of these relationships are not satisfactory because in the early days the difficulties were too great to be overcome. I believe that it is important that all girls should have at least a smattering of English before they come. It is too much to expect any family, however kind, and any girl, however willing to help, to get on well together if neither of them can understand a word each other says for weeks on end. That is an impossible undertaking.

I therefore think it important that the age should be right. At present these girls can come here at the age of 15. That seems to me to be much too young. I recall a Swiss girl we had who was 18 and who spent every spare moment in the first few weeks up in her bedroom sobbing bitterly with homesickness. We and she weathered the storm; she stayed with us for a year and she finished with a grand trip on a walking holiday all round the country. When she went back she said that being in England was the best thing that she had ever done. But she was 18, and she had enough maturity to weather the difficulties of those early weeks. A girl of 15 is very immature, and it takes a lot at that age to come to a strange country, probably being away from home for the first time. I think hat the age should be 16 at the very lowest.

Because of some of the misconceptions about the words "au pair", I think that it would be better to find a different description of these girls. It has been suggested that they might be called student-workers or student-helpers—or, at any rate, some description which would indicate the two sides of the proposition; one, that they are here to study and the other, that they will work in exchange for the opportunity to study and for being kept and paid pocket money.

May I stress the importance of greater Ministerial responsibility for these arrangements? A great deal has been done hitherto by a number of voluntary organisations, and the debt which we owe to these voluntary organisations for the work which they have done in this field is very great. They man the kiosk in Victoria Station, they meet and help the girls at other arrival points, they help the misfits and the unhappy, they provide clubs and companionship, they advise, Government Departments and they issue a number of booklets which have been the basis of the excellent booklets which have been produced by the Home Office and the Central Office of Information. There is another booklet, I understand, in course of preparation by the Foreign Office, and there are booklets handed to the girls at the point of entry into this country.

The point which I have stressed, and which I am sure other hon. Members will mention in the debate, is the large number of girls involved, the scale of these arrangements and the limited resources of the voluntary organisations. This is an important subject. Short-term, these girls are extremely valuable to the economy of this country by helping to release many women for other work. Long-term, undoubtedly where these arrangements are successful they help to promote international harmony in a small but an important way.

I feel that it is time that more of this was placed on an official footing and that the Home Office ought to take an even greater responsibility than they do. I appreciate all that has been done by the Home Office, the increasing interest of the Foreign Office and the continuing work of the Ministry of Labour with work permits and the care with which they are issued. I do not know what the hon. Lady the Joint Under-Secretary of State will say in her reply about the attitude of Government Departments to this problem—but I should like to see fairly soon a round-table conference of all the organisations and people concerned in this to try to sort out what are the urgent problems and how the Government can tackle them so that the au pair procedure, which has changed very much over the years, can be brought up to date. In this way the various points can be adequately covered to ensure that the machinery is effective, that the preparation on both sides, in the hostesses' family and by the girls corning over, is adequate, and that there is a warm and friendly approach in the booklets which are issued, in the officials the girls meet and at every possible point where the girls come into contact with people from this country. There is a quotation in one of the book- lets which are issued to the girls when they come to this country,

"Those who meet you will think of your country as they think of you."

That is very true also about us in this country. The girls who come here will think of this country as they think of the people they meet when they come here.

The au pair arrangement is highly individual and highly personal and no power on earth can ensure that the right girl always goes to the right family. It is almost inevitable, when there is such a variety of types of girl and such a variety of types of family, that sometimes the studious girl will find herself in a family which does a great deal of entertaining or in which there are a number of very high-spirited and lively children, or that the lively girl will find herself with very quiet, studious people or with elderly people who do not understand her very well. We cannot avoid this happening, and undoubtedly the voluntary organisation will continue to play a very big part in trying to sort out some of these difficulties and to rearrange such partnerships on a different basis.

Our purpose in initiating this short debate is to draw attention to some of the difficulties which could be removed and to press for greater official responsibility for these girls and the arrangements under which they come. The whole standard of au pair arrangements now needs to be raised; it should be put on a higher level so that those who exploit the arrangements, on both sides, can be discouraged. I hope that this short debate and the proposals we make will contribute to the raising of the standard which is now so necessary.

I am very glad to take part in this short debate initiated by the hon. Lady the Member for Wood Green (Mrs. Butler). I agree very much with what she has said. I have never had an au pair girl myself. My special connection with the subject is that I am chairman of the British Vigilance Association.

First, I wish to express thanks to the immigration officers at the various ports. I appreciate the difficulty which they have in sorting out addresses and technical problems, and I know that their kindness is quite remarkable. Theirs is a very big task and we should pay a tribute to them for what they do. I pay a tribute also to International Travellers' Aid, with its 200 voluntary workers who, as the hon. Lady said, man the kiosks at Victoria and Liverpool Street Stations in London. The Victoria kiosk is manned every day except Christmas. The voluntary workers there prevent untold misery, particularly when, as does happen sometimes, regrettably, a hostess comes along, does not like the look of the girl she is supposed to take, and then leaves her to the care of the voluntary workers.

A great deal is done by the Friends of the Islands, the Y.W.C.A., and, particularly, by the Liverpool Vigilance Association which deals so adequately with the Irish. Mrs. Ellis and her group of voluntary lady helpers at Dover do remarkable work particularly for girls who perhaps arrive late and cannot be admitted for one reason or another and have to be found accommodation for the night. Also, of course, the National Council of Women and the Mothers' Union do a great deal in their localities. If it were not for this splendid band of workers, the system would probably break down. The problem is not a new one. It exercised the attention of the Social Advisory Group for Girls Working Away from Home as far back as 1958.

I agree with the hon. Lady, and so do all the associations I have mentioned, about the need to raise the age at which au pair girls can come here. The age should certainly be raised to 17, and I would even prefer it to be 18. Life can be very difficult for immature girls in a strange country, particularly if they are left alone in the house all day, looking after children, as often happens when the wife is out at work. There have been cases of au pair girls being left for a whole week alone in the house with children to look after, and this obviously is too much of a strain.

I agree entirely with the hon. Lady's suggestion that there should be a stereotyped letter of invitation, but I would go further and urge that there is still need for a permit. It seems to me absurd that we should refuse a labour permit for a girl under 18 years of age yet let a girl of 15 do similar work in an au pair job for about 25s. or 30s. a week. I should have thought that this contravened the Young Persons (Employment) Act, 1938. I am fortified in my view with regard to age by such people as those who have worked for the International Travellers' Aid. One worker says that, after six years' experience, it is clear that

"Many young girls find themselves in difficulties on arrival. Their irresponsibility, due to their age, creates special problems."

A girl may receive a letter from her host family to say that they are going off for a holiday, but she may decide to come "to see London" although she may have only £3 to last her for a fortnight.

The International Travellers' Aid points out also that a young girl is far more vulnerable if, by accident, she is not met, if she is met by an uncaring hostess, who does not want her, or if the hostess does not like her and turns her out after a few days. From the hostess's point of view, also, a very young girl is not able to give real service.

I understand that a lot of girls do not fully realise the importance of their letter of invitation. The letter sent by the hostess may be thoughtlessly worded, and the girl may be held up by the immigration officers while they are trying to find addresses and straighten out various technicalities. I agree, therefore, with the hon. Lady's suggestion that a form of letter should be properly drafted, giving all details.

A definite permit would undoubtedly give the hostess greater responsibility towards the girl. Not only would she have to report to the Ministry of Labour if the girl left her, but she would not be able to change her mind at the last minute about receiving the girl. Presumably, also, the girl herself would be required to come in fulfilment of the terms of the permit.

Again, to quote from the International Travellers' Aid,

"A few girls have been rejected on the stations, but a far greater number have been met by a strange employer because the agency concerned has had to find a substitute at the last moment when the employer had cried off".

An example is given of a young Spanish girl who was met by a single Indian man, speaking no Spanish, in place of her original employer.

Now, with 30,000 girls in this country, it is essential to have a definite contract. The contract could specify the period of time off, time for attending classes, and so on. It would also stop exploitation, which, although, as the hon. Lady said, it is not widespread, is there to some extent. A contract would stop exploitation by both employer and employee. I have in mind the girl who comes over here just to have a good time and who does not want to do anything in the house.

Arrangements should be made for au pair girls to be included within the National Insurance Scheme. All girls should be guaranteed a two weeks' holiday and one full free day a week. There is need also to ensure that they bring adequate pocket money. They cannot support themselves with the small amount of money they get from their hostesses if they wish to go out to attend classes or enjoy themselves. In addition, there should be arrangements at an early stage for a link with another girl speaking the same language. As the hon. Lady the Member for Wood Green pointed out, the lack of English can be, a great problem. The girl of whom the hon. Lady spoke was fortunate in being in an understanding home, but girls who have great difficulty in expressing themselves can get into much trouble and unhappiness on this account.

Whether girls are employed whole-time or part-time, there should be some form of contract. This need is becoming more important. The voluntary organisations tell us that the year 1963 produced a greater number of persons coming to this county than ever before, and a greater number than ever had to be helped. The variety of nationalities involved is growing. The booklet referred to by the hon. Lady is concerned only with girls coming from European countries, but the scope is growing wider. Only two days ago, my own association had an application from a Tunisian who wished to come to this country to work as au pair. As I said, with at least 30,000 of these girls in the country, the problem is becoming more serious.

In France, a girl wishing to work au pair without a contract signed by the two parties concerned is in an illegal position, contrary to the French regulations, and she is likely to encounter serious difficulties. Also, the receiving family in France must put themselves in order with Social Security from the day when the girl arrives. There is a civil responsibility upon the workers to do this with effect from the moment the girl comes into their house. Belgium and other countries have similar contracts. There has been a conference in Geneva on the position of women and girls working abroad, and in the report of that conference one can see the various regulations drawn up for the type of contract to which I have referred.

I hope that my hon. Friend the Joint Under-Secretary of State will be able to tell us what action the Home Office is willing to take. I realise that it will not be possible for her to give definite answers to all our questions today, but, as the hon. Lady the Member for Wood Green said, it is a great advantage to have the opportunity from time to time to review the situation and make suggestions for action to be taken in the future.

I believe that the entire responsibility for these girls should be placed on the Ministry of Labour instead of being, as it is now, divided between the Home Office and the Ministry of Labour. My main reason for wanting au pair girls to be within the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Labour is that that Ministry operates employment exchanges in practically every city and town where these girls are employed. Most employment exchanges have women officials, so that a closer liaison could be established through them between employer and employee. Girls who find themselves in difficulty would know that they could go to their local employment exchanges. At present there is only a hit-and-miss system of help given, with the girls writing to various organisations, sometimes receiving help and at other times being unable to get assistance.

Only two days ago I met an au pair girl who was pregnant. Apparently she had become pregnant before arriving in this country. On arrival here the hostess realised what had happened. The girl was distressed when I met her and I was able to put her in touch with her embassy. I mention this to show that there should be a clearing house of some kind; and I suggest that the Ministry of Labour, with its network of employment exchanges, would be the best solution. If this is not possible, one voluntary organisation should be deputed to act as a clearing house. If this were done it would be necessary for the Government to give the organisation a grant. No one voluntary organisation could afford this extra strain on its finances without Government assistance.

One of the difficulties now is that no one, except the Home Office—and only then if that Department likes to send a woman policeman around—has any right of entry into a house to see how an au pair girl is getting on. When an application is received from a girl to come here no one has the right to go to the house at which the girl proposes to live and see if it is a satisfactory type of house. The girl at present might write to the local clergyman to see if time can be found to visit the house, but no right of entry exists. It is important that we should have more knowledge of the types of house to which these girls are going.

It is worth remembering that some au pair girls go to houses where practically no English is spoken. It is natural that the girls should be unhappy from the beginning in such circumstances, and nearly always they leave. When that happens they must find somewhere else to stay and this is not always easy, particularly when it must be done quickly. When this happens there is not an organisation to which the girls can satisfactorily go to seek other employment.

To give an example of what I mean, I have with me details of someone who wrote from overseas to Scotland Yard asking if the authorities there would verify that the house to which an au pair girl proposed to go was a suitable one. Scotland Yard sent the letter to the British Vigilance Association, which has absolutely no right of entry—although on that occasion we attempted, by means of courtesy, to get ourselves invited to the house concerned.

Many other considerations enter into this; for example, a lonely girl not only needs advice but almost always requires to be a member of a club. In this connection, I will quote from the last annual report published by the Welfare Office for Swiss Girls in Great Britain. The Swiss are particularly alive to the

problem we are considering. I will not go into all the statistics listed in the report, but it is interesting to note that whereas in 1962 Swiss girls received 54 letters of welcome, in 1963 the figure was 108. After pointing out that the Welfare Office tries to visit the girls, the report states:

"The 'girls in danger' are mostly young and immature. Not being able to distinguish between good and bad characters, they often get involved in unhappy love affairs with men of doubtful reputation. Usually these girls are too easily influenced and are willing to meet every demand of their so-called friends. For example, even girls of good family background leave their domestic jobs or language schools in order to go and live with their boy friends. As a result, some of them failed to report their change of address and sooner or later landed at the police station because of this.

There were 28 compatriots whose illness was reported to us. Nearly half of them were mental cases, whilst a few girls had to undergo operations. We made 28 visits to patients at hospitals in London and in other counties. We heard of 5 compatriots who had attempted suicide. Fortunately all of them were saved, although one girl will never regain full health. Two girls were found to have a hereditary disposition to suicide."

The report later states:

"We paid 5 visits to compatriots of ours in Holloway Prison. One girl is still there, having been sentenced to 9 months imprisonment for conspiracy to defraud by doping racehorses. Half of the criminal cases were for larceny, mainly in department stores or self-service shops. Two of these girls unable to resist shoplifting have wealthy parents and were not at all in need of the things they stole."

The reason why many of the girls steal is the extremely small amount of money they are allowed to receive. In view of the report of the Welfare Office for Swiss Girls, I hope that this matter will be looked into.

There is an organisation called the Amies de la Jeune Fille which, with the Y.W.C.A., organised a world meeting in Geneva in September 1961 on this subject. Eight countries attended, all of them European. It was made clear at that meeting that all the countries were getting worried. For this reason, I thought that the hon. Lady's point about someone at the other end having to see the permit or letter of introduction was an extremely good suggestion. I hope that something on those lines will be done so that an indication is given to au pair girls of what they may expect when they arrive in this country.

I entirely agree that the impression au pair girls take back with them from Britain will make all the difference to international relations in future. I am told that some of the girls are getting rather tougher. They now realise the difficulties, particularly German girls, and pass the knowledge they gain on to their friends when they return home. As a result, they are ready for these difficulties on arrival here, although I fear that this may be setting up a certain resistance to their hostesses.

Hon. Members will be aware that in the newspapers recently there have been reports of several cases, two of which were reported from Scotland, of girls who have had to leave their houses and find refuge elsewhere because—and I believe that the two girls in Scotland were Swedish—they had been used as a form of cheap labour.

I have been interested to learn that the Co-operative Guild had a meeting at Whitley Bay the other day, at which about 800 women considered this subject. The Co-operative Guild, which has taken a keen interest in this matter, considers that stricter control should be demanded by the Government and that au pair girls should have at least 19 hours free time a day from their work for studies. There is a general consensus of opinion throughout the country that the profession of the au pair girl should be looked into.

A booklet entitled The Foreign Worker and the au pair Student in Britain was published some time ago, although I understand that it is no longer in print. I suggest that they are not au pair students. As the hon. Lady rightly pointed out, they are now more like au pair domestic workers. They get some time, off for studying, but their hours are not sufficiently well defined.

On arrival in this country, I would like to see their names circulated by the immigration officers to their respective embassies. Conditions of employment should be laid down, and I would particularly like to see au pair girls having their own and separate bedrooms. Whatever may be said, it is not possible for a family to have an au pair girl sharing a bedroom all the time. In any case, no girl can do without a certain amount of privacy and a separate bedroom would be helpful to her studies.

I gather that the International Labour Office is pressing for a charter to be established for young workers, although I understand that au pair girls would be excluded from such a document because labour permits are not issued to them. If they were, they could be included in the charter.

I hope that my remarks will be of some help to the Joint Under-Secretary in trying to impress on her right hon. Friend and the Minister of Labour the necessity for some action to be taken quickly in this matter. I have some sympathy with the idea of having another conference, but there have been so many conferences on this subject. The National Council of Women has taken a great interest in this matter, and I am wondering whether another conference would be of benefit. I have had meetings with the secretary and other officials of the British Vigilance Association and I am sure that it is time that we went forward with a definite plan so that the whole au pair system may be put on a more practical basis. That would benefit both the employer and employee and would be particularly beneficial to our relations with other countries in Europe.

If a mere male can crash in for a few moments on this female occasion, and it is not often that we are outnumbered in debate by hon. Ladies, I should like to say how grateful we are to the hon. Lady the Member for Wood Green (Mrs. Butler) for raising this subject. It is important. I will not follow her on the suggestion that it has become a status symbol to have an au pair girl, much as one would have a second car in the garage or a weekend cottage in the country.

There are certain questions which we must ask ourselves about this subject. First, why do these girls come to this country? They come to see the country and to learn English and to do that as cheaply as possible. This is a very reasonable aim and there is nothing wrong with it. Why are they wanted? In some cases families want to help a girl from overseas to learn the language, to meet English people and live with an English family, but in far too many cases these girls come because the families are looking for cheap domestic help. We have to recognise this fact.

