It is some time since we have had a debate on foreign affairs and we have, therefore, had no opportunity to discuss what to many of us is the most burning and important problem in this sphere, that is Britain's relations with Europe. It will no doubt come as a relief to the Minister of State for Foreign Affairs, to whom we are very grateful for his presence and attention, that he will not today have to spend his time addressing his Left Wing over his right shoulder on such difficult and tendentious subjects as Vietnam or the Dominican Republic. But I felt that it would give us an opportunity to discuss within this general topic both the recent Vienna Conference and the Prime Minister's journeyings.

In connection with the latter I should like to read one quotation to the House:

"One familiar domestic criticism of Mr. Wilson's political style was that he attempted to be all things to all men. Now that the Prime Minister has completed his visits to the major European capitals, the same criticism is being heard in foreign chancelleries. So rapidly has the Labour leader endeared himself to so many disparate groups, to so wide a range of politicians representing contradictory policies, that British motives are once again under suspicion."

That, let the House believe it or not, was from last week's New Statesman and it seems to me to be typical of the doubts which have been engendered in many quarters as to where Britain stands.

The communiqué which came out after the conference was reasonably anodyne. One thing is now crystal clear. Every- one is well aware of the dangers and disadvantages of the division of Europe into two trading blocs. But it is fair to say—and it is sometimes forgotten here—that those dangers and disadvantages are more harmful to the E.F.T.A. countries, on balance, than to the countries of the E.E.C., and within E.F.T.A. they are more harmful to ourselves in the long run than to any other country.

The communiqué underlines the situation which has thus been created by the "paper curtain" that now divides Europe and divides E.F.T.A. from the E.E.C. The communiqué goes on to discuss certain concrete proposals to which I will return. It also stresses the importance of the Kennedy Round—and I think, so say all of us. A successful Kennedy Round would do a great deal to mitigate the dangers to which I have drawn attention and would eliminate some of the stresses which are beginning to show.

Various measures are to be proposed in October to strengthen E.F.T.A. It was agreed by all at the conference that the import surcharge was most damaging and that its removal was, to quote from the communiqué

"a vital step in the consolidation of E.F.T.A."

Like others, I had hoped that the Prime Minister might be able to announce a further reduction in the import surcharge at that time. I had felt, perhaps optimisticallly, that he would find it difficult to face our colleagues in the other countries unless he did so, and my optimism and belief in his ability to do so, I am sorry to say, cost me 5s.

E.F.T.A. has been most useful, and it remains very useful. Without it, the growth and development of the E.E.C. would have impinged far more harshly on those nations in Europe which lie outside its boundaries. It has provided, and will, I hope, provide increasingly, the United Kingdom with a larger market base for our major industries. The concept of a free trade area, which was at one time thought to be unworkable, has proved to be very workable indeed. Therefore, all reasonable steps which can be taken to reinforce E.F.T.A. are good, but only if they are steps which will make the eventual and inevitable negotiations with Europe easier and painless.

But there is a limit to the use of E.F.T.A. The fact is—and this is a disagreeable fact which we have to face—that E.F.T.A. is an association of those who are excluded from a club. Whatever its virtues—and they are many—E.F.T.A. is not, and cannot be, a bridgehead for us to enter Europe. To think that involves a complete misunderstanding of the nature of the E.E.C. and of E.F.T.A. They are two entirely different animals, and the divergence between the two species is growing greater and not less.

The Prime Minister, in Vienna, introduced the theme of bridge building. It is not a new theme, and it is not, frankly, one with a record of success so far. It may well be that the right hon. Gentleman saw himself going down in history as "Harold the Bridge Builder", "Harold Pontifex"—Pontifex Minimus. But I am afraid that his efforts are undoubtedly doomed to failure.

What are the bridge building proposals so far put forward? In the main, there are three. The first is a meeting of the Six and Seven before the end of the year, which would, of course, politically tide the Government over the now inevitable autumn election. Secondly, there is the bright idea that the E.E.C. should join E.F.T.A. Thirdly, there are proposals for a limited free trade area—that is to say, free trade between the two groups in special categories of goods. These are the three main proposals, and, frankly, they do not amount to a row of pins.

To deal with them in reverse order, may I take the limited free trade area. This is an admirable idea in theory, and I for one would welcome it warmly. Certain industries would lend themselves very well to such an idea—for example, the motor car industry and the machine tool industry which is, by its very nature, European. This is an idea which has been mooted by others—in particular, by my right hon. Friend the Member for Barnet (Mr. Maudling). It would be a great help to many of the industries concerned in both blocs. But even if we get the necessary G.A.T.T. waiver, such as Canada and America are now seeking for motor cars I very much doubt whether the E.E.C. would support such an idea, for reasons which I will give later.

The second bright idea is that the E.E.C. should join E.F.T.A. This is an old chestnut. It is certainly as unacceptable to the Six now as it was when first mooted five years ago. The fact is that all free trade area proposals such as these carry the same stigma in the eyes of the E.E.C., which is that Britain or the E.F.T.A. countries, or both, are trying to get the best of both worlds. They are trying, as the Economist put it in a very telling phrase, to become

"country members with access to the club's trade discount";

and that is unacceptable.

I deal now with the proposed conference of the Six and Seven. Will it happen, or is it just a pre-election gimmick? If the invitations were accepted, could it achieve anything? The answer to that, in my view, is that it could achieve nothing. First of all, it would show up the differences of approach on the political issues within the E.F.T.A. nations themselves. But the real mistake lies in the arithmetic that thinks that Six plus Seven makes Thirteen and equals Europe. It does not any more.

Any such conference is doomed to failure since it fails to appreciate the growing unity and influence of the Community, and, incidentally, the growing authority of the Commission itself. However much sympathy towards us might be expressed by leaders at such a conference, few of them would want to do anything to mar or hinder the growing cohesion of the Community. We read so much about the difficulties and the disagreements within the Community that we tend to overlook the achievements and the successes; and the influence of the Commission itself is in no way negligible. The Commission will certainly be hostile to any idea of bridgebuilding and very unsympathetic to a conference from which it is excluded.

The Community has many preoccupations, and its first priorities are with its internal problems and not with the external problems, of which E.F.T.A. is merely one. This is not to argue that there is in any way any hostility towards us or towards E.F.T.A. inside the Commission. Far from it. There is a fund of good will towards us and a deep regret that we should not be there with them, but the uncomfortable and unpalatable truth is that for the present we are largely irrelevant to them. So bridge building is out. The door into Europe appears to be closed for the present.

Meanwhile, what can we do except bide our time? First, we have to face the fact that the United Kingdom can only come to terms with Europe as a full member. Therefore, what is needed here is the political resolve to sign the Treaty of Rome, and brave words about bridge building cut no ice here, there or anywhere. Their sole purpose, and that is slightly dubious, would be to prepare some sections of public opinion for the inevitable ultimate political decision. There is no point in the Prime Minister setting himself up as E.F.T.A.'s own de Gaulle.

The General himself seems sometimes equally out of touch with what is happening. His creed is, to quote his own words,

"Every nation must be responsible itself, freed of infringements."

These are brave words, but they are meaningless, because under his nose and behind his back the Community is being steadily consolidated.

So is there a solution to this dilemma? Not yet. But what we do need now is an unequivocal statement—a commitment, if you wish—from the party opposite such as we have had recently from my right hon. Friend the Leader of the Opposition. There must be no "ifs" and "ands" and no trailing of the final conditions before we have even been invited to enter negotiations. Till our full intentions are made clear we run a grave risk of being distrusted by our friends in E.F.T.A. and of disheartening our friends in the Community and of drifting purposelessly along alone.

I greatly should like to congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for Reigate (Sir J. Vaughan-Morgan) on choosing this subject for this Adjournment debate, but more especially than that I should like to congratulate him on the extremely clear and honest way in which he put this subject, which is so much in all of our minds, and, in my case certainly, carries so much pain and grief that we should have to hear from him a tale, although so accurate, also so very depressing. There is nothing that I will say that will contradict anything that he has just said, but, on the other hand, perhaps I can dot a few "i's" and cross a few "t's" in the extraordinarily accurate survey which my right hon. Friend has just given us of our position in relation to Europe.

I have just returned from a week at the Assembly of Western European Union, where the main political debate centred round this whole question of our relations with the Common Market. It was the most depressing debate I have attended at any of the European Assemblies during the four years for which I have been a member of them. In particular, I would say that the speech of Lord Walston, who spoke on behalf of the Government, was one which seemed to me completely to misunderstand the situation, which seemed to be devoid of reality and perhaps can do more harm than good to the Government's intentions. I hope that if Ministers from this country are to speak in these Assemblies they will do so with more real life and more real fire, and not read out Foreign Office briefs which appear not to have been changed for the last 20 years, which is the impression that that speech gave.