It is significant that in the Home Office pamphlet on this subject it was suggested that the wage might be 30s. to £2 a week for five hours work a day. I do not know what the trade unions would think of that, but I imagine that this is not very good payment even taking into account the fact that the girls have their keep. The pamphlet suggested that the girls should not do more than the mistress of the house, but I should have thought that the mistress of the house would have got more for her work than 30s.

This whole matter has some official blessing, and I am glad that the subject has been raised in debate, because it needs looking into. The numbers of girls are becoming considerable and are likely to continue to increase, and we should now consider whether there should be some established rules. The National Council of Women has suggested a new form of labour permit. I have an open mind about that. It is suggested that there should be a labour permit for what might be termed a working student. I would go further and register both the girls and the families, and charge a fee for the registration of the families. I would draw up certain rules about payment and that kind of thing. This should be made the responsibility partly of the Government and partly of the voluntary organisations. In other words, I would not discard the work of the voluntary organisations, but would link it with a Government Department. I believe that it should be one Government Department and not two. Somebody must make up his mind whether this should be the function of the Home Office or the Ministry of Labour.

If there were this registration and these rules, a girl could make any complaint she had to the Department or to the voluntary organisation recognised by the Department. Equally, if the family had a complaint it could do exactly the same. Sometimes the families themselves are badly dealt with by these girls. We should recognise that the faults are not all on one side. The faults are probably minimal, anyway. Most of the working arrangements between families and girls are correct and amenable to both sides, but there are the exceptions which always cause the trouble.

Girls who come from overseas sometimes take up positions with the deliberate intention of gravitating to London eventually, because London is a magnet, and sometimes an unpleasant magnet for girls of 16 or 17 years of age. I agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Plymouth, Devonport (Miss Vickers) that we should look at the question of age and consider whether 15 years is not too young. This system applies not only in this country, but in other countries in Europe, and because we are a close-knit continent it is easy for girls either to come to this country from Europe or for our girls to go abroad. It is a system which should be developed. It has advantages for both sides. Sooner or later we must recognise that certain countries in Europe have rules and regulations and a certain amount of order in this matter, and that we must have the same.

This au pair system can do a great deal in furthering good relations between ourselves and Europe. Equally, it can do a great deal to damage those relations. If the girls are well looked after and encouraged to conduct themselves well, they will leave the country feeling that they like the British and our way of life and will come again. Equally, the families will probably establish connections with continental countries which will be of great value to them.

I hope, therefore that, arising out of this short debate, the Government will look at this whole matter in due course on the basis of whether more order can be put into the present arrangements. No one wants to over-regularise it or establish a more bureaucratic system, but in the interest of both the girls and the families there is a great deal to be said for making use of voluntary organisations under a proper system of control by either the Ministry of Labour or the Home Office, but not both, because when two Ministries are involved a system frequently breaks down from a falling between two stools.

I intervene briefly in the debate, partly because I share the timidity expressed by the hon. Member for Rutland and Stam- ford (Mr. K. Lewis) about intervening at all in a debate dominated by hon. Ladies on both sides of the House, and partly because I came to the House without any preconceived ideas on this matter.

I feel that the case made out by those who have spoken adds up to the need for the Government to take a more positive rôle than they have taken, not only for the reasons which have been given, but because I notice that the hon. Lady the Member for Plymouth, Devon-port (Miss Vickers) said, in passing, that the number of these girls had increased in 1963. I should have thought that this was good and that we would want to encourage a n increase, but in doing this there is a Government responsibility to try to deal with the obvious difficulties.

I should have thought that we wanted this kind of arrangement to grow, because it is of mutual benefit to everybody concerned when it is done in the right way. Young people who spend a period abroad, whether they are Europeans coming here or British young people going overseas, learn not merely a language but a great deal about the country they visit. They increase their own understanding in an international sense. This is something which we should encourage as far as we can. If this is so, I should have thought that at least some of the points which have been brought up in the debate demand urgent attention from the Government.

The problem of these girls arriving at an airport or seaport, and not having the right credentials and finding themselves in enormous difficulty with immigration officers, is something which simple organisation could overcome. The same applies to conditions of employment. There is a dilemma here, however, in that none of us wants to over-organise this activity. Part of its value is its flexibility and the way in which the needs of a particular girl and of a family will obviously vary enormously. If these can be worked out sensibly to mutual satisfaction we ought not to interfere too much. Nevertheless, I suggest that certain minimum standards should be enforced.

I wonder what has been done in the Home Office to find out what is currently being done in other countries. I understood from the contribution by the hon. Member for Rutland and Stamford that some countries have more formal arrangements and more Government interference. At this stage, we should be studying what is being done with a view to adapting what is best elsewhere to our kind of problems. I strongly support the suggestion originally made by my hon. Friend the Member for Wood Green (Mrs. Butler), who introduced the debate, that there should shortly be a conference of the two Government Departments immediately involved—or three, perhaps, including the Foreign Office—and of the voluntary organisations to sort out these problems rather thoroughly.

It might well be that some kind of a committee of the voluntary organisations, with Government sponsorship, might be a good thing in the long run. There is, perhaps, a parallel in the arrangements that the Government have made for young British volunteers who go to work in developing countries. In that case, there is a committee on which the voluntary organisations are represented. It is assisted in some ways by the Government and Government finance is involved in its operations. I do not say that the Government have done enough, but they have done something which, possibly, may provide a means by which to watch the situation and decide how much need there is for a labour permit policy or something of that kind.

At least, enough has been said in the debate to indicate that new thinking is needed. The whole House should express its gratitude to my hon. Friend the Member for Wood Green for initiating the debate and to those who have spoken in it.

I agree with hon. Members who have spoken that we are grateful to the hon. Lady the Member for Wood Green (Mrs. Butler) for initiating this interesting and important debate on a subject which we all recognise as a growing problem. As both the hon. Lady and my hon. Friend the Member for Plymouth, Devonport (Miss Vickers) have said, more and more young people come to this country by the au pair arrangement and this is something which we all welcome.

I can divide my speech into two parts, following, first, my hon. Friend the Member for Rutland and Stamford (Mr. K. Lewis) into the reasons why these young people come here and the importance of the reasons for which they are here. They come primarily to learn English and to learn about the British way of life. This is of fundamental importance and is the key to the necessity of maintaining, as far as possible, a personal and informal type of arrangement. We want these people to come as friends of the family and to feel themselves to be part of a British life. We want as far as possible to avoid a mistress-servant relationship. It is important, therefore, in approaching the matter to recognise that that is the fundamental reason for these young people being here.

In that respect, it would probably be a great disservice to many young people if we raised the age from 15 to 17 or 18. There is no doubt that many young girls, after leaving school at the age of 15 or 16, are keen to come to this country for a year or two before taking up a more formal training in some other sphere. Many of them want to be hotel receptionists, or to work in the tourist industry in their own country.

The families of these girls usually go to great trouble to ensure that they get into the right kind of family in this country. I cannot accept that the major problem is with the young girls between, say, the ages of 15 and 17. Some young ones come, perhaps, from homes which are not as responsible as they should be and whose families have not taken sufficient care concerning the kind of homes to which their children go. Some young girls who come here get into trouble, of course, through sheer lack of experience and through immaturity.

From our evidence, however, there is not much to show that in the 15–17 age group there is any very significant difficulty concerning girls becoming pregnant or being convicted of offences. It is probably the experienced, mature girl of 18 or 19 who can cause the greater trouble, perhaps because of her own experience and her lack of responsibility.

I should not, therefore, like to accept that we should raise the age limit, because it is important that as many young people as possible at the outset of their lives should have the opportunity to come here and get experience of British life and British people and friendliness. Equally, an important effect can be derived by these young people when they go back to their own countries after staying in British homes. One of the great things that we need is more positive links with our European neighbours.

The other question is how we can ensure, as everybody wants to do, that these young people are not exploited. We recognise that it is only in the minority of cases that some of these young people are purposely exploited, and this is the most difficult part of the problem. No matter what regulations are made, no matter what type of letter of introduction or form is provided, people who are deliberately out to exploit the young will, in some way, get round the regulations.

Where it is most valuable for us to apply our attention is to those people who do not willingly wish to exploit the young girls but who, through lack of understanding or lack of consideration for others, impose far too great a burden upon these inexperienced girls who come to a foreign country and who do not understand our ways or our language.

The hon. Member for East Ham, North (Mr. Prentice) was right in suggesting that there is great danger in over-organising. If we were to try to regularise the position too much, we would need the whole paraphernalia of labour permits and inspection with the right of entry into the homes of families which that would entail. It would not be in the best interests of the scheme as we know it at present. I am not, however, closing my mind to any development that may arise and I accept that we must watch the situation the whole time in close consultation. I do not think that work permits would solve the problem.

The suggestion that this is a matter which should come under one Department is, in many ways, attractive, because it would place the responsibility fairly and squarely on somebody's shoulders. As I have said, however, in approaching the problem it is upon the families who, through lack of consideration or understanding, do the exploiting that we should concentrate. It is here that the voluntary organisations have such a vital part to play.

My own feeling is that this is very much a job for the voluntary organisations. They are able to approach the problem far more informally; they do not have the same officialdom and sense of bureaucracy. This would enable people to form friendships with those in the voluntary organisations. It would allow our own people who are engaged in voluntary work to gain something from their contacts with these foreign girls. It could, to a great extent, strengthen the whole purpose and value of the scheme and the au pair relationship. I suggest, therefore, that the most valuable avenue of approach is to see how we can strengthen and help the voluntary organisations in their work.

I am aware that I have done nothing much to answer the many interesting points that hon. Members have raised in the debate, but all those who have spoken have done so with the thought in mind that the main object was to talk about this problem and to air it as thoroughly as possible to ensure that the Home Office is well aware of every aspect of the problem.

The best thing that I can say in reply is that we have welcomed the debate. I have taken careful note of all that has been said. My hon. Friend the Member for Devonport frequently comes to the Home Office and discusses this problem and has quite recently discussed it with my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary.

I am sorry to interrupt the hon. Lady but my hon. Friend the Member for Wood Green (Mrs. Butler) made the important suggestion that a conference should be sponsored by the Home Office. Will serious consideration be given to this suggestion by the hon. Lady and her Department?

I was about to say that that is one of the suggestions that I will take back from the debate and see that we give it serious consideration. As my hon. Friend the Member for Devon-port has said, we have had many consultations, although I know that people are anxious that we should not fall into the danger of merely consulting and that hon. Members who have spoken want action to be taken. I give the pledge that, in saying we have noted everything which has been said, I mean that we intend to watch the problem carefully, because we recognise that it is an important social problem and one which will go on developing in the years ahead.

The object of this debate is to discuss the question of people coming from the Chinese mainland into Hong Kong, whether any of them can then go on from there elsewhere, and the question of their being returned unwillingly to the mainland without any proper consultation with the United Nations or anyone else.

I should like, first, to thank my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary of State who is to reply to the debate, because I know that he wanted to go to Northern Ireland and have a pleasant and long weekend, and I have deprived him of half a day.

The two most worrying incidents that I want to discuss are questions of refugees. Over 70,000 of these, in 1962, came away from the mainland and hon. Members will remember that there was considerable uncertainty here because we did not know quite why it was all happening. We now know that it was largely due to famine on the mainland—starvation—and that these people were trying as hard as they could to get away from it.

Unfortunately, of those 72,000 or 74,000, about 60,000 were returned to the mainland protesting. They were not allowed to stay. That was the first time that the outside world, or those of us who really heard much about it, realised that the Hong Kong policy seemed to be changing a little—the policy of accepting refugees and doing everything possible to take in as many of them as they could.

The second incident to which I want to refer is much more recent, and occurred only last November. It was called the junk incident, because of a junk which took 52 refugees away from China, and then they were all returned. I will come back to those two points later, but may I, in passing, make one comment which is connected with both these matters. That is that China, being as vast at it is, one can only expect people to try to escape to Hong Kong from the Cantonese area. They cannot be expected to come from Sinkiang or the North of China—they would never get across China without being stopped and questioned—so it is those mainly from the Cantonese area.

Hong Kong is very largely populated by Cantonese and, therefore, when these people eventually get to the Island of Hong Kong they do not want to be told that they can go on to Formosa, which is quite a long way—from their point of view almost unget-atable—and they know very little about it. These people say, "No, we will not go. We have our own relations and friends in Hong Kong, and if we can get there and occasionally slip back to the mainland to see those relatives that we have left behind we would infinitely prefer it". Therefore, about 90 per cent. of the people who are trying to get away from the mainland do not want to go further than Hong Kong. That, of course, is a great headache for Hong Kong, and it is one of the matters that I suggest to my hon. Friend we should look into again.

What is the background of this? I have been personally interested in China since several years before the war, and I have been out there frequently. I was a member, in 1947, when Lord Attlee was Prime Minister and the Labour Party were in power, of a Parliamentary delegation which went to China to try to see what was going on. China, with Chiang Kai-shek as its leader, had been one of our principal allies. Now it seemed that everyone was getting a little tired on the mainland and that a terrible drift was taking place. The Communists were getting into power, mainly in the North.

It will be remembered that when Japan collapsed she left all of her very up-to-date armaments in Northern China, Manchuria, and that when the Russians took over they passed those armaments to the Communists in Northern China. That greatly strengthened the position of the Communists and it was from then on that they became more and more powerful as Chiang Kai-shek's régime became more and more tired.

We went there in 1947 and for anyone interested in this period I would recommend that he look up the Foreign Office brief to Lord Ammon, the leader of that delegation, as to what the Foreign Office felt about the then Kuomintang Government. That was in 1947. Then, of course, Chiang Kai-shek's régime began to collapse in 1948, and finally collapsed in 1949. I remember so well when Lord Morrison of Lambeth, at a dinner at the Chinese Embassy, asked the head of the Far Eastern Department of our Foreign Office, "What can you do to help us in this dilemma? We do not know what to do". The head of the Department said, "We sent you all the fullest facts and it is not for us to recommend a policy", to which Lord Morrison of Lambeth replied, "Well, our Government know nothing about the Far East, none of us has ever been out there, and we really do not know quite what to do".

Very soon after that, Ernest Bevin went out to the Far East, and India put great pressure on us to recognise the new Communist China. At the same time, there was the China Association, which is still in being, and consisting of rich businessmen connected with all the banks and the Bund in Shanghai, and so on, who felt that if we came to a quick agreement with the Communists they would, in the long run, save something for themselves and things would go on very well later.

Let us look at what has happened since. India can only regret now that she asked us to recognise Red China. The members of the China Association have all been turned out and have got no compensation and if any business people are going out there now they will find quite a different crowd of people from those who have these big claims and who look as though they will never get them settled.

I remember well Mr. Ernest Bevin saying in this House that he was recognising mainland China not de jure, but de facto, and stressing the point very much on more than one occasion that it was a de facto recognition. Whether it has now become de jure I do not know. Since we still have not got an ambassador there they only allow us a chargé d'affaires.

But if we are recognising the Chinese mainland as de facto and de jure what is the position of Formosa? I bring that in because, later, I shall be describing how to get people from the mainland who want to go to Formosa and who certainly do not want to go back to the mainland when at the same time the Hong Kong Government refuse to recognise the existence of Formosa. Not only does the Hong Kong Government refuse to recognise Formosa, but the present British Government taking over from the Labour Government in 1951 recognised—not very happily, but they did recognise—Red China. They also, at the same time, there is no question about it, find the régime of Chiang Kai-shek as very much de facto in Formosa.

That is a de facto régime. There is no question about that. About 12 million people are there. It is an almost bigger population than that of Belgium or even of Holland. It is a quite well-to-do country. Indeed, it is considered to be one of the most important of the lesser régimes in the Far East. After all, 12 million is no small number of people.

We say that we do not recognise them. We have a consul there, and now we have "anted" him up, so to speak, to consul-general. In addition, we have a naval attaché, largely because of the American Seventh Fleet. Of course, he is not called a naval attaché he is called an assistant counsellor, or something like that, but everybody knows he is a naval attaché, and he is a member of the Navy.

Not only that, but there is the Commonwealth point of view, and Australia, New Zealand, Canada all fully recognise Formosa and they do not recognise Red China, though they very often send stuff to Red China; they accept an ambassador or chargé d'affaires in their countries from Formosa, and in return our consul-general is the man who has to act for them in Formosa. So really this is a little bit of a peculiar set-up at the moment, but the whole organisation of it becomes tragic when we have to deal with people's lives, and to that I shall return in a few minutes.

Hong Kong itself started up after the war by having a population of about 800,000. Then, after the beginning of the collapse of the Kuomintang régime, more or less middle class people, university professors, the more educated people, the richer people, started to get as quickly as they could to Hong Kong and about 1 million went in between 1949 and 1951. Then again, after that, over the period between 1951 and 1964 about another 1 million went in.

I cannot believe that all these are Communists. Far from it. The majority of these people in Hong Kong are actually either Nationalists, who would have been for the Kuomintang régime, or, certainly, anti-Communist. I stress that because, of course, before the Kuomintang collapsed some of them did not see eye to eye with the Kuomintang, and many of them went to Singapore and the Philippines or Hong Kong, and did not want to go to Taiwan to get away from the Communists; but Taiwan managed to do quite a lot to help those who wanted to get away, and come to them.

There are, therefore, now about 3 million people in Hong Kong, which is just about as many as Hong Kong can possibly hold. After all, there is practically no water there. There is water now once in four days. Obviously, Hong Kong cannot take any more people, so what I wish to suggest later is that something should be done on an international basis by appeals to the United Nations or other agencies.

In 1962, when the 60,000 to 75,000 people went there, the Formosan Government offered a large amount of grain to be sent them, and while they were held in camps awaiting 11 or 12 ships to collect them from Formosa, but there was nobody official to whom the Formosan Government could put this offer, and that is, of course, one of the difficulties about it all. So the 60,000 were sent back, protesting.

Now we come again to the second incident of last November. Here, I should like to quote what the Chinese Formosan Government stated as their version of what happened. Their version has been summarised thus:

"52 Chinese sailed from the coast town of Luk-Fung in Kuantung province on 26th November, 1963. They seized a fishing junk owned by the Commune after disarming those on board. They sailed for Hong Kong the same night. Of the 52 refugees, 27 were male adults, 19 were women, and six were children. Forty-eight hours later, on the night of 28th November, 1963, they had reached Lamma Island off Hong Kong where they were arrested by the Hong Kong water police. On escaping from Luk-Fung the refugees had been under machine-gun fire, and the refugees had returned it with small arms fire. The condition of the refugees was bad. All were in rags and were seeking to escape from the hardships of Commune life.

"The United Press reported this event on 1st December and quoted the Hong Kong police as saying that a decision was impending as to whether these junk refugees were political refugees or illegal immigrants.

Mr. Ku Chang-Kan, head of the Free Chinese Association in Taipein working directly with the United Nations on the matter—cabled the Hong Kong authorities on 1st December, 1963, requesting them to respect the wishes of the refugees as to their ultimate destination. Mr. Ku added that if the Hong Kong Government had no funds to support the refugees the Free Chinese Association would take entire responsibility. In either the same or another cable of the same date, 1st December, 1963, Mr. Ku asked the Hong Kong Government's permission for the refugees to proceed to Taiwan. Two days later, namely 3rd December, 1963, the junk refugees"—

as they are now called—

"were sent to the Red Chinese border in three box-cars usually used for transporting cattle. Their transfer to the Red Chinese authorities involved a scene of much weeping and distress."

Hon. Members can imagine the scene well enough, and I have photographs here:

"On 4th December United Press reported Mr. Duncan Sandys as saying that in the past 12 months refugees to Hong Kong from the Chinese mainland had numbered 29,000. During the past 15 years the Hong Kong Government had built 140,000 dwellings to accommodate some 750,000 Chinese refugees. On 12th December, 1963, Mr. Ku Chang-kan wrote to the Secretary General U Thant of the United Nations protesting against this and many other recent occasions upon which the Hong Kong Government had returned refugees to the Communist mainland."

Letters were also written to me and to Lord Killearn and others and this matter has been taken up both in another place and here, and indeed, Lord Dundee and Lord Lansdowne have written several letters on these questions.

I should like to look for a few minutes at the facts which are agreed and at the ones which are disagreed. Everyone agrees that there were 52 Chinese who sailed from Luk-Fung on 26th November. Everybody agrees that they reached Lamma Island on 28th November and that they were arrested by the Hong Kong border police and detained in various gaols. Everybody also agrees that in the afternoon of 3rd December, 1963, they were repatriated across the Chinese Communist border having been held—and this is important—incommunicado from the moment of their arrest until their return to the Chinese Communists.

Now, in dispute are the following facts. In saying these things I must also point out that my hon. Friend the Member for Sevenoaks (Mr. J. Rodgers), who cannot be here today, has also been in communication with the Secretary of State on this matter and that these are, roughly, his statements to the Colonial Office and, very roughly, the answers.

Our Government's point of view is that the 52 Chinese were illegal immigrants and not political refugees. It has even been suggested that they were possibly security risks, but that has never been definitely stated; it has only been implied. We say they were fugitives from Communism. They must be. They have to be to seize a junk and to fire on people who are trying to stop them from going, and anybody who knows about Communism or about Red China's position will know that people who go like that are unlikely to have a good time of it if and when they go back.

Then our Government say there was no disregarding of the Declaration of Human Rights. But it has been disregarded, for these refugees are leaving, and risking persecution, and according to what I understand the Declaration of Human Rights to say—and which we have all signed—it says that every nation is bound to give sanctuary to such people in such circumstances.

Our Government tell us that Hong Kong is bound to restrict immigration. That I fully grant. All I am asking is that they should just hold them en route till somebody else can accommodate them.

Then they say there was no offer of sanctuary by Formosa. The great difficulty is for the Formosans to make direct contact with Hong Kong, but on 2nd December Mr. Robert Der, who is the person in Hong Kong who looks after Formosan interests, unconditionally on Formosa's behalf made this offer to Mr. Sydney S. Gordon, Hong Kong's political police chief.

We must not forget that the Prime Minister of Formosa, in May, 1962, when the starving 70,000 were going out, made a standing offer which, I am informed today—I have just heard from Taipeh about it—still holds good, to accept all refugees wanting to come to Formosa. Again, the Hong Kong Government say:

"Formosa's offer is not sincere. When it was made in 1962, only 751 of these Chinese went on to Formosa".

That is probably true. They fled to escape famine, but were returned by Hong Kong. In view of what happened to the Korean prisoners after the Korean War, when 80 per cent. of them, on being given their choice, went back to Formosa and not to the mainland, it is unlikely, and, indeed, almost certain, that these people were never told about the Formosan offer.

Many of her refugees are in the same position and they are being turned back fairly regularly, although not in such large numbers. That is why I have en-deavoured to bring this matter up today, because it is possible that we might have something on a much bigger scale in the near future. It looks as though there is no way of helping these people or there being anyone to whom they can turn.

I suggest that some contact should be made between Formosa and Hong Kong. There are, of course, trading ships which go regularly. There are aircraft which go three or four times a week between the two territories. Of the 3 million people, probably well over 2 million are in close sympathy with Formosa. The Hong Kong Government used to be very fair and just on all these matters. They did their best to take as many people as possible. But now it would seem as if they are beginning, bit by bit, to become a little impatient of Formosa and more interested in helping to please the Chinese mainland.

I know that the Foreign Office is absolutely terrified of Peking and that it would not do anything to offend Peking unless it looked as if it might offend the United States a bit more. It is, therefore, in a bit of a jam, because the United States put Formosa very much on the map just after the collapse of Chiang Kai-shek. The British in Hong Kong have really helped the Chinese there. A group of Britons, without really getting very much assistance in the early days after the war from the Colonial Office, did a great deal. It was done through the Hong Kong Bank and other banks. They financed everything and, therefore, they were not in a position to be dictated to by the Colonial Office concerning the expenditure of the money. The net result is that they have made Hong Kong into one of the most exciting places in the Far East, both from the point of view of building and of solving the appalling housing problem. They have not yet solved the water problem—they cannot do that—but they would like to do so very much. They have done all this very much on their own.

In Formosa, however, it is the better type of Chinese who escape from the mainland. They have been left, with the financial backing of the Americans, very much on their own and to do what they want to do. They have done everything they can to make an old China in the Far East, a China of the Confucian period in many ways with regard to religion and culture, and, at the same time, a very modern Formosa in military equipment, and so on.

Is there no way in which we could get these two, even if they cannot officially recognise each other, to do something to save lives for the future? I cannot help but feel that people who escape and get away from the mainland in China, if they are sent back—and one can see from the tears and the scenes that they are heartbroken when they are sent back—they will have the devil of a time. They will be put in concentration camps and will suffer forced labour, or something like that. We should, therefore, try to do something to prevent that situation from arising. It would have to be done on the highest level. This could mean a lot of worry for the Foreign Office, although I cannot see that it will mean very much worry for the Colonial Office.

We must also consider the matter from the lower level. Here, I want to tell my hon. Friend in public what I have told him in private about a Nationalist Chinese who lives here normally and has done so for many years. He looks after everything which can be done for the Nationalists, the anti-Communist Chinese, of whom there is such a large number in this country. His name is Mr. Charles Wang. The other day, he went back to Formosa for a month. To do so he had to pass through Hong Kong. He hoped that he would be able to see some of his friends there. He did everything absolutely correctly. He went to the Home Office and got a Home Office visa to stay for 48 hours—passing through.

Mr. Wang arrived, admittedly, about eight o'clock in the evening, on 23rd March. He went by air. We are told that the senior Customs officials were not on duty, but there was a junior official, a Cantonese, who was extremely offensive and who refused to allow him to stay. He threatened to put him back on the next plane for England. Mr. Wang showed him the Home Office visa. Presumably it was a perfectly legal one. I take it that my hon. Friend agrees that the Colonial Office accepts Home Office visas. The visa was for 48 hours in Hong Kong.

This official said that he could not care less, that he was not interested in that and that Mr. Wang was an illegal immigrant because he did not have an entry visa for Taipeh, in Taiwan. The reason that he did not have one was that it is usually kept at Taipeh airport on landing, and people in Hong King are informed first, or a facsimile of it is sent to one by air mail. Mr. Wang had this document and he showed it to the official, but he refused to accept it.

Mr. Wang was put in a detention centre at the airport to await the next plane for Taiwan. Luckily, he was seen from over the wall by the head of the Press Department, who was expecting him, and others. Finally, after three hours and much trouble, they gave a personal guarantee and they got him out. The Home Office visa meant nothing at all; nobody cared tuppence about it. A personal guarantee had to be given by someone in Hong Kong.

This makes one suspect that, in addition to there being this uncertainty at the top and unwillingness even to recognise the existence of 12 million people in neighbouring territory, there is, at the same time, among the lower ranges of the Cantonese, among whom are quite a lot of Communist sympathisers, people who are most unwilling to do anything to help others going on to Taiwan.

I beg the Colonial Office's officials to do what they can to assert their authority. They know the Far East far better than the Foreign Office officials. When I first became interested in China, before the war, it was just at the end of the time when the old Far Eastern hands in the Foreign Office became ambassadors and stayed on. After that there came the idea that this was just another part of the Foreign Office's world responsibility and one went backwards and forwards from Europe to Far Eastern areas whilst those in the Colonial Office remained specialists in the East. One heard many hard things said by Colonial Office people in Hong Kong about the way in which they were dictated to by the Foreign Office just after the war.

I ask my hon. Friend to see whether the Colonial Office cannot do something to ease the situation and to make it possible for someone in Hong Kong to be recognised as the person to whom messages could he sent by the Formosan Government. For instance, when the Prime Minister of Formosa makes a public statement to say what he will do to help people going there, there should be someone in Hong Kong to receive it and to make certain that it gets to the Governor. There is no certainty that the statements I have mentioned ever did so, and I ask my hon. Friend to do what he can to solve this problem.

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Sir W. Teeling) on his welcome initiative in obtaining this debate. I should like to say how much I share some of his distress about the illegal immigration into the Colony. However, I do not agree with the unfair censure which he levelled at the Hong Kong Government and their actions in this matter over the past few years.

As my hon. Friend said, the population of the Colony is now more than 3,500,000. This includes a natural increase of 95,000 per annum, but, in spite of it, the Hong Kong Government have continued the tradition of allowing a certain number of immigrants from the Kwantung Province, which has always been very close to the Colony, to enter legally. However, in addition, in 1963 10,000 illegal immigrants entered the Colony, mostly by junk, many from Macao. Of course, the police in the Colony have had a very difficult task. They have coped with this problem as well as they could within the limitations and difficulties confronting them.

I should like my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary to say whether any extra pressure, with any success, has been put on the Portuguese Administration in Macao to reduce, if not stop, this immigration at source, because it causes so much human misery to so many Chinese who are crammed into small boats to cross the estuary in order to try to enter Hong Kong. I have seen this for myself in Macao. I have seen the junks and the small tourist agencies which charge the Chinese great sums of money, although many never get to the Colony, some being dumped back on the shores of Red China.

My hon. Friend the Member for Brighton, Pavilion mentioned the water situation to which I, too, would like to refer. The water situation in the Colony has been desperate since the failure of last year's rains. Domestic taps get water once every four days for periods of four hours while at the standpipes water is available for only an hour or two every other day. I should like to pay tribute to the great restraint of the Chinese in Hong Kong, and indeed the whole population, for the way they have coped with great discomfort and misery caused by shortage of water over the past two years.

However, it should not be forgotten that the Hong Kong Government are pressing ahead rapidly with many development schemes. First, the Plover Cove Scheme is well under way. Secondly, I understand that sea water distillation plants are being set up. Although he may not have the information today, I should like my hon. Friend to tell me at some time when these sea water distillation plants are likely to be in operation. Thirdly, there is the agreement with Red China to obtain water from the East River. I am sure that my hon. Friend welcomes this agreement which will considerably help to ease the water situation.

I should like finally to comment on the most important thing which we can do to ease the population difficulty in Hong Kong. The basic problem is the tremendous increase in population, including illegal immigration. This can be tackled by expanding trade and by providing full employment for the vast numbers living in the Colony. Total trade expanded by nearly 12 per cent. in 1962 compared with 1961, and again by more than 12 per cent. last year compared with 1962. This is a great credit to the businessmen and industrialists of the Colony, but diversification of industry is vital. There is no need for capital, as is the case with other overseas territories, but there is a need for "know-how" and technical assistance and I appeal to British firms to give all the assistance they can. Many have started, but more help is needed.

I should like again to stress that, while sharing my hon. Friend's concern about this illegal immigration, there is no doubt that the Hong Kong Government are doing all that can be done to cope with it there. The flourishing Colony is a great credit to British administration and to Chinese hard work and ingenuity. It is a shop window for the West on the edge of China. We must help to support this fine example of thriving free enterprise in the Far East.

I assure my hon. Friend the Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Sir W. Teeling) that it was well worth missing half-a-day's holiday to hear his most interesting speech. I am also grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Richmond, Surrey (Mr. A. Royle) for his defence of the Hong Kong Government, which I was delighted to hear, as it was well justified. I do not know the answer to his first question, but I will inquire about it at once and let him know. He was perfectly right to say that the water problem is very worrying. There have been several Parliamentary Questions about it, and I am now more optimistic than I have been for some time that something is being done. I do not know when the desalination plant will be ready, but I will let my hon. Friend know as soon as I can find out.

I am very glad that my hon. Friend the Member for Brighton, Pavilion has raised this subject, because it gives me the opportunity to clarify a situation which is well understood in Hong Kong, but perhaps not so well understood in Britain. I want to make it quite clear that we are dealing with a problem not of political refugees, but of illegal immigrants. Most of the Chinese now seeking to enter Hong Kong do so because the Colony's relative economic prosperity is very great, or because they have relations there. The vast majority are not political refugees but are simple, unsophisticated people without any political motives. They are not in danger of losing their lives or liberty and are quite simply illegal immigrants.

At the end of the war, the population of Hong Kong was fewer than 600,000, but by 1950, when immigration controls were first introduced, it had risen to 2,300,000, a very large number of people in a very small place. Since then, more than a million more people have entered Hong Kong from the mainland, either legally or illegally.

There is another side of the coin, and I must remind my hon. Friend that when there is a period of less pressure of immigration from the mainland, the Hong Kong Government at once relaxes these restrictions on entering. This has happened between 1952 and 1955 and again for a period in 1956. As he knows, by arrangement with China, we now have a quota system by which between 20,000 and 30,000 people can come to Hong Kong legally every year. They are not a problem, because these are the people whom the Hong Kong Government believes this very small and overcrowded Colony can absorb. It is the illegal immigrants who are the problem, and in 1962 alone there were more than 100,000 of them.

The Hong Kong Government must exercise some degree of immigration control in the interests of those people who live in the Colony, and I think that my hon. Friend agrees with that. The controls they apply are the usual controls by which any country regulates entry into its boundaries and, as my hon. Friend knows, it is normal international practice to return people who try to evade those controls to the country from which they came.

Only those who are actually caught entering Hong Kong illegally are returned to China; I think that there were only 1,883 of them during 1963. The people who avoid detection and reach Hong Kong are allowed to remain there, and even if they are caught coming in illegally they are not returned immediately. Full investigations are made as to why they came in, and if there are any reasonable grounds for believing that they would be persecuted if sent back, very careful inquiries are made before a decision is taken. Where there are any special circumstances, these are taken fully into account before a decision is made and, it there is any doubt, the benefit of the doubt is given to the man who is claiming political asylum; he is not returned.

Admission is not refused to anyone seeking entry in circumstances covered by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights—I must make that quite clear, because my hon. Friend mentioned it. Article 14(1) of the Declaration says:

"Everyone has the right to seek and enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution."

That Declaration is not actually binding on us, but our own practice does, in fact, conform to it.

The decision whether to admit someone is, and I think must be, one for the local authority, but general policy is laid down by Her Majesty's Government in Britain, and any individual case about which there was any doubt at all would be referred to my right hon. Friend if special considerations arose.