Therefore, as I say, there is a staleness and disenchantment about the whole situation. It is as though the log jam has got so stuck that nothing can move it. I know that we are all waiting. We are all waiting for opportunities to change the situation to appear, and there is perhaps, to those who are enthusiasts, no task more difficult than to have to wait. It is always a depressing experience to sit and wait, so to speak, for something to turn up. Really, we are waiting for French policy to change.

Of course, it is natural, while one is waiting, to look for alternatives, to look for diversions. If one has missed one's aeroplane and has to wait for hours for the next one, one tries all the other airlines to see if any of them has one going in one's direction, and one is quite right to see if there are other ways round the dilemma in which one is, but in fact there are no real alternatives.

My right hon. Friend talked of bridge building, the links and connections and all the many minor approaches which the Government are making, but I believe that these cannot work because, as he said, E.F.T.A. and E.E.C., both in their way admirable, are completely different animals.

The central theme of the whole of the thinking, the psychology, of the European Economic Community is that it involves integration, first the integration of businesses and industries and finance, and, secondly, political integration. There is an unalterable determination to make those six countries eventually into one, and, realising that, there is no chance of trying to join such an organisation to an organisation which is merely a free association of sovereign trading nations such as E.F.T.A.

We must not under-estimate the political commitment of the E.E.C. Whatever the arguments and discussions going on the Continent may be, there can be no doubt that in the end they will come near to being a United States of Europe, and the determination of all the leading statesmen there, both national and in the Commissions, to achieve this is so obvious and so patent that without our accepting this ourselves, and expressing a positive and enthusiastic view of the ideal, we shall not be taken seriously in our attempts to end the division of Europe.

Links and bridges may ease a few minor strains. Please do not let it be thought that I pour cold water on any attempt to widen the intergration of Europe in any way. Industrial links, perhaps free trade in motor cars, means of communications between the two bodies, all of them are helpful, and things which should be encouraged, but to think that this is a policy towards joining Europe is a futile and useless idea.

There is one danger in it, too, and that is, I think, that we must be careful not to give away too many of our bargaining counters. We have precious few. If negotiations should be resumed for us to join the Market we have really very little we can use as trump cards in the negotiations, and if our technical knowledge, or our nuclear knowledge, or our industrial "know-how," are frittered away in a series of bilateral agreements we shall be left with very little appeal to help us gain entry into the Community. Though I am in favour of doing all that we can in the way of bridge building, I believe that we should remember always that we have to keep as many of our cards in our hands as we can for the eventual fusion of the two, as there is no alternative to joining the Six outright.

In reality, we have to face the French political veto which kept us out three years ago, and which, I think, still applies; and while we are waiting for that to alter, I observe with some unhappiness the way in which the Community itself is hardening as a result of that veto, of that political objection. The members of the Commission are rather beyond political and democratic control. They have established a pattern in Brussels which suits them. They have settled down to easy and orderly progress. Each piece of their thinking fits in. Their whole attitude is one of settled calm which cannot be disturbed, and there is little in the whole political set-up of the Community which can disturb this organised and peaceful calm.

I think that it is clearly obvious how difficult it would be to integrate one new member into the Community, let alone seven, or 10, or however many more might eventually want to join. It is built up on a series of balanced bargains which the Six have made, and which would all have to be disturbed if a new member were to join the Community. If one were a Commissioner, one would view this not only as a lot of extra work, but as raising great difficulties indeed to maintain the balance of advantages which has been so carefully built up.

I think that each year that goes by with us excluded makes it harder to change this situation. Although we welcome the wheat agreement, the progress, such as it is, towards agreement for the Kennedy Round, the progress towards political union, and so on, within the Six, we have to recognise that each of these makes the bargain more firm, and, therefore, more difficult for us to accede to the Community in the future.

I think that political union, when it comes, will also make it harder for us, because they will have evolved their own arrangements for controlling the Commission, their own foreign policy, perhaps their own defence policy and we will be asked to accept this in its entirety. It is not as if we were in at the making of the original compromises. It will be as though the compromise between six members has to be altered again, to allow a further compromise to allow a seventh or other members to come in.

All these are massive difficulties which the House would be wrong to underestimate, and I think that it is only fair and frank to the country to make quite clear what a difficult task it is which faces us. To be optimistic and to try to see how this can be broken, I think that I must echo my right hon. Friend's statement that there is no alternative, there is no other approach that we can now make, but to be enthusiastic and to be outright in our declaration of our need to join the Community.

At the meeting of Western European Union the Dutch rapporteur said:

"First, it would be most helpful not only for public opinion in Great Britain but for our efforts in Europe if there were a declaration of intent for the Common Market, if possible a non-partisan declaration. If that could be said, the case for the Common Market would be much stronger than it is now."

This is the kernel of the whole situation. We are not at the moment convincing Europe of the seriousness of our intent to join the Common Market, and until an outright enthusiastic declaration is made both from this Front Bench and from the Front Bench opposite, there will be no ready response to our overtures.

In our pamphlet "One Europe", which I hope many hon. Members have read, we as a group of individual backbench Members try to give this lead on behalf of our members, but I feel that this same enthusiasm, this same outright declaration, is necessary on behalf of the whole House if we are ever to achieve what is so essential.

I think that I should mention the two great impediments which have been built up into reasons why we cannot make this declaration. The first is E.F.T.A. I do not believe that there is any clash between our desire to join the Common Market and our present membership of E.F.T.A. It will, of course, require careful handling, but the idea that because we are a member of E.F.T.A. we cannot ever join the Common Market must, by definition, be wrong, because all the members of E.F.T.A. themselves would like to see the division ended and would like themselves to have either membership or association with the Common Market, so there must be a possible way of solving this problem.

The same Dutchman, Mr. Patijn, was asked:

"How can you expect us to do this, because that would be selling E.F.T.A.?"

His reply was:

"… you did it once before. Please do it again. You are serving the purpose of E.F.T.A. members by going in. Once you are in, Norway will be in and Denmark will soon follow. Once Britain is in we take that step and fight for the opening of the door."

We have many means by which to realise the importance of our commitment to E.F.T.A. and the importance of the E.F.T.A. countries in Europe, and they will help us, as they will help E.F.T.A. if we give them the opportunity, but I believe that there is no chance of a formal joining of the two associations, and that Britain as before will have to lead the way to open the door for our partners in E.F.T.A. Nor do I believe that this will result in the hardships or the accusations of broken pledges which many fear.

Perhaps I might now say a word about the Commonwealth, because I believe that this is not an irreconcilable objection. This has been discussed so much that I shall say very little about it. During the debate on Tuesday my right hon. Friend the Leader of the Opposition said:

"I have no doubt whatever that we can combine membership of the European Community with a healthy influence in the Commonwealth partnership. …"—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 1st June, 1965; Vol. 713, c. 1575.]

That is a sentiment which is being accepted more and more widely in the Commonwealth itself, and it is one which I hope will commend itself to the whole House.

Of course, there are difficulties. All the Brussels negotiations centred round these difficulties, but the extent to which they were solved at Brussels, and the extent to which public opinion is now changing and modifying itself in favour of realising that these problems are soluble, is surely evidence that we can make the declaration for which I was calling earlier.

From all this, it must be clear that the five conditions laid down by the right hon. Gentleman the Prime Minister under which the Labour Party would join the Common Market can no longer hold. The conditions about E.F.T.A., about the Commonwealth, about planning our own economy, and so on, are no longer relevant in a situation which has changed dramatically, and I may say for the worse, since that time in 1962 when these negotiations took place and when these conditions were formulated.

I repeat that there is no alternative but for this country to make up its mind what it wants to do, and I for my part have no hesitation, no doubt whatever, in saying that our only course is to apply for membership and to accept all that that entails.

The right hon. Member for Reigate (Sir J. Vaughan-Morgan) presented a picture of the present state of relations between Britain and the Common Market which I found difficult to follow. As I listened to him develop his theme, one had the impression that it was due to the British Government that there was not at the moment an attempt to get Britain into the Community. It was as if the breakdown of negotiations in January, 1963, had never happened.

The right hon. Gentleman was followed by his hon. Friend the Member for Cirencester and Tewkesbury (Mr. Ridley), who was a little more frank. I refer to two phrases that he used—first, that we were waiting for French policy to change; and, later, that in reality we have to face up to the French political veto. The hon. Member is right.

Let us analyse the position in which we find ourselves and look at the limitations imposed upon the Government—limitations which would be imposed on the Conservative Party if it became the Government. Then let us look at the possibilities of easing a situation rightly described by the hon. Gentleman as one in which everything depends on time in that we have to wait for an opportunity which does not exist at the moment.

Until January, 1963, hon. Members opposite, who then formed the Government, engaged in very lengthy negotiations with Europe. When we look back we can see that there were two weak- nesses in the negotiations from the point of view of the then Government. First, they had to try to live down the 1958 proposal, usually called the Maudling Plan, and the suggestion that in a sense Britain was trying to be a Trojan horse in the Community, in attempting to open up the closed tariff barriers around the Community and turn the Community into one in which supranational development would not be feasible.