My hon. Friend seemed to imply at one point that we do not exercise sufficient control over Hong Kong from this country, but I must tell him that we are in perfect agreement with the policy of the Hong Kong Government on this matter, and I am not prepared to accept any wedge that he may seek to drive between the Colonial Office here and the local Government.

The suggestion that emigration to Formosa and other countries would ease the immigrant problem in Hong Kong has often been made, particularly by the Chinese Nationalist authorities. The fact is that neither Formosa nor any other country has hitherto been prepared to accept Chinese immigrants in sufficient numbers to make any real contribution to the problem. Whenever countries other than Hong Kong have admitted immigrants it has always been on a very selective basis indeed. They have only taken people—I do not particularly blame them, but it is the fact—of good health and good character, who have professional or technical qualifications. Those sort of conditions are really quite irrelevant to the refugee problem in Hong Kong, because immigrants, whether they have entered legally or illegally, are accepted without any qualifications whatever or any inquiry as to whether they can earn their living in the Colony.

We must also take into account the wishes of the immigrants themselves. It is quite unthinkable that we should move people from one country to another without their consent and against their wish, and it is perfectly clear that the vast majority of them who come to Hong Kong simply want to work there and live there, where many of them have friends, and where conditions are comparatively rather good. Most of them prefer to remain near their previous homes in China, which they often revisit, and have no wish at all to move further afield.

I do not think that it is true to say that Formosa would take these migrants in their tens of thousands, which is the size of the problem, even if the migrants themselves wished to go there. It is true that individuals are sometimes assisted to go, but, as far as we know, those who go to Formosa are normally students, or people like doctors with professional or technical qualifications. Indeed, in the ten years from 1952 to 1962, only about 17,000 Chinese from Hong Kong were resettled in Formosa, yet during the same period no fewer than 800,000 people entered Hong Kong. Those are the facts of past experience.

In May, 1962, after the great influx from China, when about 70,000 people entered Hong Kong, the Formosan authorities publicly declared—I think that my hen. Friend made this point—that they would resettle any refugees who wished to go to Formosa. In the following January, however, the Free China Relief Association admitted that only 721 people—1 per cent.—had been brought to Formosa; 262 of them were students, and 331 were people who could be gainfully employed because of their special skills. It is not true to say that the Hong Kong Government's policy restricts emigration to Formosa. If more people do not go there, it is just that they do not want to go there, or because the Formosan authorities would not take them if they did want to go there.

The United States has also taken between 10,000 and 20,000 immigrants over the years, but the basic United States immigration quota from Hong Kong is only 105 people per year, with their wives and children. The number of Chinese immigrants into other countries is minimal—a few hundred in all. Let me assure my hon. Friend that the Hong Kong Government are not in the least opposed to emigration, and any resident in the Colony is quite free to emigrate to any country willing to accept him.

My hon. Friend has suggested, in effect, that illegal immigrants should be sent to Formosa instead of being returned to China, but there is no indication that the great majority of people entering Hong Kong either wish to go on to Formosa or would be accepted there if they did so wish. They cannot just be kept in Hong Kong; they are not distinguishable from the residents of Hong Kong, and if they were allowed to circulate freely in the Colony it would not be possible to keep track of them or ensure their onward transmission to Formosa—unless they were put in transit camps which would, I think, be quite unacceptable to them and to their friends and relations in Hong Kong. These are human beings, and have to be treated as such, and not, like cattle, to be sent anywhere without regard to their own wishes.

I am sorry to be slightly exceeding my time in this debate, but my hon. Friend took half an hour in opening and there are one or two points of detail with which I want to deal. My hon. Friend referred to the incident in November, 1963, when the Hong Kong police intercepted a junk containing 52 illegal immigrants. Two members of that party said that their vessel had been pursued by an armed junk, and that fish bombs had been thrown at this junk in order to effect escape, but this story was not corroborated by any of the other 50 members of the party. Eventually, as my hon. Friend has said, the members of the party were returned across the land frontier early in December.

There is no reason to believe that this was anything other than a case of attempted illegal entry. Possibly in order to make it appear that these people were refugees hotly pursued out of China, the Free China Relief Association talked at the time of their escape under gunfire—I think that those were the words—and of heartrending scenes at the border as they were returned to "certain death". I am reliably informed that there was no gunfire at all, and that there were no heartrending scenes whatever either at the border or at any other time during their detention in Hong Kong—

May I show my hon. Friend some pictures at another time?

I should like to see them, but I have been very carefully into this report and would need very convincing pictures to refute the evidence I have.

The Free China Relief Association claims that it offered to take these people to Formosa, but there is no record of any such offer, and the Hong Kong Government received no request from the people themselves to be allowed to go anywhere other than Hong Kong. It is quite untrue to say that the people themselves asked to go to Formosa.

I must refer now to the incident my hon. Friend mentioned of a few days ago in which, as I understand him, the representative of the Chinese Nationalist Government was refused entry to Hong Kong for several hours despite the fact that he had been issued with a 48-hour transit visa from London.

I do not think that this man could have been a representative of Formosa, because there is no diplomatic representative of Formosa in this country. Perhaps he was a member of the Free China News Agency. I do not know. In any case, the Hong Kong Government have no record of the incident, and I know nothing at all about it. If my hon. Friend will give me the name of the passenger and the date, together with the flight number, I will have this matter carefully investigated, and I will write to him as soon as I have some information about it.

Lastly, there is the question of diplomatic relations or liaison with Formosa. As my hon. Friend has stated, Her Majesty's Government do not recognise the Nationalist authorities of Formosa. The existence of a British consulate in Formosa does not mean that we have diplomatic relations. As my hon. Friend knows, consuls are not diplomatic representatives; their duty is simply to look after British interests. The consulate in Formosa has relations with the local provincial authorities in the island, but not with the Nationalist authorities. If my hon. Friend is arguing that Her Majesty's Government should change this policy of non-recognition of the Nationalist regime in Formosa, I must decline to enter the controversy, because this is not a matter for the Colonial Office, and my hon. Friend should put his arguments to my right hon. Friend the Foreign Secretary. I am not prepared to answer, because I should get into terrible trouble with the Foreign Office if I sought to assume responsibility for these matters.

I hope that I have covered the main points and arguments which my hon. Friend has put to the House. If, for lack of time, I have not covered every point that my hon. Friend raised, I hope that he will understand that this is out of consideration for the other debates on the Whitsun Adjournment and in deference, Mr. Speaker, to your informal time table, to which I have tried to adhere, however unsuccessfully. If there are points that I have not covered I will write to my hon. Friend as soon as possible after the debate in order to refer to them, and reply to the other points that he mentioned.

I rise to call attention to the Skelhorn Report and the tragic circumstances surrounding the death of the artist, "Hal" Woolf. I do not wish to discuss the contents, merits or demerits of Mr. Skelhorn's Report. It was presented to Parliament in March of this year, and I trust that when we resume after the Recess we shall have an opportunity to debate the conclusions and the body of the Report.

Mine is a preliminary plea, and I make it so that we may be put into a better position to assess the value of the Report and to judge the criticisms and structures contained therein. I am asking the Home Secretary whether he will agree to publish the evidence—at any rate, the police evidence—given at the Skelhorn inquiry, so that Members of Parliament and the public may be able to draw their own conclusions.

I begin by reciting briefly the facts that led up to this investigation. I shall be as objective and succinct as I can. Why was there an inquiry into the Woolf case? Mr. Herman Woolf was knocked down by a car in Central London in November, 1962. He was taken to hospital and X-rayed there. A short time afterwards he was considered fit for discharge, and he was promptly arrested by the police on the allegation that he was in possession of a dangerous drug. Within 24 hours he was returned to that very same hospital, gravely ill and injured, in a comatose condition. Shortly after that he was transferred to another hospital, and 12 days later he was dead.

During this whole time—from 10th to 23rd November, 1962—the late Mr. Woolf was under police surveillance, and most of the time under police arrest. In spite of the fact that some days after this unfortunate incident and his transfer to a hospital in the suburbs more than one of his friends reported him missing at a London police station, his former wife—who was his next-of-kin—and his friends were not notified by the police of his whereabouts until after he had died.

Those who heard the recital of these facts, which I have given so barely—Mrs. Woolf, his former wife, friends of "Hal" Woolf and Members of Parliament who were subsequently informed—found in them things which generated in them a number of suspicions. Let me put them quite bluntly. There was a suspicion that Mr. Woolf had been beaten up by the police, and that that accounted for the grave injuries that eventually led to his death. There was a suspicion that he had been framed on the charge of drug peddling. There was the suspicion, thirdly, that the police had deliberately withheld knowledge of his whereabouts, despite the fact that he was under their surveillance, until after his death, because we know that on 15th and 16th December he was registered and reported as a missing person, but that not until he died in the Atkinson Morley Hospital were his wife and friends notified of his whereabouts.

One of the troubles about the whole of this tragedy in 1963 was that those equipped with authority to deal with this matter in any way did not show themselves to be over-anxious to investigate the circumstances of the case. At the inquest Mrs. Woolf objected to the haste with which it was being held, and asked to be represented, but her objection was brushed aside. Later, her legal advisers had great difficulty in getting a transcript of the evidence—such as it was—which had been given at the inquest.

Last summer when, as a result of an article in the magazine Private Eye, the national Press took up the Woolf case, and suspicions and anxieties were aroused among many people about it, an investigation was held by Scotland Yard, under Detective Superintendent Axon. It took a very short time. I know none of the details. There was a report to the Commissioner, and comfortable and complacent conclusions were issued to the Press. But the report has never been published. Neither the public nor Members of Parliament know any of its details.

Subsequently, the case went to the Divisional Court, on the demand for a new inquest. Surprisingly, to those who read the evidence, that court rejected the demand for a new inquest, which was most unfortunate, because it would have provided an opportunity for a public cross-examination of those people who were concerned with the case, particularly members of the police force. About 12 months after these events the Home Secretary was good enough, at the instance of the National Council for Civil Liberties, to receive an all-party deputation of Members and to consider the case. He was sufficiently impressed by the expression of their anxieties and misgivings, and the facts that they put before him, to agree that the case necessitated an investigation into police conduct. So it was that in December of last year, more than 12 months after the tragic death of Mr. Woolf, the Skelhorn inquiry was set up.

The inquiry was established by the Home Secretary quite explicitly to allay public anxiety about the circumstances surrounding the death of Mr. Woolf—anxiety that had been expressed to him by Members of Parliament of all parties and which had been made widespread by the publicity in the case, quite apart from the long-drawn-out anxiety suffered by Mrs. Woolf and Mr. Woolf's friends.

Although the Home Secretary decided that the inquiry should be in private, he had the power to oblige the London police, for whom he is responsible, to give evidence at that inquiry. Their evidence was the most important evidence, because the anxiety was about the police conduct of the case, and there seems, therefore, no reason at all why the Home Secretary should not decide immediately to publish the police evidence and the report of the cross-examination of the police witnesses, with which we are most concerned. In the case of the other witnesses, who are fairly numerous, for whom presumably he made the inquiry private in case they would not otherwise be prepared to come forward to give their evidence, I am suggesting that the Minister should seek the consent of those other witnesses to the publication of their evidence and that publication should be dependent upon their agreement.

It is important, as we all know, that justice should not only be done but should be seen to be done, and it is also important, in view of the criticisms, implied and explicit, in the body and conclusions of Mr. Skelhorn's Report, that those who have been concerned with the case should be able to assess and judge the validity of his recommendations.

We have only the conclusions of a single man, albeit a distinguished citizen, but if the Home Office really wishes to achieve the objective of allaying public anxiety about a case of this kind which received considerable publicity as a result of proceedings in court and in the Press, it seems to me that there is a real responsibility upon him to make the facts known. During this Session of Parliament a good deal of concern has been expressed about safeguards against arbitrary police action. There has been widespread concern amongst people about particular cases that I do not propose to mention this afternoon.

Because of that, because of the importance of this fact and because of the importance of legislation that has recently been through this House, it seems to me to be a necessary part of the duty of the Home Secretary in a case of this kind to tell the public the whole of the facts, to give them the whole truth about the cross-examination that occurred at the inquiry.

There is also another side to this matter, and that is the aspect of fairness to the police themselves. In Mr. Skelhorn's Report some police officers are exonerated and others are censured—some of them quite severely—for their conduct during the course of this case. One has to reflect upon the fact that if there had not been an agitation and if the Skelhorn inquiry had not been held, these things would never have come to light. In fairness to those members of the police force, it seems to me that the Home Secretary ought to publish the Report so that the censures upon them may be judged by the public and so that what they said in cross-examination at the inquiry can be weighed up by citizens in relation to the conclusions to which Mr. Skelhorn came.

I hope, therefore, that, on reflection, the Joint Under-Secretary of State will show willingness today, in the first place, to agree to the publication of the police evidence, which is the basis of the Skelhorn Report, so that we may be more fully informed of the facts that were adduced as well as the conclusions to which Mr. Skelhorn came; and, secondly, that he will be willing to ask the other witnesses, over whom he has no control and for whom he has no responsibility, if they will consent to the publication of their evidence so that this matter may be seen to have been fully probed before it was debated in the House of Commons.

I wish to speak in support of my hon. Friend the Member for Newcastle-under-Lyme (Mr. Swingler). I do so with some diffidence because, as I think everyone knows—certainly the Joint Under-Secretary of State knows—I was myself professionally engaged in the inquiry and conducted the case from Mrs. Woolf's point of view, cross-examining all the witnesses and addressing the learned Commissioner at the end of the day. It would be quite wrong of me—and I have no intention of committing such a solecism—to take advantage of the knowledge which I have about the evidence that was given in order to plead a case to an assembly that has not the same advantage. The inquiry was held in secret, rightly or wrongly, and, having taken part in it in that way, I recognise that, whatever I think of the merits of the matter, I must not do anything in breach of the secrecy which I accepted.

Before saying anything further, I should like to ask the hon. Gentleman whether he has read the evidence in this case. I would be obliged if he would tell me now.

The answer is, "Yes".

One may take it, therefore, that the Home Secretary has likewise read it?

indicated assent.

Therefore, the Home Secretary and the Joint Under-Secretary will be able to appreciate the point that I am about to make, even though I can only refer to the evidence allusively and not specifically.

The difficulty in this case was obvious. Dr. Toone at the hospital—he gave this evidence at the inquiry, so this is no breach of secrecy—thought that Mr. Woolf, after two and a half hours detention, was suffering from no more than trivial injuries. The Commissioner specifically accepts that this is what Dr. Toone honestly believed. The dilemma is that, if Dr. Toone was right, obviously something must have happened to Mr. Woolf in the 17 or 20 hours that elapsed between his discharge into police custody from St. George's Hospital, suffering only from trivial injuries, and his return to St. George's Hospital less than 24 hours later in a collapsed, comatose, completely unconscious condition from which he never recovered.

Certainly when he came back to St. George's Hospital his injuries were not trivial. If, therefore, when he was first discharged from St. George's Hospital his injuries were trivial, something must have happened in the meantime. Whatever happened in the meantime could only be a happening for which the police custodians were responsible, because it is not contended that he was ever not in their custody. Indeed, Mr. Skelhorn specifically finds that for virtually the whole of the period after the first hour or two in the police station he was virtually unconscious until 2 o'clock the next day when he was returned to the hospital in the condition which everybody now knows.

So, quite obviously, the first question that the Commissioner had to decide was whether in fact anything had happened to him in the police station. If hon. Members will turn to paragraph 33 of the Report, with the cross heading,

"Was Mr. Woolf subjected to violence or maltreatment by the Police?"

they will see the first sentence:

"As to the first of these questions"—

the question I have just recited—

"I am quite satisfied on the evidence I received both from the police officers who had custody of Mr. Woolf and from the medical evidence as to the injuries which he received, that he was not subjected to violence or deliberately maltreated by the police."

Lower down on the page it says:

"I was satisfied that their denials"—

that is, the denials of the police officers concerned—

"that he was in any way subjected to violence, were true."

He goes on at the end of that paragraph to say that he comes to this finding because he accepts the evidence of Mr. Bush and Inspector Keene. He goes on to say that he was fortified in it, although he does not base his findings on it, because the medical evidence shows that at any rate his injuries were consistent with having been inflicted not in the police station.

I cannot go further into detail about this. My recollection—I do not go into any details or make any specific reference to any witness or fact, but my recollection—of the evidence is that it was neutral. There may have been a bias in favour of thinking that the injuries were not caused in the police station. The doctors were quite sure that they could have been. We are left with Mr. Skelhorn's acceptance of the evidence of the two police officers themselves.

It is not complained that a judge in a case forms a different assessment of the credibility of the evidence of particular witnesses from what other people form, or may have formed, or would form, if they had the evidence in front of them. That is certainly no matter of complaint. It was for Mr. Skelhorn to decide, and he decided. I say with some diffidence, but I think it has to be said and the Under-Secretary will know what I mean if he has read the evidence, that one might derive—if one had not read the evidence—the feeling that Mr. Skelhorn accepted the whole of the evidence given by Mr. Bruce and Inspector Keene. I think reference to the evidence would show that this cannot be SO.

On one very important matter, Inspector Keene and Detective Sergeant Bruce gave evidence as to what they found when they illegally searched Mr. Woolf's flat. In this they were contradicted by every other witness in the case. If one were to disregard the evidence on this point of all the lay witnesses, all the civilian witnesses, and pay attention only to the evidence of police officers, it is clear that Inspector Keene and Detective Sergeant Bruce in their description of what they found were contradicted as clearly and absolutely as they could be contradicted by other officers who at relevant and material times examined the same premises.

Of course, a good judge has an open mind at the beginning of a case, but if his mind is still open at the conclusion of the case he is to that extent a less good judge. It is his business to decide which side he believes; he could not believe both sides. Either the other officers were not telling the truth, or Inspector Keene and Detective Sergeant Bruce were not telling the truth.

The curious thing, I suggest the regrettable thing, is that Mr. Skelhorn has seen fit not to refer to this very important matter.

The hon. Member for Newcastle-under-Lyme (Mr. Swingler) is seeking to draw the attention of the hon. Member for Nelson and Colne (Mr. S. Silverman) to the fact that he has used the wrong name.

My hon. Friend is referring to Detective Sergeant Bell.

I am much obliged to my hon. Friend.

I find it a little surprising, and I think regrettable, that when he wrote the paragraph which says he accepts the evidence of the police officers concerned on the material point of whether they inflicted any injuries on Mr. Woolf or not, he says nothing to indicate that their evidence on another material point was challenged, and perhaps successfully challenged. Of course, that does not mean that a judge cannot say, "I accept this part of the evidence but not that part of the evidence", but at least he ought to indicate, if he is doing that, that he is doing that.

I should have thought it very wrong that the Home Secretary should conceal from the public what was the evidence which apparently Mr. Skelhorn accepted without qualification. It was about the condition of the flat. In the Report Mr. Skelhorn goes out of his way—very fairly, and everyone is very grateful to him for doing it—to pay tribute to the kind of man Mr. Woolf was, and to the cleanliness and orderliness and even methodical nature of his way of life. This is an indication that the evidence on this point given by Bell and Keene, which could not have been a mistake, if it was not true must have been invented. I think the Home Secretary on consideration might feel that the public ought to be told what this evidence was and enabled to judge.

I have taken longer over this than I intended to take, but I want to make one or two short points. There was the question of the diary. In the hospital there was found a diary which contained a specific request that in case of anything happening information was to be given to Mrs. Woolf, whose address and telephone number were contained on the first page of the diary. There is no doubt that this was in police custody from the day Mr. Woolf was discharged from the hospital until April of this year, when it was handed to me with other property by the police. There is no doubt that it was kept with his other property in the station. What is said about it is that Mr. Bell, the detective sergeant in charge of the case, never saw it. There the Commissioner leaves it. He leaves the question quite open. "He never saw it. It was there but he never saw it. It contains the precise information that he was looking for, but he never saw it." If Mr. Skelhorn feels unable to come to a conclusion as to whether Mr. Bell is telling the truth on this point or is not telling the truth on this point, it is perhaps reasonable that the House and the public should see what the information is, for perhaps they might be able to make up their minds—and it is only right that they should have the opportunity to do so.

There is also the question to which my hon. Friend referred about whether earlier medical advice should have been sought. Mr. Skelhorn fixes the blame solely on one police officer who was supposed or claimed to have served, but obviously did not serve, a meal early the following morning. There was a lot of evidence about this. There was some negative evidence whether the police ought not to have discovered it very much earlier. I feel sure that not everybody would agree with Mr. Skelhorn that the blame for not seeking medical advice earlier was solely that of Mr. Thornley and that everybody else could be completely exonerated. I may be wrong. All I am saying is that if one police officer, and this a casual jailer, is to be singled out for sole and exclusive responsibility for not discovering what ought to have been obvious to everybody; if this is to go down and to be accepted as a final conclusion in the matter, then at least everybody is entitled to know on what evidence it was based. Unfair to the others? It is unfair, first, to Thornley.

There is the question of the delayed charge: brought in at 8 o'clock, charged when obviously completely insensible at 11 o'clock or 12 o'clock—I have forgotten the exact time—in circumstances about which there is considerable contradiction of evidence and in which there is even one document which says that he was not charged at all. These are matters which the public are entitled to know about in an inquiry the object of which was to relieve public anxiety. We cannot relieve public anxiety by leaving questions open or reaching equivocal decisions and not allowing anyone to know on what evidence they were based.

Obviously I cannot take longer, although there is a great deal more which could be said and which I shall have to reserve for another occasion. I ask the Joint Under-Secretary to imagine for one moment this situation: let us suppose that in the course of trying to find out from Woolf his source of supply, a matter of obvious interest and duty to a police officer investigating such a charge, and not believing that he was seriously injured in any way and incapable of anything, something happened. Suppose he passed out. This could be the explanation of everything else that followed; the pretence that one never saw the diary, the failure to communicate with the Criminal Record Office, the failure to communicate with the widow until after death, the resulting fact that nobody ever saw him who knew him until after he had died. All this would be readily explainable if something untoward had happened at the police station at the beginning of the story.

I am not saying that this is so. Not at all. I do not know whether it is so. I would draw certain inferences from certain evidence, but that is of no interest to the House, and I do not seek to detain the House about it or to commit the obvious breach of confidence which would be involved. What I say is that if we are to find, by accepting the evidence of two police officers, which evidence is not disclosed, that the evidence concludes the principal matter on which there was public anxiety, then in all fairness and in all justice we must disclose, and enable others to judge after disclosing, the evidence which was investigated. There were 78 witnesses; all of them are alive.

I do not expect the Joint Under-Secretary to say, "I will publish all this tomorrow." Of course he will not, and of course he cannot. But I ask him to believe that those who are pressing these matters upon him do it with the utmost sincerity and in all good faith. As I said to Skelhorn about the business of the Report, to quote Othello:

"…nothing extenuate,

Nor set down aught in malice."

There is no malice behind this. There is only a passionate desire to know what is to be known about what transpired during that tragic night. Nobody can feel on the Report, without the evidence, that there are not at least as many questions raised by the Report as are answered by it.

I am grateful to both the hon. Member for Newcastle-under-Lyme (Mr. Swingler) and the hon. Member for Nelson and Colne (Mr. S. Silverman) for the moderation and unquestionable sincerity with which they have put their case, and I am grateful, particularly, to the hon. Member for Newcastle-under-Lyme for giving notice to my right hon. Friend of some of the points which he intended to raise and which I shall briefly deal with during my remarks, although I must apologise to the House in the present circumstances for the inevitability that we shall somewhat overrun the provisionally allotted time.

The hon. Member said that he hoped that there would be an opportunity to debate the Report on a later occasion. This, of course, is not a matter for me but a matter for negotiation through the usual channels, and that is my reason for not dealing, in detail, with any points of substance on the Report raised by the hon. Member for Nelson and Colne. Perhaps I might briefly comment on two points on which he touched. The first was the reliance of Mr. Skelhorn, as he put it, on the police evidence alone in paragraph 33. If the hon. Member reads later paragraphs which appear under the same cross-heading, particularly the latter part of paragraph 43, he will see that reliance is not placed solely on the police but that the medical evidence is corroborative of it.

The hon. Member understands that the stress which I was laying on it was that for just that reason the evidence ought to be made available both about paragraph 43 and about paragraph 33.

I understand the hon. Member's point. I thought that he did not completely cover the ground in touching on paragraph 33.

In respect of the diary, it is fair to remind the House of what Mr. Skelhorn said in paragraph 99:

"It is probable, however, that, even if the diary had been examined earlier, no action would have been taken on the information it contained about Mrs. Woolf in view of Mr. Woolf's request that nobody should be informed."

I am not proposing that we should debate this Report in detail now, but merely mentioning that there are other points which need to be put before the House in considering the points which the hon. Member for Nelson and Colne raised.

The facts about this very unhappy case are as they were put, temperately, by the hon. Member for Newcastle-under-Lyme. We are all familiar with the general sequence of events which culminated in Mr. Woolf's tragic death and I do not need to repeat them, but I think that it would be useful, in looking at the recital of facts given by the hon. Member which led up to the inquiry, if I examined and explained the considerations which my right hon. Friend had to take into account in deciding the form of the inquiry. The circumstances of Mr. Woolf's death had already been examined three times, in greater or lesser degree of detail, before Mr. Skelhorr was appointed.

They had been examined by the coroner at the inquest on 28th November and 5th December, 1962, when a verdict of accidental death was returned. They had been examined by Detective Superintendent Axon, on the instructions of the Commissioner of Police, and a very full report was submitted by him to my right hon. Friend in August, 1963. Thirdly, they were explored before the Lord Chief Justice on 12th and 13th November, when he refused an application to the Divisional Court for a fresh inquest. In giving judgment on that occasion, the Lord Chief Justice said:

"There is not a shred of evidence that there was any incident in the police station which would account for any additional injury."

Those are facts, but my right hon. Friend was, naturally, anxious that no possible point of doubt about the case should remain unresolved. After meeting an all-party deputation, to which the hon. Member for Newcastle-under-Lyme referred, my right hon. Friend agreed to set up an independent administrative inquiry. He was anxious not only to allay public anxiety about the case, but also to give the Metropolitan Police the opportunity to refute the allegations of brutality which had been made against them in certain quarters following the widespread Press and television publicity which had been given to the case.

I come now to the factors which influenced my right hon. Friend's decision that the inquiry should not be in public. As my right hon. Friend told the House in his statement on 19th December last year, he had no power to compel the attendance of witnesses, and the terms of reference given to Mr. Skelhorn were necessarily limited to the actions of the Metropolitan Police in the case because these were the only matters which had been subject to public criticism. But the success of the inquiry was bound to depend on the evidence not only of the police officers in the case, whose attendance was assured, as the hon. Gentleman pointed out, but also of such witnesses as the medical staff of the two hospitals who had dealt with Mr. Woolf and who would have been within their rights in declining to attend the inquiry.

My right hon. Friend therefore consulted his right hon. Friend the Minister of Health and came to the conclusion that the desired end could best be achieved and a full and frank examination of all the evidence be obtained by ordering the inquiry to be held in private. In fact, all the essential medical witnesses who were available and all the private persons involved in the case did come forward to give evidence, and we join the hon. Gentleman in his tribute to their public spirit. But, in the nature of things—I am sure that both hon. Gentlemen will acknowledge this—we can never know whether those witnesses would have been willing to attend if the inquiry had been held in public. It is certain that they would have been entitled to refuse to attend.

My right hon. Friend is, therefore, satisfied that the decision to hold the inquiry in private was, in these circumstances, the right one and to seek their consent to publish their evidence now would be tantamount to inviting them to agree that he should go back on his word.

The hon. Member for Newcastle-under-Lyme posed the question whether the evidence given before Mr. Skelhorn was confidential in, I take it, the sense that there was anything in the evidence itself such that it would be wrong to disclose it. The answer to that can only be that the witnesses who attended the inquiry would be entitled to insist that the answer to the question is affirmative. Once they were invited to give their evidence in private, they were entitled to accept that their testimony would not be published. This applies to all of them. If the evidence were published, this would, surety, make nonsense of the decision to hold the inquiry in private, and, as I say, it would be a betrayal of the implicit understanding on which the evidence was freely offered.

I am not altogether clear from the criticisms which have been made in the debate whether the suggestion is that Mr. Skelhorn ignored some of the evidence. I should certainly assert the contrary. I am not suggesting that the hon. Member for Nelson and Colne had this in mind, but such an interpretation could, perhaps, be read into some of the observations made. Anyone who reads with an open mind this detailed Report, which runs to 34 closely printed pages, will be bound to feel that it has fairly set out all the facts as they emerge.

I should like to make clear what I am saying and what I am not saying. I am saying quite definitely that a considerable part of the time of the inquiry and a large number of the pages of the transcript were devoted to some evidence given by Bell and Keene and evidence on the same matters by other policemen in contradiction of it, to which no reference whatever appears in the Report. I draw no inference from that, but I think that the fact is clear and I would not like it to be in any way overlaid.

I take the hon. Gentleman's point, and the last thing I want to do is to misrepresent him; but, of course, this does not bear on the question whether or not the evidence should be published, since my reason for opposing the suggestion of publication lies in the undertaking given by the Home Secretary before the inquiry began.

The suggestion being made is that the undertaking applies only to witnesses who were not compellable. When he announced the inquiry, the Home Secretary said that he would take personal responsibility for seeing that the police officers came. Therefore, no question as to the confidential nature of their evidence can possibly arise.

I am sorry, but I cannot accept that. The undertaking that the inquiry would be in private was general and comprehensive. It was not limited to some witnesses to the exclusion of others.

Obviously, the Home Secretary has responsibility for the Metropolitan Police and he has power over them. As I understand, he made it a private inquiry to ensure that the medical and lay witnesses would attend. He could have obliged the police witnesses to give evidence in any case, could he not?

It is true that he could have obliged the police witnesses to give evidence. It is true, also, that, from the beginning, he gave a general unqualified undertaking that the inquiry would be in private. I must ask the House to allow me to come to a conclusion because we have already over-run our time. That which I have just asserted is a fact which, I think, cannot be put in dispute. The hon. Member for Nelson and Colne, in the proceedings on the Police Bill, himself paid a tribute to the thoroughness of the inquiry, and I think that he has, in spirit, repeated it today.

I repeat it now.

I am very grateful. As we know, Mr. Skelhorn acquitted the police completely of any suggestion that they used violence towards Mr. Woolf or deliberately maltreated him. That is in general accord with the conclusion reached in the course of the other investigations. In view of the tone of some of the comments made in public during the last year or so, I think this should be emphasised again.

As regards the other matters dealt with in the Report, which were alluded to again by the hon. Member for Nelson and Colne today, the reasons for the failure in the missing persons procedure, already admitted by the Commissioner, are not in dispute. Steps are being taken, as the hon. Gentleman knows, to rectify he defects. The detailed criticisms of certain other aspects of police procedure have either been accepted by the Commissioner or are under further examination.

I wish to say something about the suggestion that some of those named in the Report may feel that they have been explicitly or implicitly censured on unpublished evidence. I must emphasise here, as regards the two police officers, that it has not been felt that there was any warrant for taking disciplinary action against either of them, or against any of the others. For the rest, I have not heard it suggested that the Report was unfair to anyone mentioned. What the Commissioner did in the case of the two police officers mentioned was to see that they were interviewed—one of them was interviewed actually by himself—and given helpful advice on their future action in similar circumstances. It did not seem justifiable to initiate any disciplinary action against them.

Whatever view was taken by particular individuals, however, I do not think that we should be justified in departing from the understanding on which the inquiry was conducted from the first, namely, that, while the Report was to be full and frank—my right hon. Friend said from the beginning that, whatever it contained, he would publish it—the inquiry itself and, therefore, the record of its proceedings was to be private.

I appreciate that there was a widespread call at the time for a full inquiry into the case. There have now been three separate investigations. We are sometimes told that the police feel that they are unfairly harried by those who are determined to believe the worst of them. If it is suggested that in this case further steps are required to satisfy the public, I can only say that this is not my impression.

I do not believe that there is any strong public concern that the facts have not been brought out or that anything further is needed to establish the facts. I have no doubt that hon. Members would not wish to quesion the impartiality and care with which Mr. Skelhorn assessed the evidence he heard. I hope that the three suspicions to which the hon. Member for Newcastle-under-Lyme referred may be regarded as having been removed by the very fair and thorough examination of all the evidence by Mr. Skelhorn.

My right hon. Friend is convinced—and I hope that the House will take this assurance in a co-operative spirit—that no useful purpose would be served in publishing the proceedings of this inquiry and that it would, in terms of the undertaking he gave in the beginning, be quite wrong to do so.

I turn the attention of the House to a somewhat different subject. For the last few months the concept of an international health research centre has captured the imagination of large numbers of influential people in Britain, not least in Scotland. Our gratitude must go to the scientists who have laboured diligently and long on this idea within the United Nations Organisation.

The United Nations never hits the headlines until it seeks actively to engage in a holding of the peace operation, often by military intervention; for example, as in Cyprus, the Congo or on the Egyptian-Israeli border. And then the Organisation comes in for such jeering abuse and carping criticism as it receives praise. Meanwhile, the constructive and positive striving for peace continues unabated and, I fear, very much unpublished.

This House is as much at fault for this as any other institution. In my recollection over many years in this House, there has been only one debate on the specialised agencies of the United Nations. Today's short debate gives us an opportunity to express our thanks to the World Health Organisation for its continuing struggle against ill-health on an international scale.

While making my investigations into this problem I came across an example which should be put on the record; the worldwide attack which has been made on malaria in recent years—in my view the only kind of worldwide war which has been worth while.

According to the Director-General of the W.H.O., Dr. M. G. Candau, this has been the largest mass campaign against disease undertaken in history. As a result, the population which could now be regarded as safe from this killer disease had increased 14 times, from 49½ million to 700 million people, and 2 million lives a year were being saved. It is in that context that I want to discuss this idea of a W.H.O. research centre.

Unfortunately, the reports of the debates in the W.H.O. which took place in January and March of this year have not yet been published. They were based on proposals contained in a report made by a number of scientific advisers from various research institutes in many parts of the world. Those proposals were discussed by the W.H.O. Executive Board at its 33rd session last January. Among the scientists involved were such eminent British scientists as Dr. J. Kendrew from the Medical Research Laboratory of Molecular Biology at Cambridge University, Lord Adrian of Cambridge, Professor J. Rotblat of the Physics Department of St. Bartholomew's Hospital in London, Dr. Carter from the Edinburgh Agricultural Research Council, Professor Alexander Haddow, Director of the Chester Beatty Research Institute, and Professor Waddington, from the Institute of Animal Genetics in Edinburgh. I hope that the eminence of those gentleman has been noted.