I see that the hon. Member for South Angus (Mr. Bruce-Gardyne), for whose knowledge of these matters I have considerable respect, shakes his head in disagreement.

I was shaking my head only because the hon. Lady said that one of our difficulties arose because of our earlier experience with the E.F.T.A. negotiations.

No doubt the hon. Gentleman can deal with that point later.

No one who looked through the course of the negotiations could deny that the fact of the original Free Trade Area proposals very much coloured the attitude of some members of the Common Market, notably France, towards our attempts later to sign the Rome Treaty. There was always a slight suspicion that our approach to the Community was as much an approach to destroy it as to make it stronger. I am not saying that this was just, but it existed in the minds of many taking part in the negotiations.

We then saw the long and detailed economic negotiations conducted by the right hon. Member for Bexley (Mr. Heath). Perhaps I can make one criticism of those negotiations, that they stressed time and time again such minute details as the precise relationship of Commonwealth tariffs to European tariffs and the details of certificates of origin which coincided with other attempts to describe the origin of goods; they went into immense detail over agricultural policy and tried to make special arrangements and in the course of that lost sight of the political objective of either the Community or the United Kingdom in relation to the Community.

As these negotiations wore on, conducted as cleverly as they were, they became more and more irrelevant to the basis of discussion upon which British membership of the Community was possible. When the hon. Member for Cirencester and Tewkesbury says that a declaration of intent would help now, I am sure that he is fair-minded enough to grant that what was missing in our earlier negotiations was a declaration of political intent.

What happened after the breakdown in January, 1963? During the first three or four months there was an almost complete stop in co-operation between the Five and France. The Five went to what then was the limit. We must be clear about the limit. It is anything which will not destroy the existing Community. As the hon. Member said, Britain has many friends in the Community, notably the Dutch, and also Italy and Germany, but they have always one pre-condition, which is that they will not take their friendship with us to a point which might destroy the present Community. Therefore, the limitation on what we can expect from them must always be in our minds.

The first reaction to the breakdown in January, 1963, was a stalemate within the Community. Since then we have seen that the purposes of President de Gaulle went much further in terms of the way in which he saw the development of the Community than merely whether or not it could be wider than the Six. What I am now saying is that there was a development of a totally new concept of what the Community is meant to be, sometimes given in shorthand as "L'Europe des Patries", but certainly with much wider implications. If we refer back to the last few weeks and look at the joint declaration by Mr. Gromyko and President de Gaulle on certain European matters, a declaration many of the terms of which are subscribed to by my hon. Friends, we appreciate that it did a great deal to weaken the Community approach because it constituted a bilateral discussion between France and Russia about matters of the greatest possible interest to other members of the Community, above all Germany.

It is clear that at present President de Gaulle is acting to a very great extent to prevent any further political development of the Community. It is not only Britain which is caught in the difficulty, but the Five as well. Whether we look at the way in which the meeting on 10th May of the Foreign Ministers was cancelled, whether we look at the way in which the agricultural negotiations have been a pre-condition of any future development of the Community, whether we look at the way in which the discussions over the financing of the agricultural system have been developed, whether we look at the way in which the development of the European Parliament has been halted when, only two years ago, it looked so likely, what we are clearly seeing is the Community virtually stalemated at present. I speak as one who would very much like to see it develop.

It means that, just because the Community's own position is to some extent weakened by the divisions between them on where the future lies, above all this would not be from its point of view a time when it would be willing once again to reopen the whole discussion as to whether there should be a wider Europe. I speak as one who would like to see Britain fully in the Community. But every one of us here, if we put party points aside for a moment, recognises that there will not be any immediate development of British relations with the Community on the original basis of our signing the Rome Treaty.

Surely, in this position, any Government who want to keep the option open must look at the possibilities of closer relations of a type which will be acceptable to all six members of the Community. One of the strengths of the Government's point of view and the point of view of the Prime Minister has been willingness to treat the Community as one. The right hon. Member for Reigate referred to the relations between E.F.T.A. and the Community. But we must mark an advance, and that was when the Prime Minister referred to the Community in membership of E.F.T.A. and not to each one of the Six. This was recognised as a reality which is crucial to our approach, that the Community must be treated as one regardless of the stresses and strains.

We welcome the possibilities, as the hon. Member for Cirencester and Tewkesbury said, of keeping the door open. One matter so far neglected by all Opposition speakers is functional arrangements. All of us on this side recognise that a functional arrangement is not the same thing as a political union. Of course we recognise it, but what one can say about a functional arrangement is that it makes possible a type of economic development which does not militate against later political development.

Let us be frank. If the interpretation of companies or arrangements for licensing agreements lie almost entirely between Britain and non-European countries, all the difficulties which the hon. Member pointed out in politics will be duplicated in economics. Surely my right hon. Friend is right to try to see what functional agreements can be made in aircraft and other types of weapon development in order to try to develop a relationship which is only maintainable on this basis.

Secondly, surely he is right to think of ways in which the tariff differentiation between two sides can be reduced, be it by the Kennedy Round, by special arrangements regarding particular industries or, as I think is a possibility which is opened up by the negotiations between Nigeria and Brussels, by an extension of existing preferential arrangements conceivably even between the Commonwealth African countries and the associated territories overseas. This has al ways seemed to me—

The hon. Lady is listing many things with which many of us would agree. This is not what I was suggesting. My feeling about the limited free trade area is that it is a mistake to repeat the very mistakes which she says were made in the Maudling negotiations—those which made it look as though Britain was trying to get the best advantage on the cheap.

I do not want to bore the House by listing the possibilities. The possibilities which I am listing are the only possibilities which are at present open to us. I do not think that hon. Gentlemen opposite can ask for something which will simply lead to another breakdown in negotiations. I was recently in Brussels and also in one or two other European capitals. I saw very clearly that any attempt to reopen negotiations which would be unlikely to succeed would be more damaging to the long-term possibilities of our relationship with Brussels than anything else. I accept what the right hon. Member for Reigate said, that we must make it clear that we accept the integrity of the Community. We need to look at what we can now do.

There is, of course, one very large problem in the way, which speeches so far have skirted. This is what some hon. Gentlemen opposite regard as the one ticket into Europe even under present conditions, the issue of an independent European nuclear deterrent. Some hon. and right hon. Gentlemen on the opposite side of the House believe that this price, high as it is, is worth paying to get negotiations started again. Certainly, President de Gaulle's reaction to Nassau suggests that there is something in this argument, simply from the point of view of getting negotiations started again.

There are two reasons that we on this side of the House find that approach totally unacceptable. One is that it is unacceptable to essential and important members of the Six themselves. It plays to a small minority of opinion in countries like Germany and Italy over against the vast majority of opinion which believes that a separate European deterrent, leading, as it ultimately would, to a growing breach in the Atlantic relationship, is unacceptably dangerous, even as a method of getting Britain in.

The second reason which is fundamental to us on this side is that an independent nuclear deterrent would be essentially a long step towards proliferation of a kind which we would find totally unacceptable, and of a kind which would render impossible what for us must be the ultimate object in Europe. That is of a community which is a whole, with a wider range of relationships, not limited to the community in Brussels but associated with the E.F.T.A. countries, including the neutrals, which are unlikely to enter into full relations—as we now know—not limited to Commonwealth countries, but ultimately embracing the growingly independent countries of the Warsaw bloc as well. It is not without significance that there is at present a very powerful delegation from Poland in Brussels discussing various possible economic links between that country and the Community.

I accept what hon. Gentlemen opposite say about the crucial importance and the ultimate inevitability of a close relationship, involving entry into the Community, between Britain and the Six. This is under very great difficulties at present, and hon. Members must accept this. I would ask them what they seriously believe can be done over and above what the Government are doing to try to leave open the door for satisfactory negotiations to take place at a later stage. The Prime Minister has made it clear that he would discuss political union, that he wishes to be involved in disiussions about Ministerial meetings, foreign policy and other types of political evolution in the Community. He has made it clear that he is open to discussions about tariffs and about relationships with the outside world.

A declaration of intent might help in addition, but its timing is absolutely crucial. A declaration of intent will operate only if it is clearly seen to carry with it not just the support of this House but the support of those whom Britain is, to some extent, pledged to taking in with her. Anyone who looks at the present situation in the Community will recognise that there are grave difficulties presented by Sweden and Switzerland. Therefore, it is only by a change within E.F.T.A. itself as well as within Britain—I accept both these things—that a future negotiation is likely to succeed. To my mind, it is crucial, if we embark on another negotiation, that success is almost certain from the very beginning.

I join with my hon. Friend the Member for Cirencester and Tewkesbury (Mr. Ridley) in his thanks to my right hon. Friend the Member for Reigate (Sir J. Vaughan-Morgan) for initiating the debate. I think that it has already shown its worth in the different contributions which we have had. I listened with particular interest to the remarks of the hon. Lady the Member for Hitchin (Mrs. Shirley Williams), because I know that she has studied these matters with considerable care. I agree with a good deal of what she said.