After the January debate a resolution was adopted requesting the Director-General

"…to invite comments from Member States and Associate Members and to continue the study of this subject for future consideration".

I am reasonably certain that that will be the case of Her Majesty's Government; that this is under active discussion and that it will be under discussion for many months to come. But before considering the attitude of Her Majesty's Government, I want to comment on the W.H.O. Report of Scientific Advisers on the Special Development of International Health and Biochemic Research, dated December, 1963. I have managed to obtain a copy of that Report through the good offices of my hon. Friend the Member for Dunfermline Burghs (Dr. A. Thompson), who has taken an active interest in these matters.

The Report was devoted to a study of certain health problems of great international importance but which are unlikely to be explored adequately on a national scale. To give a few examples quoted in the Report, there are the potential dangers of chemical contamination of the atmosphere, our water supplies and foodstuffs inhaled or ingested by millions of people. There are then given examples of the possible ill-effects of new therapeutic and prophylactic substances and biological products given to or inoculated into millions of people each year.

One need only quote the examples of the recent thalidomide tragedy and the problems of industrial waste and pesticides to realise the extent of the new problems which are being created by scientific advances. One example is cancer, which the Report quoted as not being tackled inadequately. Cardiovascular diseases are quoted as another example. Also quoted are the chronic degenerative diseases of old age and so on, mental health problems and the special problems relating to developing countries, particularly those of malnutrition, parasitic and other infectious tropical diseases.

These are quoted as examples of the kind of problems which can be tackled only on an international basis. We are living in a world of explosive scientific and social change which demands ever higher standards of living. This runs parallel with increasing health hazards as science marches on. The fantastic increase in scientific and medical information, even in the last decade, has become so great that even the individual specialist in his own speciality cannot cope with all the information that is being pushed out to him. In these circumstances, the danger of wasteful duplication of effort becomes obvious, and even if the effort has been made and the results collated there is inevitably considerable delay in worldwide dissemination of that information and of the results of research.

Fortunately, as the volume of this scientific information increases simultaneously there is and there has been a phenomenally rapid development in computing techniques. The W.H.O. is concerned to marry these two developments—the increasing volume of scientific and medical knowledge and the increasing possibility of computing and collating it and getting it out as quickly as possible to all parts of the world. The problems which the study in the Report poses were listed under three or four main headings. First, there is the study of health and disease patterns of population groups, known as epidemiology, which basically is the incidence of disease; secondly, environmental and other factors affecting genetic developmental and metabolic mechanisms; thirdly, the collecting, processing and dissemination of information on global health problems and bio-medical research; fourthly, the special problems of developing countries.

The study suggested that these four categories of problems can be tackled only on an international basis, for certain reasons which I will try to put as briefly as I can. In the first place, tackling them on an international basis would represent the most enonomical use of finance and personnel. Secondly, the problems involve the close co-operation of a variety of scientific disciplines. Thirdly, the assembly of such top-level scientists in various fields, with all the stimulus and cross-fertilisation of ideas which would inevitably result, could be achieved only by such an international agency. Fourthly, the expensive apparatus and large machinery and animal facilities required would be beyond the means of most, if not all, nation States. The collection of such eminent scientists in such large numbers in one establishment would provide unrivalled research and training facilities for a wide variety of health and bio-medical research workers all over the world.

Lastly, as in any other field, world health problems and needs will inevitably change. There clearly must be an international centre of some kind to collect and disseminate information on these problems as they change, and such a centre could possibly anticipate the changes if sufficient data were being fed into it. The World Health Organisation envisages an institution grouped round three centers—a centre for epidemiology, a centre for health communications and a centre for what is called the study of environmentally induced mutations and toxicities, that is, the dangers of chemical and toxic agents in food and water and the dangers from new medicines and drugs.

I have studied these papers and have found them extremely impressive. It is a salutary discipline and a humbling experience from the point of view of a back bencher who struggles with a mass of paper from week to week. I am in no position whatsoever to challenge the scientific assessment of the problems posed, or the practicability or desirability of the solutions propounded. My immediate instinct is to be immensely excited by the idea of having a vast research centre with the scientists of many nations co-operating in the common world struggle against ill-health. This suggestion of an international centre is one of the most exciting that we have had for many decades.

I turn now to the Government's response. I regret to have to say it, but after looking carefully through all the Questions and Answers posed in the House over the last few months, the impression which the Government have created is, if not of active hostility, then certainly one of very divided counsel and a hesitant if not outright indifference. This may be an unfair impression and I hope that I shall be corrected if I am wrong.

On 28th March The Lancet stated:

"At the 17th World Health Assembly, Sir George Godber, speaking on behalf of Her Majesty's Government, said that he could not support the idea of a W.H.O. centre for fundamental research in medical and allied biological fields. This was not because of costs but because the scientific concept seemed wrong. Such research activities should be related to national health services."

On whose advice was this opinion given? According to the Prime Minister, in answer to a Question on 7th April, it was based on advice given to the Government by the Advisory Council on Scientific Policy. He suggested that the Council had agreed on two points—a centre for epidemiology, and a centre for communications and processing information, but that there was disagreement on the third point, the establishment of what he called a large scientific laboratory for biological research. The Prime Minister went on to say:

"In this view we have been supported by a great majority of the countries which have considered this matter."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 7th April, 1964; Vol. 692 c. 799.]

I want to know on what evidence he based that statement and which countries have disagreed with this proposition. I believe I am right in saying that in the debates at the United Nations, certain scientists or individuals disagreed, but I am not sure that the Prime Minister would be correct in saying that countries have expressed their outright opposition to the proposition at this point. Certainly, these statements by the Prime Minister represented a large douche of cold water for the whole idea.

On 19th March, the Leader of the House was asked questions and he said categorically:

"We are in favour of the idea of a World Health Centre."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 19th March, 1964; Vol. 691, c. 1589.]

So we had the Prime Minister saying or implying one thing and the Leader of the House implying, indeed, stating, quite the opposite.

Then we had the Secretary of State for Education and Science, again in answer to a Question, saying on 9th April:

"The representations received by the Government do not suggest that there is widespread and general support among the scientific community for an establishment of this nature in its present form."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 9th April, 1964; Vol. 692, c. 1199.]

That again suggested that the Government were lukewarm in their approach to the problem. I regret very much that that has been the response of the Government to the proposition.

We as ordinary Members of Parliament are left completely in the dark as to the intentions of the Government. I should like the Under-Secretary of State for Scotland to say whether we are to have a full statement by the Government in a White Paper or by other means on the advice received from the Advisory Council. What are the reasons for not supporting the plans for large scientific laboratories for biological research, the point on which the alleged differences occur? What is the extent of division of opinion among the scientific community on this issue, and to what extent would it be possible to establish a World Health Organisation research centre without the third contentious element?

Do the Government intend to formulate any alternative proposals? If they do not agree with those now put forward, do they intend to formulate their own? If, as the Government may claim, the idea is still nebulous, how can they explain that several countries—I understand Czechoslovakia, Austria, France and Italy—have already staked a claim for the centre or are about to stake a claim for the siting of a centre in their countries? Are there any other countries which have staked a similar claim?

Further, to what extent are we in active consultation with members of the Commonwealth on this specific issue? I appeal to the Government, through the Under-Secretary of State, to put this item high on the agenda of the Commonwealth Prime Ministers' meeting in July, because many of the problems with which the centre would be concerned are very much the health problems in many of our Commonwealth countries—for example, parasitic diseases, malnutrition, tropical diseases and the like.

The Under-Secretary of State might legitimately be saying to himself at this point, "What has all this to do with me and with Scotland?" I have deliberately left this as a relatively minor part of my speech lest I be charged with excessive parochialism, but I want now to try to bring the hon. Gentleman into the picture. In the detailed facts and figures which the study of the scientists provide, it is envisaged that by the fifth year the total number of scientific and technical staff would be 1,273, supported by 304 locally recruited secretaries and clerks. The estimate of total cost must be very tentative, but the estimate provided by the W.H.O. is in the region of £100 million over the first 10 years, including capital investment for buildings, equipment and staff.

That estimate visualises, for instance, the housing of half a million mice and other mammals as part of the research organisation and the provision of six meeting rooms and a students' residence hall to accommodate 100 fellows. It is, clearly, an enormous undertaking and would be one of the greatest concentrations of top-quality scientific manpower in the world. Speaking as a representative from a Scottish constituency, I take the view, which is widely shared in Scotland, that to win this prize for Scotland would be the greatest victory in 100 years. There is no good reason why we should not have it.

In the estimate of cost that I have given, it is assumed by the World Health Organisation that the land required will be free of charge. Fife County Council is the first local council in Britain that has come along and said, "We will provide the site free." It wants to meet either the Secretary of State for Scotland or the Minister of Health to discuss this proposition and I hope that either the Secretary of State or the Minister of Health, or both, will agree to meet the Council later this month. It would also fit in admirably with the ideas put forward by the Scottish Council to the Secretary of State in the paper "The Next Stage in Regional Plans". The argument which the Scottish Council then put up was summarised in these words:

"The first necessity is thus the adoption of policies for deliberately spreading the research and development work commissioned by Government and nationalised industries more evenly over the principal industrial areas of the country".

The Government, and the Secretary of State in particular, have it in their power to strike a mighty blow for Britain, for Scotland, for the Commonwealth and for international co-operation of the most invaluable kind.

I cannot see any reason why, in the first instance, Britain should not put in a claim for this centre, and why having put in a claim and, I hope, succeeding, Scotland should not then put in a claim for it to be sited north of the Border. After all, we are one of the most regular subscribers to the United Nations. I do not think that we are laggard in that respect. We have not yet a single specialised agency in this country, or any United Nations institution at all. I feel this is a glorious opportunity to marry enlightened self-interest to the ideals of international brotherhood and co-operation, and I hope that the Government will not wantonly cast it aside.

I am glad to have this opportunity to say a few brief words in support of my hon. Friend the Member for Fife, West (Mr. Hamilton), who has made an extremely comprehensive, interesting and effective speech about the World Health Organisation Research Centre. I know that the time is limited, but I should like to underline a few of the points made by my hon. Friend.

In the first place, I also had the chance of looking briefly at the Report of the Study Group of scientists under the Director-General to the W.H.O. Assembly in March. It is an extremely impressive document. The scientists concerned in its preparation are all world-renowned authorities and include a number of British scientists. It would be presumptuous of me to try to judge in any way the medical and scientific basis of the Report. It does, however, not seem to be just an attempt at any kind of empire building on the part of the World Health Organisation, but to deal realistically and sensibly with a number of major health problems and to produce practical proposals for the establishment of centres for their solution. I hope that the Government will treat the proposal with the seriousness which it deserves, because it would seem that originally the Government were almost inclined to dismiss the whole proposal out of hand. That may or may not have been the intention of the British delegate when he went to the world Health Organisation Assembly in March this year. We are glad to see that, partly because of the pressure from this country itself, the Government are now adopting a much more accommodating attitude towards the whole proposal, but at most the Government's attitude at the moment is simply one of neutrality, and one would like to see the Government being a little more enthusiastic about it and showing a little more initiative about this very imaginative proposal.

On that point I would ask the hon. Gentleman, when he replies to the debate, on the question of the scientific advice which the Government have been receiving, to try to distinguish between the three separate proposals which are included in the overall conception of the research centre, because I think it is common ground, accepted even by the Government, that for two of the proposals there is a strong case for establishing this kind of research centre. It is only on the question of the bio-medical research centre part of the proposal that there are differences of opinion, which, of course, are valid differences of opinion, as to the desirability of the establishment of such a centre. I hope very much that the Government are not going to take a rather antagonistic attitude towards the whole proposal simply because there are differences of opinion on one particular part of it.

I hope, too, like my hon. Friend, that we are going to have some kind of White Paper about the Government's attitude. The Minister of State for Education and Science, answering a Question in the House on 9th April, promised to look at the question of publishing the advice which the Government have received on the whole idea, and the Minister of Health, on 16th April, mentioned that within the next year the Government's comments on the proposal would, of course, be sent to the World Health Organisation. It seems to me that the two things could be married and that we could have the Government's comments—and, indeed, a bit of background information—published in a White Paper.

As to the site, obviously one would not want to see this centre established simply because of the possibility of its coming to the United Kingdom if scientifically or medically speaking it were not a realistic proposal, but, on the other hand, if it is a realistic proposal and it is eventually decided to have it established there is no reason at all, as my hon. Friend has said, why Britain should not stake a claim to have it sited in the United Kingdom.

In particular, as a Scottish Member, I am interested in the possibility, and I hope the Under-Secretary of State is also interested in the possibility, of having it established in Scotland, where many of the kinds of problems which the centre would be dealing with are already being dealt with in the University of Edinburgh and the University of Glasgow.

It does seem to me that this would be a tremendous boost to the economy of Scotland, and, of course, it would do a good deal to stop this continual brain drain, which affects the United Kingdom but affects Scotland even more seriously than the rest of the United Kingdom. The whole thing does seem to me to be an imaginative project which one hopes the Government will deal with imaginatively in turn.

The sums of money involved, an annual expenditure of between £10 million and £12 million, are in fact minute in comparison with the vast sums of money which are spent on military research not only in this country but in other parts of the world, and spread among the 100 members of the United Nations Organisation the expenditure of £12 million a year on basic research of this sort, which would have potentialities for making a very effective attack on world problems of health, seems to me to be essentially a very modest proposal. One hopes that the Government will greet it with a certain amount of enthusiasm rather than the hostility or neutrality they have so far.

I am very pleased, and I am sure the House is pleased, that my hon. Friend the Member for Fife, West (Mr. W. Hamilton) has raised this matter. It gives the Government the opportunity of clearing the air in a matter which has been extremely obscure so far. I have already expressed my views on the merits of the World Health Organisation's proposal and I certainly will not reiterate them now, particularly in view of the forceful and persuasive speech of my hon. Friend and the endorsement of his remarks by my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow, Craigton (Mr. Millan).

What I want to get clear is this. I think that we are entitled to know what the Government's position was last March at the World Health Assembly meeting. The first occasion on which the ordinary man in the street knew anything about this proposal was when the Daily Telegraph reported the speech of Sir George Godber, the delegate to the World Health Assembly, in March. Sir George is, of course, also the Chief Medical Officer of the Ministry of Health. As my hon. Friend mentioned, the substance of that report was confirmed in a report in the Lancet at about the same time, and in the absence of any official record that is all that we have to go on. There is no doubt, according to those reports, that the British delegate poured cold water on the whole scheme. It was that which prompted me to put down a Question to the Minister of Health immediately. As I understand it, Sir George clearly suggested that the kind of research which it was proposed to carry out in this centre was better handled on a national rather than an international basis.

When I asked the Minister of Health to instruct the delegate to withdraw his opposition to this scheme, the Minister did not deny that opposition had been expressed. I had a kind of temporising answer saying that the matter was still under review. The next thing was that the Under-Secretary of State for Scotland was asked by some of my hon. Friends representing Scottish constituencies whether he would use his best endeavours to get this centre situated in Scotland. It was clear from the hon. Gentleman's replies that he was in favour of the project and, as far as he knew, the United Kingdom was in favour of the project. All that he was concerned about was getting it established in Scotland. I should like to know whether the Under-Secretary of State discussed this matter with the Minister of Health before answering at the Dispatch Box on that occasion.

That prompted us to put down some Questions. I asked a Question which was answered by the Leader of the House in the absence of the Prime Minister. The right hon. and learned Gentleman gave us a third view. He suggested that we had opposed only this one of the three aspects of the World Health Research Centre and that apart from this aspect—the biological research side—we were in support of the proposal. Although he did not say it absolutely clearly, he suggested that we had always been in support of it.

We had further Answers from the Prime Minister whom, I thought, supported the Leader of the House in a broader way than my hon. Friend thought he did, but it was not exactly along the same lines; nor was the Answer of the Secretary of State for Education and Science. I therefore repeat that we should like to know the Government's attitude to this project, and we also want to know why and to what extent we opposed the project at the World Health Assembly in March.

I come briefly to the question of location. It is not quite true, as my hon. Friend said, that we have no specialised agency of the United Nations in the United Kingdom. I understand that we have one very small organisation connected with maritime matters. It is not a specialised agency which nobody has ever heard of, but I believe that it is located in the United Kingdom. We have no specialised agency of any importance here. Therefore, if this World Health Research Centre comes into being, there is an excellent case for it being located in the United Kingdom. I think that it would be admirable from our point of view as well as from the United Nations point of view if it were located here. I speak as an English and London Member, but we do not want to hog every- thing for the Metropolis. A very good case can be made out for this centre being sited at Edinburgh, Fife, or even, perhaps, in Glasgow, but certainly in Scotland.

If we are, or appear to be, hostile or even lukewarm to this proposal, we shall certainly not get the centre sited in this country, even if it comes into being against our opposition. I hope that the Under-Secretary of State will take the opportunity to clear the air and to let us know precisely where we stand in this matter.