I should like to stress that, having spent three years in Paris as a journalist at the time of the original free trade area negotiations, and also during the formative period of the Common Market, and then having watched fairly closely the course of the negotiations in Brussels, I have always believed that the solution to the problem of our relations with our Continental neighbours is a prerequisite for a solution to all our problems and, therefore, I believe that it is most advantageous that we should be having this debate.

My hon. Friend the Member for Cirencester and Tewkesbury referred to the report which was submitted to the Western European Union Assembly in Paris this week by one of the Dutch members, Mr. Patijn. He asked the United Kingdom two questions which The Times described as "pertinent". They certainly seemed very pertinent to me. The questions were:

"(a) Can Great Britain restore her balance of payments, modernise her economy and maintain sterling as a world reserve currency on a national basis?"

and:

"(b) Would a British decision to renounce nuclear national autonomy strengthen Atlantic cohesion and the unity of Europe, or would it divide Europe? Under what conditions will it serve both Atlantic and European relations?"

My right hon. Friend the Member for Barnet (Mr. Maudling) was reported in The Times as having answered the first question in the affirmative, that Britain could restore her balance of payments, and her economy and maintain sterling on her own. I hope that he is right, but I cannot entirely share his conviction of this point. We stand a very much better chance of doing these things on a European basis; I am not sure that we can do them at all on any other basis.

But I believe that the kernel of the problem which we are discussing lies in the answer we give to the second question, concerning the future arrangements which we make in Europe for nuclear weapons and the form of the relationship between Western Europe and the United States. All attempts so far to put this country's European relationship on a satisfactory basis have failed because of the failure to understand what I believe to be two extremely important realities. I frequently criticised my right hon. Friends when they were in power and I still feel that they were sometimes as much at fault in this matter as I believe right hon. Gentlemen opposite are today.

The first of these two realities is that we have failed to understand that the new Europe is essentially a political entity—what my right hon. Friend the Leader of the Opposition has called a "constellation of power". Trading arrangements in Europe matter, of course, but I agree with the hon. Lady the Member for Hitchin that we spent far too long in Brussels arguing about the channels of trade in kangaroo meat or cricket bats and did not at any time face the political realities involved in commitment to Europe.

If we are to play our part, as we should, in a new and united Europe, we must recognise that this involves, first and foremost, searching for a common foreign policy and a common defence policy for the whole of Western Europe. I do not pretend that either will be easy to find, but if we want to resolve the problem of our relations with Europe we must keep these political issues foremost in our mind.

I am not so pessimistic as my hon. Friends about the possibility of some positive outcome to the proposals which the Prime Minister has put forward and which my right hon. Friend the Member for Barnet orginally suggested; for tariff cuts on individual products. This may have appeal to the members of the European Community. The French have not yet spoken on this point and until they hare we cannot be sure of the reaction the suggestion will get. However, I agree that this is not the real solution and no more than a palliative.

The second reality which we have failed to recognise throughout is that the key to this new Europe for those of us who are not yet members is, and will be, held as far as we can see into the future by the French. I entirely agree with the hon. Member for Hitchin that, broadly speaking, the other members of the Community want us in. I also agree with her that they are not going to go to the limit of risking the break up of the Community to have us in. And that essentially means that if we can arrive at conditions to resolve this problem of our relations with Europe which are acceptable to France, they will be acceptable to all. But if we try to arrive at conditions which are acceptable to the others but not to France, that will serve us no useful purpose at all. Our failure to recognise these realities has been demonstrated in a variety of ways, such as the determination as far as possible to exclude defence from the context of European integration. It is here that I part company from the hon. Member for Hitchin.

When one talks about defence in this context the crucial issue is undoubtedly nuclear defence and the arrangements we make for the nuclear defence of Western Europe. Of the various schemes which have been propounded by the United States, by the British Prime Minister in his so-called A.N.F. and the rest—and the latest one put forward by Mr. McNamara, in Paris the other day—all suffer from a fundamental defect. It is that they assume that the United States must always retain ultimate control over the deterrent on the Continent of Europe, but that Europe cannot and will not maintain any effective, real, control over the United States deterrent.

I do not agree with the hon. Member for Hitchin that objections to these rather unbalanced propositions are confined to minority circles in Italy and Germany, if I understood her correctly. I think that the hon. Lady would not dispute that those views are strongly held in France, and not only by members of the present French Government.

I was endeavouring to point out that there is more than one way of trying to overcome this admitted feeling of being disregarded and unconsulted on defence matters. I accept the hon. Gentleman's analysis, but I do not accept the conclusion that he draws from it.

I was about to come to the question of alternatives. I was pointing out the dissatisfaction that is felt because of this imbalance and that the latest proposals, including those made by Mr. McNamara, suffer from the same defect. I believe that none of these suggestions really satisfies any of the Common Market countries, with the possible exception of the Dutch who, I agree, take a different attitude on this issue.

The other objection to the various plans which have been put forward is that they tend inevitably to give the Federal Republic of Germany a foot in the nuclear door without satisfying the nuclear ambitions that such a move might well encourage in Western Germany. I do not share the view of many hon. Members opposite that West Germany is not to be trusted with nuclear weapons. But I do believe that there is a widespread view in Eastern Europe that this is so, and that granting control of nuclear weapons to Western Germany would have serious effects on the thaw which has been going on on the other side of the Iron Curtain, if one can call it that any longer.

I believe that we can overcome these difficulties if we move gradually towards the idea of an independent European nuclear deterrent which would, at least in the early stages, have to be based on the co-ordination of the British and French deterrent.

I draw the attention of the House to a passage in an article by the former French Chief of Air Staff, General Paul Stehlin, in the October, 1963, issue of Foreign Afiairs, in which he stated:

"To begin with, the British and French nuclear forces might constitute the nucleus of a European multi-national force based on the equality of the participants; and later, when Europe's state of unification permits, they could become part of a homogeneous force."

I believe that that is the line along which we should be moving. We should demonstrate that we recognise that the Europe of the future has common interests in defence and foreign policies far overriding the narrow limits of an economic relationship. We have also demonstrated our failure to recognise the meaning of the new Europe which is evolving by giving the impression, whether rightly or wrongly, that we regard our relationship with this Europe as a sort of convenience for securing our relationship with the United States. This new Europe will not be treated as a convenience by anyone.

I believe that my right hon. Friends in the previous Government were frequently guilty of this fault and that the present Government were guilty of it in a particularly glaring instance when they chose to inform the United States, and the United States Government alone, in advance of their decision to impose a 15 per cent. surcharge, in breach of their international obligations. This is just the latest example of a trend that has gone on for a long time.

One of the big problems is that the French Government adopt an attitude which suggests that Europe can only develop by demonstrating its hostility to the United States. But I believe that the feeling that we go rather too far in the other direction is not confined to the French. We have to realise, in short, that if we are to take our place in this new Europe we must recognise that our relations with our Continental neighbours must be the first priority in defence and in international affairs as well as in economic matters.

I believe that the partnership of equals across the Atlantic, which President Kennedy held out as a great vision before us for the future, will only be established when we have first built the European side of the arch. We can only build that when this country is involved, formally and effectively, on the European side.

I should like to reply to what has been said by the hon. Lady the Member for Hitchin (Mrs. Shirley Williams). Everyone agrees that this is not the time to reopen negotiations. The opportunity is not there. But there are two questions which she raised which I think everyone needs to look at in the meantime. The first is the question of functional arrangements. I agree that if one could make some functional arrangements to help bridge a gap before the time when we may have the opportunity of joining the Common Market, then they should he made, with one proviso with which I think the hon. Lady would agree. The proviso is that these functional arrangements should not in themselves be so entangling that they will become a hindrance to our eventual joining of the Common Market.

The hon. Lady asked what we would do that the Government were not doing in the meantime before conditions were such that we could enter into negotiations. Frankly, I think she answered the question herself when she said that perhaps the thing that was needed was to make the nations of Western Europe recognise the fact that Britain was determined to enter into Europe eventually.

Whether one calls it a declaration of intent—although that particular word has other connotations and those may not make it so recognisably good—or a statement of faith, Britain now wants everyone to realise that she is serious about becoming politically and economically joined with the Continent. That is why I am sorry that as recently as 28th February the Prime Minister saw fit to reiterate the five conditions of Britain's entry. At lease one of them was out of date. This is concerned with the problems of Britain's relationship with the Commonwealth. This would make it impossible for us to join in with Europe. I agree with what my right hon. Friend the Leader of the Opposition said about this in the Commonwealth debate which we had a few days ago.

What does the Commonwealth want from Britain? I think events have shown that it is complementary for Britain to have an important and vital part in Europe if it is going to be able to fulfil its Commonwealth commitments. The Commonwealth does not want Britain just as a place where it can come and meet in London and have old boys' tie, regular meetings, with a few dinners and a chat around the problem. What the Commonwealth wants in Britain is something very much more positive. It wants a strong country, a sound currency from which it can do most of its trading in the world. The majority of members of the Commonwealth want economic aid from Great Britain for the development of their countries and technical assistance to enable them to fulfil their aspirations of nation-building and so on. This is what the Commonwealth is looking to Britain to provide.

More important, I am sure that members of the Commonwealth are becoming increasingly aware that Britain cannot provide this unless it is within the context of a wider trading area, a wider economic unit which the Common Market and the Continent of Europe provides. It is no use giving aid and development assistance to those countries unless one is going to give them the opportunity of trading. By opening up to the Commonwealth countries the European trading area we should be giving those countries a greater area of trading than they have at present in this country. Many of those countries in the Commonwealth earn four or five times as much foreign exchange as they do by any aid which they receive from us. This is another reason why these conditions today are, I believe, impossible. I entirely agree with my right hon. Friend the Member for Reigate (Sir J. Vaughan-Morgan) and my hon. Friend the Member for Cirencester and Tewkesbury (Mr. Ridley) and the hon. Lady the Member for Hitchin, who alluded to this as a possibility, that what is needed from Parliament and the country today is for us to make this declaration of intent, that it is our wish to join in with the Treaty of Rome, accepting the full economic and political possibilities and potentials that this involves. This is a step we can make in the meantime. I hope that at the Commonwealth Prime Minister's Conference the Prime Minister will go through this question with the Commonwealth Ministers, because they realise that if Britain is going to be able to do something dynamic for the Commonwealth in terms of aid and development it can do it only from inside Europe.

I am deeply aware that by standing up now I am preventing several of my hon. Friends from speaking and I apologise to them because I know that many of them would make extremely important contributions. But we are limited in this debate and I know that all Members of the House would like to hear the reply we are going to have from the Minister.

I would like to congratulate, as everyone has, my right hon. Friend the Member for Reigate (Sir J. Vaughan-Morgan) on introducing this subject. It is a pity that we are so limited because it is clear that there are many people who have contributions to make. I listened with great interest to the speech by the hon. Lady the Member for Hitchin (Mrs. Shirley Williams) and I agree with a great deal of it. I think, however, that she rather missed the point. What my hon. and right hon. Friends have said is not that we should immediately join the Common Market. We all know the difficulties. What they have said is that if it is our policy in the future to join the Common Market, if we think it is to the advantage of Britain, Europe and the Commonwealth, then we should make it clear that that is our policy and we should not equivocate.

I did not agree with the hon. Lady when she said that the Common Market is virtually stalemated. I could not accept that. I think there is a great deal of misunderstanding at the moment about what is happening in Europe. There is a great deal of misunderstanding about the great ideals and materialist forces at work in Europe. It is undoubted that the European Economic Community is firmly established and here to stay. It has its ups and downs and its differences—indeed, there have been shocks—but those who think that it is an unstable organisation delude themselves. The Common Market has managed to survive shocks, and will continue to develop. In what way it will develop is anyone's guess, but that it will develop, and that there will be continuing integration within the Community, is certain.

We know that the transitional period will be completed at the latest by the beginning of 1968, and we know what that means. Shortly before that, possibly by the end of 1967, the E.F.T.A. will have completed its transitional stage. We shall then have two economic groupings in Europe, each of which will have moved into its permanent condition. It is therefore quite obvious that we have to think about the importance of bringing these groups together.

I agree with much that the hon. Lady the Member for Hitchin said, but references to making better use of the Kennedy Round, of consultations between the two groupings, of taking steps to bring the two economic systems into closer harmony, are all right as proposals but are no substitute for a European policy. It is important that we should realise this, because all these are purely defensive and interim proposals.

We all look forward to hearing the Minister of State. I was present when he spoke at Bonn not long ago, and last month, speaking at Strasbourg, he said:

"We believe that the creation of a united and democratic Europe in which Britain can play her full part must be a primary objective of its policy."

Those are fine words—but what do they mean?

Is it the policy of Her Majesty's Government that Britain should in due course join the Common Market and accept the principles of the Treaty of Rome? The hon. Lady has given us her view, but she does not represent Her Majesty's Government. We know that she is a good European, but it is Her Majesty's Government which will have to answer the question. Unless that is the policy of the Government, there is little hope of a united and democratic Europe in which Britain can play its full part, because the Community believes, with justification, that its success is firmly based on—is, indeed, a consequence of—the Treaty of Rome, and those who wish to join the Community cannot expect the Treaty to be renegotiated for their benefit, or to be excused from the obligations that the members have placed on themselves.

At the E.F.T.A. meeting in Vienna, the Prime Minister is reported in The Times as having proposed that the six European Economic Community countries should be asked to join the E.F.T.A. If he did say that, and if it was a serious suggestion, it shows an astonishing ignorance of what is really happening in Europe. Those six countries have already refused to do this, and to think that they would even look at the suggestion again now that they have progressed so far is ludicrous. I have sufficient respect for the Prime Minister's intelligence to assume that he cannot have been serious, and that if he made it he must have done so knowing that he would receive a rebuff from the European Economic Community—that the suggestion would not be considered, or would be immediately rejected. If so, it is no wonder that there is this suspicion in Europe of Her Majesty's Government's intentions and motives.

Then we heard of the five conditions laid down by the 1962 Labour Party Conference, two of which refer to freedom to pursue our own foreign policy and the right to plan our economy. Nothing in the Treaty of Rome requires us to accept European dictation of our foreign policy or complete European control of our economy as a condition of entry, but everyone must recognise that the maintenance of completely independent foreign policies and purely national economic systems cannot possibly be reconciled with the ultimate purpose of building a united Europe. The Prime Minister has made it clear that Her Majesty's Government are still bound by these conditions, and as long as that state of things continues Her Majesty's Government must expect opinion in Europe to assume that the Labour Party totally misunderstands or rejects the real aims of European unity.

The time has come when the Government should make their position much plainer, and I hope that today the Minister of State will do so. The Prime Minister should stop tinkering about with bridges and tunnels and state quite plainly whether or not he wants to see Britain join the Common Market. We on this side stated our position long ago, and my right hon. Friend the Leader of the Opposition made it clear again on Tuesday.

The decision taken by the previous Government in 1961 to apply for membership of the European Economic Community was one of historic importance. It was not only an act of faith in Europe but an act of faith in Britain, and in Britain's capacity to rise to the European challenge. I am convinced that the reasons for our application in 1961 to join the Common Market are even more valid and compelling today and are in the highest interests of Britain, the Commonwealth and Europe alike. I hope that the Minister of State will be able to say the same.

I believe that Britain's destiny lies in helping to shape the new Europe, and that we can only fulfil this from within the Community, and not from without. I am sure that that view is shared by a large and constantly increasing majority of the people in the country, and perhaps most important of all, by the young and rising generation. And if what has been said today is any indication, it is certainly the view of the overwhelming majority of those in this House.

I congratulate the right hon. Member for Reigate (Sir J. Vaughan-Morgan) on initiating this debate, which has been marked by two outstanding speeches. We had one from my hon. Friend the Member for Hitchin (Mrs. Shirley Williams), who gave a most realistic appraisal of the facts of the present situation, and the likely developments. The other outstanding speech, but one that I regarded as dangerous, came from the hon. Member for South Angus (Mr. Bruce-Gardyne), but in as far as there are dangerous as well as constructive ideas on the question of European unity it is as well that they should be ventilated.

I congratulate the right hon. Member for Reigate on his lack of party spirit. I was a little peeved that the right hon. and learned Member for Conway (Mr. Peter Thomas) should have devoted so much of his speech to party points—[HON. MEMBERS: "No."] After all, we all know that the issue of Europe has zigzagged within and between the parties, and during the last 13 years—the decisive period of Britain's relationship with the Community—the Conservative Party held power here. I myself have been preaching a united Europe for 30 years. I wrote four books about it in the middle 'forties. I was one of a minority in the House and in the Trades Union Congress in favour of Britain going into the Coal and Steel Community from the start. That was a minority view in both parties.

What we have to discuss now is not whether it would have been better for Britain to have been a leading, or the leading, foundation member in the years after the war; the problem now concerns the realities of the situation left by the breakdown of the negotiations conducted by the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Bexley (Mr. Heath).

The hon. Member for Cirencester and Tewkesbury (Mr. Ridley) talked about "joining Europe". I felt that, early in the debate, I had to say that we should stop talking about "joining Europe". For my part, I am a European. For me, Britain is Europe. This is not something which was settled by crosses on ballot papers in elections. It has been settled by crosses on the battlefields of Europe for a thousand years and more. Let it be clearly understood that the Labour Government and the movement on which they rest understand that Britain is Europe and want a united Europe.