There are several reasons for my being glad to be able to take part in what has been an interesting debate and I am sure that the hon. Member for Fife, West (Mr. W. Hamilton) and the hon. Member for Glasgow, Craigton (Mr. Millan) will be as pleased as I am that we have had the interest of the hon. Member for St. Pancras, North (Mr. K. Robinson) in our affairs.

The first reason is that I think that it was I who had the privilege of answering, on behalf of my right hon. Friend the Secretaty of State for Scotland, the first of the series of Questions asked about this matter.

The second. The first was mine to the Minister of Health, when he did not deny that there had been opposition.

Then I have my dates wrong.

All the same, I think that hon. Members were left in no doubt from my reply on that occasion of my hon. Friend's interest in this matter if it were decided to establish a research centre and if it were to be sited in this country.

The second reason for my interest is that the World Health Organisation is a sister organisation of the Food and Agriculture Organisation, and my interest in food and agriculture is not exactly unknown. Thirdly, I think that some misunderstandings have arisen about the World Health Research Centre, and I hope that I may be able to clear some of them up.

I should like at this stage to agree with the tributes paid by the hon. Member for Fife, West to those agencies of the United Nations like the two which I have mentioned on which much too little of the searchlights of public attention is played. It may be as well if I fill in a little of the background of the subject. The health organisation of the League of Nations was situated in Geneva and the agricultural one was in Rome. Both the successors to those bodies have their headquarters in the same cities, and it has now been suggested that an offspring of the World Health Organisation should be created, in the shape of a World Health Research Centre, and it is this idea with which we are dealing this afternoon.

It may be helpful if, at the outset, I distinguish between two aspects of the matter, or two stages in the development of the proposal. First, there is the question whether a World Health Research Centre should be established at all and, if so, what form it should take. There is, secondly, the question which arises only when a decision on the first has been taken—where the centre should should be established.

As hon. Members know, the objective of a proposed World Health Research Centre is to deal with major health problems which are not being adequately explored through national efforts. To meet these needs, an advisory council of the World Health Organisation suggested that the centre might comprise, first, a centre for biological research; secondly, a centre for health communications, that is, the assembling and processing of information; and, thirdly, a centre for epidemiology, which means the study of the incidence of disease, how it starts and how it grows.

The Executive Board of the World Health Organisation, of which this country is not a member at present, considered the proposal for a centre for the first time at its meeting last January. There has been some criticism of the attitude taken at a subsequent meeting of the World Health Organisation Assembly on 5th March by the United Kingdom delegation. It is true that our representative spoke against the proposal which had come from the Executive Board. However, that opposition was not in any way intended to reject the whole proposal out of hand.

We are in sympathy with the suggestion that there should be an international

centre for health communications, and for research into epidemiology, and any proposal for a centre in which research into this particular subject could be carried out would have our support. We are not, however, entirely convinced that there is a need for an international centre for biological research.

I am quite aware that the proposal that came before the World Health Organisation had been prepared after an extensive canvass of expert opinion. I know, too, that there is some—I do not know how much—support for the proposal within this country as well, but the Government must be guided by the advice they receive from the most authoritative sources available to them and, in particular, from the Advisory Council of Scientific Policy, which includes some of the most eminent scientists in the country, headed by Lord Todd.

The advice that the Government have received from the Advisory Council and from other sources is to the effect that the establishment of an international centre for biological research on the lines proposed would not only be unjustified at this time, but could affect adversely the work of the scientists who might be concerned.

We are assured that to withdraw scientists from the national centres in which they now work would be a retrograde step, since it would deprive them of their existing contacts with established laboratories and other workers in associated fields. I absolutely agree that there can be two opinions on whether the Advisory Council is right, but it was with these considerations in mind that our delegate to the Assembly of the World Health Organisation spoke against the proposals.

The Assembly met again later in March, and the proposal about the research centre was discussed once more, largely in order to give information. I should like to emphasise that the proposal was presented only for the information of the Assembly, and there was no suggestion that a definite decision was likely to be taken at that stage.

When the proposal was discussed, it became abundantly clear that we were not alone in our opposition to the proposal in the form in which it was presented. I understand that, in fact, only two of the member-nations of the World Health Organisation—Czechoslovakia and Peru—give their unreserved support. As a result of the deliberations of the Assembly on this point, the Director-General of the Organisation was asked to continue his inquiries. This means, in effect, that a decision on the project is deferred until at least the next meeting of the Assembly, which is not due to take place until next year.

It should not be thought that in view of this postponement we shall not take any action with regard to the proposal. I can assure hon. Members that we shall give all the help we can to the Director-General to assist him in the further inquiries he now has to make, but I am sure that they will understand that it will be for the Director-General himself to decide what line his inquiries shall take, although our willingness to help has been made known to him so that he may take full advantage of it.

This is the stage that has been reached in the Organisation's consideration of the proposal, and it will clearly be some time before it is in a position to decide whether the project should go ahead and, if so, in what form and on what scale. As I have said, and I will say it again, the Government are very ready to help the Director-General when he makes his further examination of possibilities.

Some hon. Members, and particularly the hon. Member for Fife, West, have urged that this is not good enough, and that we should be pressing this country's claims, or the claims of some particular area in it, to provide a site for the centre when it is established.

I suggest to the House that it is premature at this stage to talk of particular sites for the centre. Certainly, we see the advantages of having an international research centre in this country—advantages both to the centre and to this country. I give an absolute undertaking that we shall certainly see that, at the appropriate stage, the claims of this country, and of particular sites, are fully considered. But I must remind the hon. Member that where a research centre will be situated, if one is set up, will be decided quite democratically by the votes of the 118 members of the W.H.O., of whom we are one. I welcome the interest that has been shown in many parts of the country in providing a site for the centre; but I do not think that it would be right to canvass the advantages of any particular site in this country for a project which is still very much at the formative stage.

Today's debate has shown the extent of the interest in the research centre. Much of that interest—and I am delighted to see it—has come from Scottish Members who feel, with considerable justification, that Scotland's background in scientific and medical education suggests that a suitable site for the centre should be found somewhere in Scotland. The hon. Member for Fife, West has already mentioned the willingness of Fife County Council to provide a site for the centre. Other authorities, in Scotland and furth of it, have also shown interest in providing a site for the centre.

Some local authorities in Scotland have already been in touch with the World Health Organisation to let the Organisation know of their willingness to provide sites for the proposed centre. Replies have been sent to them indicating that their offers have been noted, but that in the view of the W.H.O., consideration of the siting of such a centre cannot be undertaken until such time as a decision on the centre itself is reached. This appears to be the only reasonable reply which can be given at this stage.

I can assure the House that the interest shown by these authorities is appreciated; but I am sure I shall not be expected, even if I were able, to comment on the suitability of these or any other sites. We are still a long way from knowing the size of the centre, what the detailed requirements will be, and what ancillary buildings and accommodation will be necessary.

Furthermore, I have no doubt that the World Health Organisation, if and when it comes to a decision on this matter, will have its own ideas about the type of site and facilities which will be required. It would, therefore, be very wrong of me to pretend to be able to comment on the suitability of any particular area. What I can say is that the interest shown by all these authorities will be kept in mind should a decision to set up the centre be made.

It has been suggested that steps should now be taken officially to inform W.H.O. that a suitable site in Scotland will be provided. I have already referred to our willingness to help the Director-General in any way that we possibly can, and I can assure the House that at the appropriate time Scotland's claims to provide a site for this centre will be considered very closely. Because of the further inquiries which the Director-General has still to make, however, it would appear to me to be premature to make any recommendations about sites at this stage.

The Government have been accused of dragging their feet on this matter. What I have said will, I hope—and it is perhaps difficult for me to speak with complete detachment—show that this is hardly a fair statement. We are very ready to help the Director-General in his further studies, and I can assure the House that should this proposal reach fruition, the claims of the United Kingdom to provide a location will be fully considered.

I think that the timing of the putting forward of such a claim is extremely important. It should be put forward not only forcefully, but at the right time. I am very much aware of the advantages to be gained should the centre be located here, and I need hardly say that, as a Scotsman, I am particularly aware of the special claims of Scotland. I know, too, what advantages the centre itself could gain from coming to this country and I can assure the House that no opportunity of pressing our claim will be missed.

The hon. Member for Fife, West asked me about the other bids that are being put in and whether, if bids are being put in, we ought not to do likewise. My information is that no formal approaches to the World Health Organisation have been made. The hon. Gentleman asked whether the matter will be discussed at the Commonwealth conference and whether it can be put on the agenda. I am certain that my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister will take note of this suggestion.

The hon. Member also suggested that he might bring a deputation to see either my right hon. Friend the Minister of Health or my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Scotland, or both. My right hon. Friends fully appreciate the interest which the hon. Member and others are showing in this matter, but they think that to receive a deputation at this stage would not serve any very useful purpose. When the proper time comes we shall not be remiss in pressing on the World Health Organisation the advantages which are to be gained from sitting a centre of this kind, should it be decided to establish one—and I emphasise that that is the first stage in this whole proceeding—on a suitable site in this country.

It is my intention to use my good fortune in the Ballot to raise the matter of the desirability of the provision of a teacher training college within the Borough of Croydon, which I have the honour to represent.

This matter has been raised in the House before. All three Croydon Members have been strongly in favour of the project, and as long ago as November, 1959, my hon. Friend the Member for Croydon, North-West (Mr. F. Harris) raised this matter on the Adjournment. Therefore, Mr. Deputy-Speaker, if I raise the subject again today I hope you will acquit me of any charge of tedious repetition, for I would point out that it is 4½ years since this matter was first aired, and in the meantime substantial changes have taken place in the situation, which prompts me to believe that the arguments on which the Parliamentary Secretary of those days rejected my hon. Friend's plea are no longer valid.

Why do I think this? One reason is that although four-and-a-half years ago the then Parliamentary Secretary came to the conclusion that the most solid reason for resisting Croydon's plea for a teaching training college was the fear of over-concentration of this kind of activity in the South-East, since those days we have had to raise our sights very considerably in our ideas about the scale of educational provision.

We have had quite recently the publication of the Robbins and the Newsom Report. Both Reports have been accepted by the Government and by all parties in this House. In the light of that we have to go in for some rather bigger thinking on this matter. It seems that the massive investment in education which we now face has to try to do two things at once.

First, it has to cope with a soaring population which has completely outstripped the forecasts which the experts made only a few years ago. This invalidates many of the plans and arrangements for the future in education made in the light of those forecasts. Secondly, while providing for teaching many more children we have also to raise our standards in a scientific and technical age when there will be increasingly less and less work for the completely unskilled worker. We need higher standards and we must provide them.

In this small overpopulated country with very few natural resources, it follows that we must live off our brains. That is why this additional provision for which I am pleading becomes so very important. We can differ about our educational priorities, but, whether we go for trying to reduce the size of classes or trying to complete all those things foreshadowed in the 1944 Act which we have not been able to complete, whatever our personal priorities may be, all of them come back to one essential thing. It is that whatever else we do we must make greatly increased provision for teacher training.

All these improvements which we look to and which are implict in our acceptance of Robbins and Newsom depend on increased teacher supply. I do not imagine my hon. Friend the Parliamentary Secretary will have any reason to disagree with me on that. Of course, he recognises it and has shown already that he recognises it by his announced policy to increase student-teacher places to 80,000 by 1970–71.

I suggest that even this welcome improvement has been overtaken by events. For instance, the Robbins Report urges that places be found in teacher training colleges for 111,000 students by 1973–74, rising to 131,000 in the middle and later years of that decade. The recent decision to raise the school-leaving age in the year 1970–71 will have its impact on plans already announced. I have seen an estimate that even with the provision so far announced we must expect a deficiency of 70,000 teachers in the year 1970.

I return to the compelling figures of population growth. Everything we have done in the past would have made very good sense if the population had remained roughly stable, but it has gone up, and my case is that it will go up even more than the forecasters suggest. My right hon. Friend must raise his sights if he is to provide the necessary recruitment in teachers to cope with this situation, let alone overtake it.

Perhaps I may for a moment go over the history of Croydon's plea for a teacher training college to be established there. As I have said, the proposal is not new. It originated in October, 1958, five-and a-half years ago, when the Croydon Borough Council, as it then was, put forward proposals for a training college in the borough. At the start, these seemed to get a favourable reception, because in April, 1960, the Ministry invited Croydon to make proposals for a temporary day training college. By June, 1962, Croydon proposed a temporary college in rented accommodation which could be continued later as a permanent college, for which sites were in mind. Negotiations followed.

I regret very much that my right hon. Friend turned down this proposal, in a letter which I should like to quote, because it has some relevance. It is a letter of 13th March, 1964. My right hon. Friend stated:

"Now that the initial planning of this further expansion programme is virtually complete it has become clear that it will not be practicable to include within it any of the proposals for the building of new colleges that have been submitted by the Croydon and other local education authorities."

That seemed depressing to a go-ahead authority like mine, but I am bound to say that my right hon. Friend qualified it a little later in his letter:

"The Minister is, however, reviewing the overall position in the Greater London area in the light of the plans of existing colleges and would like to explore the possibility of establishing a new day college catering primarily for mature students, provided that this would be achieved in suitable existing premises at a comparatively small capital investment".

He concluded:

"There seems to be a better prima facie case, having regard to the location of existing colleges and lines of communication for teaching practice, for setting up the college to the north of the River Thames".

That brings us back to the principal arguments used by the Parliamentary Secretary in the debate four-and-a-half years ago. The Ministry seem to accept all our arguments, but they do not seem to think that they can put the college south of the Thames. I submit that this is a wrong view, and I am reinforced in my opinion by what the Robbins Report said.

But before I go on to that, may I remind my hon. Friend the Parliamentary Secretary why we in Croydon think that our area is the right place in which to site a further teacher-training college. First of all, there are all the advantages of location. We have an unrivalled Position near London, a wonderful centre of transport, both into London and out towards the coast. Although it is true that we are in the densely populated south-eastern area, the fact remains that that is where the new teacher material is so largely located, and surely it makes sense to establish the college where we have the material to hand and not in parts of the country where it has to be imported from outside.

Croydon has recently become one of the Greater London boroughs. Its population has risen to nearly 330,000, and that gives us a tremendous source of recruitment for this purpose.

If the question of sites arises, we have two very suitable sites available now. Of course, we should like to make use of them as soon as possible—there are other candidates for them—but we should like to see a teacher training college established on one of them. Also, our proximity to London enables us to offer great opportunities both for teaching posts and for the acquisition of further qualifications.

Another vital matter for teachers under training is that, within the borough, we have quite unrivalled opportunities for teaching practice while students are training. We have all types of schools and a very high reputation as an authority. We should like the new college to be associated with our technical college and college of art.

This, I suggest, would square with what the Robbins Report itself suggested in paragraph 489:

"But more colleges of education may need to be established in the next few years in large centres of population"—

I stress those words, "in large centres of the population"—

"particularly if the aim is to attract, as day students, a number of the older entrants that the teaching profession will need in the approaching crisis.… When new foundations are contemplated we would recommend experiments with institutions that bridge the traditional gap between colleges for the education of teachers and institutions of further education which prepare their students for other professions."

We are in a unique position to cope with that in Croydon because we have our technical college, with all its resources, ready to hand.

If a very quick solution is required—it may well be that we need a quick solution, in view of the urgency of the problem—Croydon would gladly revive its proposal for a day training college, if necessary, in rented accommodation. This has been proposed before and rejected. If speed is of the essence, we should be quite prepared to put it forward again.

Another factor to be stressed is that we are already acknowledged as a first-rate education authority thoroughly capable, and having the necessary resources and experience, of administering a new institution like this. We have our new technical college now. At the time of the last Adjournment debate, 4½ years ago, it was not completed and it seemed then a very large and ambitious project. Today, when it is finished and functioning, we realise that, even now, it is not big enough. We have that college, the college of art, many new schools and a teacher and adult education centre. One is dealing here, therefore, with an authority thoroughly equipped to take on a big new responsibility of this kind.

It will not have escaped my hon. Friend's notice that Croydon has almost the highest percentage in the country of children remaining at school voluntarily after 15 years of age. This brings me again to the point that we have in Croydon a wonderful pool of 16-year-old girls all set for the teaching profession if only my hon. Friend would make his bid for them now. This is, of course, a very competitive time, and the best way of making a bid is to have the college set up locally. Otherwise, others will get in ahead and one will be short of recruits when the time comes.

I return to the point about population growth. A few days ago we had an interesting debate on the South-East, to which I made a contribution. The figure which dominated all our discussion and around which most of the debate revolved was the expected increase of 3½ million in the population of the southeastern area between 1961 and 1981. No less than 2½ million of that increase was expected to be due to the natural exuberance and fertility of the people living in the area. These are the people about whom I am speaking.

The argument that one must concentrate training colleges away from people and industries does not make sense. It may be the planner's solution, but it is not the real one. Colleges must be placed where there exists the material to use them, and that is what I am urging on my hon. Friend. I urge him to build on the sure foundations which exist in Croydon. Although he may not concede everything I have said this afternoon, he should at least say that in the light of the increased investment in education with which we are now confronted, the increasing population and the admirable facilities which exist in Croydon, he will reconsider this matter with an open mind. His predecessor, winding up the debate 4½ years ago, said:

"My hope is that it will be Croydon which will assure us that this door remains open ".—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 18th November, 1959; Vol. 613, c. 1312.]