There is a long history to this. We are not discussing a united Europe for the first time. Richard Cobden and the radicals were discussing it in the House 100 years ago. The first Workers' International was formed on the initiative of British trade unions, and we celebrated its centenary last year. It declared itself in favour of the confederation of free States of Europe. Keir Hardie, the founder, was taking an interest in Europe 40 years before Briand—and Ernest Bevin, in the International Transport Worker's Federation, was interested in it in the 1920's and 1930's.

Let us look at the real declaration of intent. The real declaration of intent is the whole content of this speech. The hon. Member for Cirencester and Tewkesbury will, once again, have to listen to a considered statement of the Government's view. First, it should be realised that there are a number of European organisations each with much to their credit. The document which contained the five conditions opened by referring to the E.E.C. as a great and imaginative concept and went on to pay tribute to its political importance in ending the European civil war based on conflict between France and Germany. Hon. Members opposite should not denigrate E.F.T.A. The record of E.F.T.A. since 1958 has been very substantial.

May I make it quite clear that nothing that I or any of my hon. Friends said was meant as denigration of E.F.T.A.?

I would not withdraw it. I hope that hon. Members will not make remarks which appear to be a denigration of E.F.T.A. because E.F.T.A. consists of 90 million Europeans and it is one-third of free Europe. But it is not only E.F.T.A. with which we are concerned. There is also the E.E.C. We collaborate in O.E.C.D. with our European partners, in Western European Union and in the Council of Europe. I insist that E.F.T.A., E.E.C. and the other organisations have great achievements to their credit, but that none of them is Europe. We should cease talking as though the E.E.C. were Europe. It is certainly the largest and in that sense the most important of the European organisations to emerge in the post-war period, but the plain truth is that in so far as Britain has treaty obligations in these international organisations we have already surrendered some measure of our sovereignty.

When it comes to a question of independent foreign policies, the plain fact is that the greatest surrender of sovereignty which has taken place in the post-war period has been in Britain's defence arrangements, and this Government's proposals for an Atlantic nuclear force is a proposal to surrender more political sovereignty to international organisations, including Europe, than any proposal made by the Conservative Party. It is important that we do not confuse the categories when we are dealing with the subject of Britain's relationship with Europe.

Both E.F.T.A. and the E.E.C. have the objective of achieving the greater unity of Europe as a whole. That is the important declaration of intent today and that is the purpose of the Government—to fulfil the aim of both E.F.T.A. and the E.E.C. to achieve the greater unity of Europe as a whole.

Everyone in the House knows that it is simply not practical politics for Britain to join the Community now. That door was shut in 1963 and we have been given no inkling that it is yet even slightly ajar.

Does the hon. Member want it open?

I have already declared that we seek the greater unity of Europe. I shall develop this theme. But in my view it is urgently necessary for us not only to say that we want to create a greater unity of Europe—as the Prime Minister and the Foreign Secretary have both said, a Common Market which the Community, Britain and the countries of E.F.T.A. and others, if they wish, can join. It is also necessary to be intensely practical, because in a matter of two years the Community and E.F.T.A. will have achieved their reduction of internal tariffs and the common external tariff of the Community will stand between one-third and two-thirds of free Europe.

I am sorry that hon. Members opposite should seek to denigrate the initiative which arose out of the meeting of the two dozen European statesmen at Chequers. The fact that it happened to be a Socialist international meeting does not alter the fact that it consisted of Prime Ministers, deputy Prime Ministers and Foreign Ministers from the Six and the Seven. This meeting arose as a spontaneous reaction to the recognition that there was a danger that the economic division of Europe would harden and that the follies of economic nationalism might be repeated on a larger scale than hitherto.

Must we acquiesce in this unnatural division? Must we simply wail outside the walls of Common Market Europe? Is it wrong for the Prime Minister and his colleagues to go to Vienna and propose that within the Council of E.F.T.A. there should be consideration of how this unnatural and artificial division of Europe should be ended? We should have been failing in our duty had we not done that.

I do not want to anticipate the discussions within the Council of E.F.T.A. Certainly, the right hon. Gentleman is right that in discussions at Vienna, in which I participated, almost all the ideas for ending the division were aired. The reference to the Common Market joining E.F.T.A. was certainly not put by the Prime Minister as a hard proposal. As everybody knows, this is the Münchmeyer plan, and it still has strong support in some European countries, particularly Germany; and it will be considered even though, after the Maudling experience, some hon. and right hon. Members feel that it is impracticable.

There has been reference to the Kennedy Round. It is a fact that to make a success of the Kennedy Round is the most practical thing which we in Britain can do to solve the immediate problem and to promote closer unity in Europe. It is, therefore, necessary to get the maximum possible agreement between Britain and her European partners. I am proud of the fact that of all the major industrial countries which submitted exception lists, ours from Britain is the shortest. If we could get a 50 per cent. cut in industrial tariffs across the board, this would greatly reduce the dangers of inflated economic nationalism in a couple of years.

There is also the problem of agriculture. The right hon. Gentleman referred to the five conditions. As the Prime Minister said the other day, this is not a question of theology. I wish that hon. and right hon. Members opposite would cease to regard the five conditions as the Ten Commandments.

They are the hon. Member's commandments.

The Prime Minister made it clear that this is not a question of theology, but a practical issue. The five conditions will be interpreted pragmatically in the realities of 1965-66-67-68. One of those realities is the problem of the agricultural policy of the Community. If the price of grain is £20 a ton as Britain imports it, and if Britain pays £27 a ton to her own farmers, and if the Community's price is £36 a ton—if that is roughly the order of the figures, obviously there is a problem. One does not cease to be a good European because one looks the economic facts in the face.

It is true that, as part of the Kennedy Round, discussions are going on about the whole question of agricultural subsidies. These problems, which would arise during any negotiations of Britain's entry into the Common Market, would also form a substantial part of the negotiations in the Kennedy Round on agricultural problems, and the success in the forum of G.A.T.T. in getting a new approach to agricultural policies, prices and tariffs would be a great contribution to removing one of the practical difficulties about Britain's ultimate entry into the Common Market.

A second device open to us is to increase industrial and technical cooperation. I noted the half-hearted attitude of several hon. Members opposite on this issue. What are we to do? If we do not collaborate with members of the Common Market we are accused of being Little Englanders and not good Europeans. When we take new initiatives going beyond the policies of the previous Government in seeking bilateral and multilateral arrangements with our N.A.T.O. partners and European countries, then we are accused by the hon. Member for Cirencester and Tewkesbury of selling the pass and giving away a good bargaining card.

Hon. Members opposite must make up their minds. Declarations of intent, mere words, accompanied by a refusal of Britain to participate in the Concord and other plans—

There was no such suggestion and the hon. Member should not say that.

There was a suggestion by the hon. Members for Cirencester and Tewkesbury and for York (Mr. Long-bottom) that there was danger in this collaboration because Britain would be giving away a technological bargaining counter.

I said that there was a danger in an entanglement which would make it more difficult eventually to sign the Treaty of Rome or to join the Common Market.

As far as I am aware, no one has produced evidence to show that collaboration on research and development for the production of industrial products of the new industrial revolution would be a barrier to our entry. I was, therefore, a little alarmed by these warnings which were given. We attach great importance to this collaboration and I am glad to note that the right hon. and learned Member for Conway does.

It is an extension of a policy which the hon. Member inherited.

It is an extension of a policy which we inherited, but there is a new initiative in this field.

It will be necessary often on technical grounds for these schemes of industrial co-operation with Europe to be begun on a bilateral basis, but it is the Government's policy to achieve a greater measure of multilateral collaboration not only with France, but also with Germany, Italy and other countries of Europe and possibly of the Commonwealth, because it is important for us to ask ourselves not only whether Europe should unite but also the purpose for which Europe should unite.

That is why I regarded the speech of the hon. Member for South Angus as dangerous, because his conception of a separate centre of defence decisions in Europe is dangerous. I believe that it would wreck the Atlantic Alliance, would be divisive and might imperil the peace of the world. What we need is the most effective division of labour within the alliance. Certainly, as the years go by, the European part of the Atlantic Alliance will be strengthened. Inevitably, over the years there will be a stronger European idea within the Atlantic Alliance. But any proposal to set up separate centres of decision or separate European deterrents is opposed firmly by the Government. We regard it as a dangerous idea, which seems to be held by an increasing number of hon. Members opposite, that Britain can somehow buy off the French veto by having the British nuclear power in association with the French as a separate European deterrent.

Then we come to the question of political unity. I am not prepared to accept the proposition that discussions on the political future of Europe should take place in the restricted group of the Six. Inevitably, if they wish to have discussions, they can have them. I remind the House, however, that of the seven countries of the original Brussels Treaty of Western European Union, if Britain is out of step economically by not being in the Common Market, France is out of step on most issues these days on questions affecting the alliance and defence. Since I regard political unity as being as much a question of defence as of economics, I believe that Britain should assert her right to participate fully in any political discussions on the future of Europe.