The door has remained open for 4½ years and the wind of change has been blowing through it. Will my hon. Friend now step through it, take note of all the considerations I have laid before him and recognise that, in this necessity of increased teacher provision, in Croydon we have the ideal place and we are at the ideal time to site a new teacher-training college?

I congratulate the hon. Member for Croydon, South (Sir R. Thompson) for raising the question of a teacher training college in his constituency. Although I represent a part of a northern city, I support his arguments and can assure him that if there is any possibility of increasing teacher supply by means of a training college in the south of England, that will be to the benefit of the country as a whole, and that will be the main burden of my remarks.

Teacher supply is the greatest problem which will face us in the coming 10 years. The hon. Member for Croydon, South repeated the figures which the Minister gave in January, that with the present facilities for teacher-training we will be 35,000 teachers short by the end of the decade and that when the school-leaving age is raised we shall be 70,000 to 75,000 short. Thus as long as we can get more suitable teachers, wherever the training colleges are sited, that will be all to the good.

By the end of the decade we shall have trained 280,000 women teachers, yet there will be only 10,000 extra women teachers in our schools because of the earlier age at which people are marrying and other considerations which are well known. Whichever party is in power will have to do its utmost to increase teacher supply, particularly because of the loss of women from the profession.

I wish to make a few suggestions and although I do not know Croydon well, my remarks will in large measure follow those of the hon. Member. I will first refer to the question of a day training college for mature students. It looks as if this is a line where the hon. Member might achieve some success because in Leeds a number of years ago—

In Leeds a few years ago the Sir James Graham Training College was opened for mature students. This is a line of approach which needs investigation. I am sure, from what the hon. Member said, that this is something in which the new Greater London borough of Croydon would help the country as a whole. In this instance I understand that the Leeds City Corporation had to fight hard to get this college. I am convinced that there are a large number of men who may already have the G.C.E. in five or six subjects but who left school and missed academic training in the last 10 to 15 years, but whom we could get back into teacher-training even if they are in their thirties. We must concentrate on getting more teachers, for the reasons which I have just adduced.

There is one suggestion which is relevant only to the London area. As the Parliamentary Secretary knows, the various Institutes of Education have different constitutions and methods in different parts of the country, but in London the Institute of Education gets its money via the University Grants Committee. It has a teaching institute in Bloomsbury, but is also has some control over or connection with the various training colleges in its area. Would it not be possible, given the variety of teacher training institutions in the Greater London area, for the London University Institute of Education to have at least an annexe in Croydon in association with the borough council for training as few in the first year as 30 or 40 adult men and women, and preferably more men than women? There must be accommodation there. The Institute has its own teaching staff and it has connections with many teacher training colleges throughout the London area. I should have thought that it was not beyond the wit of the principals of the colleges and of the Institute to make at least a beginning in association with the Croydon Borough Council.

I was interested to read the other day of what I think is some sort of private venture, though I imagine with some overall blessing from the Ministry, that Trent Park Training College in Middlesex got in touch with the Southend College of Technology with the result that some of its students do their first-year training in the Southend College. I imagine that with some buccaneering on the part of Croydon, in association with the Ministry, this also could be done in the case of the Croydon Technical College.

There has been much discussion this week about the redeployment of teachers and we are awaiting the Plowden Report. I say in the Teacher this weekend that the Chief Education Officer of Leeds argues in favour of redeployment of teachers at the infant school level. All this is an interesting discussion as we eagerly await the Plowden Report, but, above all, we must have more teachers. This is the only solution for the terrible situation which will develop in the schools. I say "terrible" because the Ministry has underestimated, particularly in the South-East, the number of children who will be in school in the next decade. I wish more power to the elbow of the hon. Member for Croydon, South. The more schemes of the kind he suggests we can have, however small, the better for the future of education in the country as a whole.

I congratulate the hon. Member for Croydon, South (Sir R. Thompson) on his persistence and I hope that today he is pushing at an open door. I can speak with considerable objectivity since I regret very much the inability of the Government to check the drift to the South. At the same time, the problem of supplying an adequate number of teachers is so great that the Under-Secretary will have to bring some cogent arguments to bear to convince me that Croydon is not a suitable place for at least a day training college and almost certainly, I would say, for a full college.

When I looked at a map of the training colleges in the South-East and London area, I noticed a large gap between Streatham and the coast—Brighton, Eastbourne and Seaford. I should have thought that there probably should have been a training college, not only in Croydon, but also, as an experiment, in Crawley—and this is without a claim from Newton Aycliffe and Bishop Auckland. I hope very much that the Under-Secretary will be able to give consideration to that gap.

I know that the hon. Gentleman is worried about the number of practice places in the schools, but the excellent fast rail communications from Croydon and the excellent bus services would make it possible to go into almost every place within a 10-mile radius and drain the orange so that the pips squeak. I should be surprised if there was not still a considerable number of places which could be used for school practice to which Croydon has admirable access.

The 80,000 places that the Ministry is providing by 1970–71 at a cost of £7 million spread over the three years 1964–67 have to be set against the extra expansion recommended by the Robbins Committee of 111,000 students by 1973 and 131,000 towards the end of the 1970s.

I was very encouraged today to see that The Times Educational Supplement comments favourably upon the document produced a few days ago by the Labour Party concerning the teacher training programme. I quote a paragraph from the article, which quotes again a letter in The Times from my hon. Friend the Member for Flint, East (Mrs. White):

"In her gloss on this, in a letter to The Times, Mrs. Eirene White makes it plain that, while they hope to carry out Robbins, if its programme for the universities should get in the way of a new programme for enlarging the teacher training colleges it would be the one to suffer. In other words the Labour Party has decided to `get the foundations right' and put the schools first. The major task becomes reducing the size of classes by swelling the number of teachers. If necessary, increasing provision for the abler minority will be sacrificed to increasing provision for the majority of ordinary children."

As someone who has campaigned for 30 years or more for what the Robbins Committee has recommended, I should be one of the people whom The Times Educational Supplement describes as terrifyingly optimistic. I hope that both the Robbins recommendations for higher education and the extra training college programme will be achieved. I am critical of the Government in this context in not going as fast as they could. I hope that there will be a drop of consolation today when the Under-Secretary of State tells us that Croydon will get a good training college.

The sentence to which I have referred in The Times Educational Supplement states that

"If Labour, like most politicians, appear terrifyingly optimistic, at least they have got their priorities right. No one can say that they have forgotten Newsom and the average child."

I would quite like to be labelled "terrifyingly optimistic" in this field.

My hon. Friend the Member for Leeds, South (Mr. Merlyn Rees) was, I thought, at one with the hon. Member for Croydon, South in referring to the obvious excellence of Croydon for day training facilities—I do not say a day training college—particularly catering for mature students. My hon. Friend was absolutely right when referring to his own training college in the City of Leeds, which has been a pioneer in day training. I believe that I am correct in saying that when it started there were ten times as many applicants as there were places to fill and that a large number of those applicants were highly suitable for training.

I would have thought that Croydon also has a considerable number of advantages in maximising the number of mature students who would come forward. It has very varied industries and it has an excellent cultural life. I remember that in the library committee, only a few weeks ago, we were discussing the excellence of the library at Penge, which, with small resources, was doing a very wonderful job. It has a great reputation for languages. I would have thought that with day training facilities established with the enthusiasm of the Croydon authority, a great many mature people would come forward who otherwise would be missed.

I would suggest to the Under-Secretary that a start could be made with a similar experiment starting in October to the one referred to by the hon. Member for Leeds, South, in collaboration between the technical college and the embryo training college. I would have thought that in the Croydon technical college there could be refresher courses for mature people with the right academic qualifications who could come at once into teaching given a certain amount of encouragement and a small amount of teacher training. This means married women who already have academic qualifications and men and women from industry, and I think that there could also be a development there of the four-term training college for technical college lecturers which is going on in a rather small way and not making much impact in some of the technical training colleges.

In the Minister's last annual report only 25 students were in the year under discussion in the technical training college short courses of four terms. However, expansion is taking place and I would have thought that Croydon would have been an excellent place for starting with this as a growth point for further teacher training. I would have thought, as well, that the refresher courses for married women "returners" might well be located in this complex of technical college-training college such as I am suggesting for Croydon.

The L.C.C. has had considerable success in getting married women who are very "rusty" back to the profession by giving them refresher courses on full pay. Here is another growing point which could operate in Croydon and prepare the way for a full training college in perhaps two years' time. These are things that could be done this autumn with the minimum of preparation.

There is a need which I feel that Croydon could provide admirably and which I do not feel that the Ministry has applied its mind anything like enough to. There is a move now to make more provision for the training of teachers for educationally subnormal children but there seems no comparable move to carry this further and give a great deal more training in all, or nearly all, the training colleges in the handling of backward children.

I referred to this in a debate last Friday week without much success of getting anyone to notice it, but I would urge on the Parliamentary Secretary that Croydon would be an admirable place in which there should be a specialised department in its training college for teaching teachers to teach educationally subnormal children and backward children. There are educational subnormal day schools at Beddington, Mitcham and Thornton Heath. There are boarding schools at Balcombe and Red-hill and there is a day school at Crawley. I would have thought that all these schools were easily accessible to Croydon and schools in which the teaching places for students would be easy to arrange. There are other schools in the neighbourhood which are perhaps a little more awkward to get at like Bramley and Cranleigh, where places for teaching practice could be found.

I urge very strongly on the Under-Secretary that Croydon would make an admirable place for this. The hon. Member for Croydon, South quoted Robbins and referred to the need to train social workers with teachers and he suggested that Croydon would be good from this point of view. There is a great complex of social work in a town the size of Croydon and with its allied smaller towns, and I have always held that the training of teachers would be very much improved by training with teachers social workers of as varied a nature as possible. I think that it was the Fulton Committee which made reference to this in recommending that this should be a development.

It seems, therefore, that Croydon is highly suitable for this sort of development. So, perhaps without completely deserting my need to represent the North-East, on this occasion I support one growth point in the South-East, and I hope that the Under-Secretary of State will be able to give a favourable answer to his hon. Friend the Member for Croydon, South.

I should like to congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Croydon, South (Sir R. Thompson) on his good fortune, and on the way he presented his case for a teacher training college in his own borough. I know that this is a subject in which he has taken interest for a considerable time, as has my hon. Friend the Member for Croydon, North-West (Mr. F. Harris). Indeed, my hon. Friend the Member for Croydon, North-West raised this matter on the Adjournment only a few years ago.

My hon. Friend, of course, was absolutely right to say that this has been a matter of discussion between my Department and the Croydon local education authority for some time. He introduced his speech with some general reflections about the teacher supply problem and the sort of difficulties which we are likely to face in the years ahead. My hon. Friend suggested that new factors had arisen which now falsified some of the assumptions made in our current plan for the expansion of teacher training colleges, and he referred to the Report of the Robbins Committee. I must point out to him that the Robbins Committee Report, although it was in many ways an expansionist document—indeed, too expansionist for The Times Educational Supplement, from which the hon. Member for Bishop Auckland (Mr. Boyden) quoted—nevertheless accepted that the expansion which the Government proposed for the 'sixties was as much as could be managed in the teacher training colleges.

The Robbins Committee did, therefore, accept the target of 80,000 which the Government had previously announced for the teacher training colleges. Moreover, there have been no further estimates of population and growth as yet to falsify the assumptions on which the Robbins Committee was working. So I think it should be accepted at the outset that we are embarked on a very large expansion indeed of the teacher training colleges. The figures, as the House will know, have already moved from 28,000 in 1957–58 to 54,000 this year, and by 1970 there will have been a trebling in the population of the teacher training colleges in a period of 12 years.

The hon. Member for Leeds, South (Mr. Merlyn Rees) and the hon. Member for Bishop Auckland went a little wider in their speeches and touched on a number of points to which I shall hope to refer in a moment. I was a little taken aback, however, that they should still speak with such enthusiasm of the Labour plans for teacher supply which were announced earlier this week, and if I am not mistaken The Times Educational Supplement, in bestowing these bouquets on the Labour Party, had not yet heard that the plans have gone into reverse and are cancelled. It therefore seems a trifle incautious for the hon. Member for Bishop Auckland to take quite so much credit for what was said about realism.

The Joint Under-Secretary of State ought to be fair. This is one-twentieth part only.

There is a good deal else I could say about the comments made on the Report. What the Report actually said I think we shall probably never know, but whether it was one in twenty of the recommendations, it was certainly the recommendation which caught the public eye and was, I suppose, the major recommendation. It was certainly a puzzle to us on this side of the House that what had been taken to be a Labour plan should have been scrapped quite as suddenly as all that.

The hon. Member for Leeds, South fell into another error which was apparently committed by some of the spokesmen at the meeting at which the Labour plan was announced. He said that the Government had underestimated the difficulties likely to be faced in the matter of teacher supply in the next few years. His hon. Friend the Member for Coventry, East (Mr. Crossman) said the same thing at that Press conference, and then went on to quote the same figures which my right hon. Friend the former Minister of Education had been using and publicising for some months past.

Croydon has one of the first requirements for a teacher-training college, namely, an authority which is enthusiastic to undertake this responsibility. Although I have to suggest to the House that there are many cogent reasons why it would be, wrong to place a teacher-training college in Croydon at the moment, I should like to express my right hon. Friend's appreciation for the way in which Croydon has been so ready to help in the training of teachers over these years.

When in 1958 the first major expansion was embarked upon, this was done in the light of certain principles recommended by the National Advisory Council on the Training and Supply of Teachers. These included three important considerations: first, proximity to a university; secondly, convenient location in relation to teaching practice facilities; thirdly, special regard to areas which were not at present well served locally by teacher training institutions. It was also then recommended that the optimum size of a college for economic running, both educational and financial, should be taken into account in planning the expansion.

It was therefore right to concentrate the great bulk of the expansion on the established colleges with the object of bringing about an appreciable increase in college sizes, particularly then in the light of the implications of lengthening the training course from two to three years. Only limited provision could therefore be made at that time for the founding of new colleges, and inevitably there were more viable proposals than could be entertained within the scope of the expansion then authorised.

The case for a new college at Croydon was, unfortunately, clearly weaker than most other cases. Frankly, it did not match up to the criteria which were recommended by the National Advisory Council. Not only is Croydon not particularly close to a university centre, but it lies to the south of the area south and south-west of London which already contains a very heavy concentration of training colleges. This inevitably raises severe doubts about the desirability of adding yet another training college to this concentration.

To have done so would obviously have added to the teaching practice difficulties of the colleges in the area which will become even more severe as the expansion of the number of students continues throughout this decade. In fact, about 25 per cent. of all training college students in England and Wales are in training colleges within the area of the University of London Institute of Education and most of these colleges are within the South London concentration.

These objections to the establishment of a new college at Croydon naturally still held good when Croydon's proposal for a permanent college was resubmitted in February of last year in relation to the current scheme for the expansion of training college numbers to 80,000 by 1970–71. This current expansion programme is based essentially on the intensive use of the existing teaching facilities of all established colleges, and it was clear from the start that there would be little possibility of building any new college as part of the current expansion. In the event—as, I think, my hon. Friend recognized—it has proved to be the case that there will be no new purpose-built college within the 80,000 expansion scheme.

My hon. Friend rightly drew attention to paragraph 489 of the Robbins Report, in which it was suggested that there might be a closer link between the training of teachers and the training of those who are entering other professions, but he will have noticed that, in the immediately preceding paragraph, the Committee also stressed the importance it attached to the enlargement of the size of colleges. Indeed, paragraph 319 suggested that, in the long-term, a college of less than 750 students should be regarded as exceptional. I would not wish to attach any magic whatsoever to that particular figure, but I believe that we are right to concentrate generally on the expansion of existing colleges, because it is important that the average size of colleges should be enlarged.

There, then, are the three major difficulties. First, the size of colleges, which means that we are anxious not to see a multiplicity of small colleges created in the course of this great expansion. Second, teaching practice. It is the fact that within six miles of Croydon there are six training colleges already and, within five miles, five training colleges. There will, as expansion proceeds, be increasing difficulties about supplying the necessary teaching practice. Thirdly, the existing spread of colleges. Colleges are, at the moment, heavily concentrated in this particular area, and although there may be a gap, as has been suggested, between the South of London and the coast, there cannot on any sensible basis for planning be much of a case for increasing the number of colleges in South London.

The one remaining possibility is that it might be found right and proper to establish within the Greater London area a small temporary day college for mature students. I agree largely with what was said by the hon. Member for Leeds, South about the importance of day colleges for students. We are anxious to expand these provisions. Already there is such a college in London—the Sidney Webb College—and some of the existing teacher training colleges in the neighbourhood of Croydon provide opportunities for mature students. I can point to this possibility although I must reiterate to my hon. Friend the view that has already been expressed that it may well prove better to locate this additional day college in North London rather than South of the Thames.

I do not want today to rule out completely the possibility of a teacher training college coming to Croydon one day, but I must point out to my hon. Friend that the difficulties to which my predecessor referred in his last Adjourn- ment debate still exist, and I must say to him frankly that, at the moment, I see no possibility of a permanent, orthodox teacher training college being established in his borough.