Discussions of political union take place in restricted groups and we could end up by a hardening of the political division of Europe as well as a hardening of the economic division of Europe. In so far as my hon. Friend the Member for Hitchin is right and hon. Members opposite are right—that the problem of Britain's relationship with Europe is as much a political as an economic issue—it is important for us to continue to express our desire to participate.

Certainly, at the present time, Britain—and this would be true under a Conservative Government equally as under the present Government—is prepared to go as far in pooling sovereignty in the political union of Europe as the Six collectively. That is an obvious statement of fact in view of the known policy of the French Government.

Since the hon. Gentleman is making this important declaration of the Government's policy towards Europe, before completing what he is saying on the political relationships can he answer this one simple question: is it or is it not the desire of the present Government to join the European Economic Community as and when the opportunity offers?

As my right hon. Friends the Prime Minister and the Foreign Secretary have made abundantly clear, we seek the creation of a European Common Market to which the Six, Britain and other countries can belong. Alongside our declarations on defence policy, on industrial collaboration and on the need to make a success of the Kennedy Round, that constitutes not only an integrated policy for solving the immediate problem of the division of Europe between E.F.T.A. and the E.E.C., but also, as a result of the discussions in E.F.T.A. and our pressures through Western European Union and similar organisations for political discussion on the future of Europe, it offers the hope of building unity on a practical basis.

On the question of the declaration of intent, as I said earlier I regard the whole of my speech today as our declaration of intent both on the economic problem and on the political problem of Europe. At this moment, however, when there is obviously no chance of Britain's joining the Common Market, a declaration of intent to do something unspecified in unspecified circumstances would not be a constructive contribution to the discussions which are now taking place.

I hope that what I have said today will lead hon. Members, in all parts of the House, to wish us well in our discussions in E.F.T.A. to get a real unity of Europe in the not distant future.

I am grateful for this opportunity to raise today the question of the work of my hon. Friend the Member for West Bromwich (Mr. Foley) the Minister designated with the responsibility of co-ordinating the work of Government Departments in the absorption of our immigrant community. The appointment of my hon. Friend was widely welcomed, first, on personal grounds, because we know of his immense interest in the problem, and, secondly, because we knew in advance the immense energy that he would bring to it.

The problem with which my hon. Friend is coping is fairly simple to define, although it has many wide and difficult ramifications. We have about 1 million immigrants, two-thirds of whom have come here during the past 20 years. At the moment, Commonwealth immigrants number about two in every 100 of the population. This fact is not suffi- ciently realised outside. Many people think that the proportion is much higher. Even with the present rate of entry and the growth in the immigrant population by natural increase, the ratio will be only four in every 100 by the year 2000. This is not an enormous figure. It is much less in terms of total inflow than countries like France and Germany have coped with.

Our problem arises not because of the small total number, but because, first, of the intense concentration of these immigrants in about 30 towns. It is a problem of the 30 towns of Britain. I can best illustrate it from my City of Birmingham by pointing out that in the year 1977 one in every six school-leavers will probably be coloured. That is the sort of figure which epitomises the problem.

The situation is made worse because those 30 towns are the areas with large housing problems. They are also largely towns which have not had coloured immigration before. For example, there is not such a great problem in a city like Liverpool, which has had coloured immigration throughout the ages. Being a port, it has seen coloured seamen come and go. There is a bigger problem of absorption and understanding in a city like Birmingham, which has had immigration only rather late in its history.

Finally, it is a problem which arises from behaviour. We have had many people who have come from a different pattern of civilisation with, in some—not all—cases, lower standards in certain matters. We have to urge them to behave and accept our standards, very much as we have had to do even with white people who, in the 1930s, for example, came from slum areas to go into new housing estates. Gradually, we had as good neighbours to help them to find a higher standard and accept the better standards of those with whom they have moved in. This is the problem of the 30 towns and the accompanying social aspects.

I wish to put the following questions to my hon. Friend. He has begun the job of seeing what can be done to ease the absorption of these people. I apologise to my hon. Friend that most of my speech must be questions, but we want from him a progress report after the first two or three months of his work. Can he tell us, first, what sort of little department he has set up for himself in the Department of Economic Affairs to deal with the problems that he has been asked to tackle? Does he have a small number of civil servants working full-time on these problems, advising him and surveying the whole problem of immigration?

Will he tell us some of the impressions and ideas which he has gathered in his travels during the last two or three months? I should be interested to know what he felt after his visit to Holland and to know how the Dutch are organising—I use the word advisedly—the integration and absorption of people from Indonesia. Secondly, can my hon. Friend tell us about his travels in this country? I know that he has been going to what I call the 30 towns one by one. I should like to know whether this means that we can soon expect him to have plans to strengthen the network of local committees throughout the country helping with what we might call local conciliation and good race relations. I believe that there are about 21 such committees in existence. They need to be expanded. Has my hon. Friend come back with firm ideas of how to do it?

What is much more important, has he screwed some money out of the Treasury with which he might be able to help these committees to have welfare staff and to tackle the simple problem of establishing an office to which immigrants with problems can readily come? In my City of Birmingham, there is such an office already, but we could do with something much more. Other towns have nothing at all. Can we have some Government money for this kind of activity and can my hon. Friend hold out prospects of all this work being considerably expanded?

At the same time, what about the office of the Commonwealth Immigrants Advisory Committee under Miss Nadine Peppard, who has done such a wonderful job but who is really, if I may say so without offence, one man and a dog? She has a tiny office and one secretary. To have this immense job based on one and a half or two persons is quite inadequate. Can we have a thorough expansion?

My second group of questions concerns employment. I fully understand the Government's decision not to introduce into the Race Relations Bill, which is now being considered in Committee, provisions about discrimination in employment. My view in a nutshell is that the employment world—the trade unions and the employers—has its own representative institutions, which should be challenged to tackle voluntarily the job of ending discrimination in employment. We should, so to speak, give the unions and the employers a couple of years' notice that within that time they should solve the problem themselves, otherwise we may have to resort to fair employment practices legislation as in other countries. If we give them that challenge to do the job themselves, is my hon. Friend beginning to help them with it?

In particular, is my hon. Friend having consultations with the unions and with the employers about education of their members and the activities of their members to reduce discrimination in employment? Is he having consultations about the suggestion, which we have raised many times, that the big stores, Government Departments and places with employees in the public eye should begin, as a matter of deliberate policy, to have coloured employees so that the nation as a whole and all the world can see that it is our considered policy as a nation to have no discrimination in places of employment?

What has happened to the idea that we should begin to have some coloured police? I have seen the Questions recently in the House. Applicants have been turned down on various grounds. There was, however, an idea of bringing over, for example, some Jamaican police on an exchange visit with our own police and putting them on traffic duty in spectacular positions in various cities to show that we mean business. The Jamaican police are a fine body of men and an exchange visit of that kind would be very good.

I hope that very soon Her Majesty the Queen will give a lead in this and that on her State occasions and her official visits she will have, say, an aide-de-campe and army officers from Jamaica, the West Indies and Africa accompanying her to show that she is head of a multi-coloured Commonwealth. Her Majesty could give a very good lead in this way.

Further, what about apprenticeship? Has my hon. Friend managed to get an acceptance of wider opportunities of apprenticeship for coloured people, bearing in mind that one in six of all school leavers in Birmingham in 1977 will be coloured?

Most important of all, what about dispersal? Thirty towns cause the trouble. Can my hon. Friend hold out some hope of us having a system, perhaps linked with the voucher system, under which there will be greater dispersal of arriving immigrants?

I come to my fourth group of questions, which are about education. There are desperate needs for increased courses for teachers in the problems of immigrants and in the problems of the areas from which immigrants come. These courses should provide background information for teachers, thus enabling them the better to handle the immigrant children arriving. There is a need for special textbooks and for courses of training for teachers in the handling of immigrant children. At the moment, such courses are few and far between. Could we have more of them?

Lastly, what about the consultations which I hope my hon. Friend is to have—I heard a whisper about this—with the television and radio networks in this country with a view to improving the amount of radio and television time devoted to helping people to understand the problem of immigration, the problems of the areas from which immigrants come, their habits, their backgrounds? Above all, coloured people should appear on television doing jobs as ordinary people instead of being the coloured man who is suddenly thrust into the middle of a programme. There should be a coloured doctor or a coloured actor just behaving as an ordinary member of the public, instead of being the coloured man in the play. This would go a long way towards securing acceptance.

I could have asked many other questions, but I want to leave time for others to speak. We are trying to create a society without prejudice in these matters. My hon. Friend has had a couple of months to start his work towards this great objective. We shall be very in- terested indeed, and I am sure very delighted, to hear what progress he has made.

May I, first, congratulate the hon. Member for Birmingham, Northfield (Mr. Chapman) on securing this Adjournment debate. I, too, have an interest in many of the questions he put to the Minister.

The prospect of the Minister's being able to do an effective job in helping the two-way process of adjustment between our recent immigrant communities and our own way of life have been greatly enhanced by the Government's change of policy since the Second Reading of the Race Relations Bill. Now that the Minister's positive measures are to have as their background the process of conciliation, where clashes of interest occur, there is a far better prospect of his securing good will and collaboration in carrying them out.

I suggest that it can never be easy for a junior Minister, however vigorous and able, to co-ordinate policy and measures over spheres of action in which at least five different Cabinet Ministers have responsibilities—the Ministers of Labour, Housing and Local Government, Education and Science, and Health, as well as the Home Secretary. If this task of coordination had had to be undertaken in the face of clashes of interest between our immigrants and our own people, fought out in criminal proceedings in the courts, as the Government proposed on the Second Reading of the Race Relations Bill, the Minister's task would have been far more difficult and, I believe, far less congenial to him personally.

I am glad, therefore, that what our party urged, both in the debate on immigration on 23rd March and in the debate on the Second Reading of the Race Relations Bill, namely, that clashes of interest should be resolved by conciliation machinery and not by criminal processes, has led to this welcome change of Government policy.

In this I should like to pay tribute also to the work of the unofficial all-party committee, to the hon. Member for Northfield, who has put forward important Amendments, and to the Minister himself, who has, I believe, fought hard for the change of policy which the Government have now made—that is, since the Second Reading of the Bill.

Our party has made its policy clear. It has two sides. The one side has called for a drastic reduction of the entry of male workers who are voucher holders. This may seem a tough statement. It is meant to be. It is meant to provide time for us to adjust ourselves to the immigrant concentrations now found in 30 towns, as mentioned by the hon. Member for Northfield, and to the additional numbers as those wives and dependent children, who have not yet joined their husbands and fathers, come in.

On the other side, it has called for an equally tough programme for ensuring that, once here, immigrants should be treated in every way as equal citizens. It is in this spirit that we are discussing the Race Relations Bill. It is in this spirit that we welcome the appointment of the hon. Member for West Bromwich (Mr. Foley) as the Minister responsible for co-ordination. We await with interest his account of his responsibilities, the action he has been able to take, and his proposals for the immediate future. In particular, we want to hear what he is doing in relation to housing, health, education and, above all, fair employment.

I have been far from satisfied at the Minister of Labour's replies to my own questions about the access of immigrants to apprenticeship schemes and training schemes in industry. From my talks with a number of immigrants, I am sure that more could be done to make full use of the qualifications, both technical and often professional, that some of those immigrants who are now employed as skilled and unskilled labour have to give to this country.

Nor have I been satisfied by the replies to my questions by the Secretary of State for Education and Science about the steps he has been able to take or is planning to take, especially in helping immigrants, both children and adults, to improve their knowledge of English. I believe that a White Paper on immigration and education is due shortly. That will be very welcome. In the meantime, perhaps the Minister will indicate the main measures that he is proposing.

We welcome the appointment of the Minister to this task of co-ordination and we await with interest his first progress report.

I am very grateful for the opportunity to make a very brief contribution to this debate. As one who has played a small part in the establishment of an all-party approach to the problems of immigration, I warmly welcome the tone which was set by the hon. Member for Birmingham, Northfield (Mr. Chapman) in his excellent speech at the beginning of the debate and which was followed by my hon. Friend the Member for Dorking (Sir G. Sinclair).

Happily, there is now a wide measure of agreement between both sides of the House on the imperative need for a strict control of the further entry of immigrants. At the same time, having controlled the intake and contained the problem, I believe that we as a nation, both individually and collectively, must now face the need for a radically changed attitude towards those coloured immigrants who remain with us. This is why I so warmly welcome the work which is being done by the Minister and pay a sincere tribute to the humanity and common sense with which he is tackling the problem.

As the hon. Member for Northfield rightly said, it is important to put the problem in perspective. At the moment at the highest estimate 2 per cent. of the population are coloured immigrants. I refuse to believe that the British people are incapable of happily absorbing such a tiny proportion of coloured people into our national life. It is surely ironic that we as a great sporting nation should welcome cricketers from the West Indies once every three years and for five days share our interests and lives with them and their fellow countrymen and say what grand chaps they are and what a wonderful sense of humour they have, and as soon as the match is over both sides retire to their respective shells of insularity, indifference and sometimes open hostility.

In the sphere of employment I believe that a potentially dangerous situation is building up, particularly with regard to coloured school leavers because, as has been pointed out, they are steadily increasing in numbers and in some areas youth employment officers are finding already that the barriers of prejudice and discrimination are going up against these coloured youngsters who want to go into white-collar clerical jobs to which their G.C.E. qualifications entitle them. In industry great difficulty is being experienced in the admission of coloured youngsters into apprenticeship schemes. Has the Minister any plans short of legislation to deal with this problem and to avoid what I fear could build up into an explosive situation as a result of bitterness and resentment on the part of those who find themselves deprived of their opportunities?

I strongly reinforce the plea made by the hon. Member for Northfield about the use of the powerful and influential medium of television for the improvement of race relations. I, too, would like to see more coloured people invited to take part in general interest and current affairs programmes, not to discuss colour but to talk with specialist knowledge of, for example, scientific, legal and medical matters.

I also agree with the hon. Member that we want more coloured actors taking part in television plays and serials, portraying coloured people as ordinary people with ordinary emotions rather than angry agitators with racialist chips on their coloured shoulders. This happens at the moment and does a great deal of damage. I should like to know whether the Minister has had talks on this matter with the I.T.A. and the B.B.C. I am sure that we at Westminster have a special responsibility to get public opinion away from dangerous paths of racial prejudice and intolerance.

I congratulate the Minister who is, as it were, our spokesman in these matters, on the sympathy, enlightenment and understanding with which he is approaching his task, and I say with other hon. Members that we await his first progress report with lively interests and anticipation.

I should like to congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Northfield (Mr. Chapman) on introducing the Motion, and also to congratulate the hon. Members for Dorking (Sir G. Sinclair) and Bromley (Mr. Hunt) on their comments and to say how much I have appreciated in the past, and I hope will have cause to do so in the future, this kind of constructive approach to what is a difficult and delicate matter.

Whatever controversy there may be about numbers coining to the country, there ought never to be controversy on the attitudes which we take towards those who are at present in our midst. In particular, we should recognise that the vast majority of immigrants who have come from Commonwealth countries are here to stay and that, therefore, we ought to rethink our attitudes in the light of this.

One of the first things that I wanted to do when I was appointed was to try to assess the nature of the problems and examine some of the work that was being done. As my hon. Friend the Member for Northfield has said, I have made a number of visits to different localities where there is an appreciable concentration of Commonwealth immigrants. I have visited most of the London areas, the West Midlands, the West Riding of Yorkshire, and a series of towns like Nottingham and Gravesend. There is a number more which I must still visit.

The object in going to these places was to talk with the officials of the local authority, with elected representatives on councils, with voluntary organisations, leaders of the churches and councils of social service, and so on, as well as the leaders of immigrants' organisations, to try to get a picture of the nature of the problems in the community and what was being done about them. I also wanted to find out what more might be done and how the Government through their various Departments might be able to assist.

In addition, I have had talks with the High Commissioners and staffs from the countries of origin of the immigrants as well as talks in London with the national leaders of the Campaign against Racial Discrimination, the British Caribbean Association, and so on. One therefore starts with the tremendous advantage that there has been a great deal of work done by such bodies as the National Committee for Commonwealth Immigrants and its Advisory Officer, Miss Nadine Peppard, the Advisory Council on Commonwealth Immigration, under the chairmanship of Lady Reading, and the Institute of Race Relations.

I should like to give, first, broad impressions of what I have seen. Reference has been made to the location of immigrants. Here I must candidly say that people will move to a particular area, whether from the north-east of England, or from Scotland or from the Commonwealth to areas where there are employment possibilities. This accounts for the concentration in three or four areas of so many Commonwealth immigrants, and this creates and adds an extra strain on the already overloaded social services in those areas.

It would be wrong to pretend that there are no difficulties and problems. Serious and grave problems face local authorities who are trying to tackle this question, and there are difficulties for the immigrants, many of whom come from countries far away where the climate, the culture and their traditions are so different. Many who come from the Asian Sub-Continent have no English and their religion is entirely different. Many of them come from a rural background and are projected into the complexities of living in an urban society. There is a great need for help so that they may adjust and adapt themselves. We must devise ways and means of shortening this transitional period to the minimum.

Similarly, for the local-born community who receive the immigrants the assumption that nothing needs to be done and that they will just get on together is not correct. There is on the part of a small number a great deal of hostility, and on the part of the vast majority there is indifference. Yet at the same time, in talking with leaders of churches and voluntary bodies, one can discover the potential good will which is there to be harnessed and put to work. The work of local committees in this respect should be encouraged. They should play a rôle of effecting mutual understanding and creating a climate of good will and tolerance.

I should like to see these committees expanded in other areas. I have visited some local areas and found absolutely no dialogue whatsoever between the immigrant organisations and the local authorities or between the immigrant organisations and the local voluntary bodies. They exist in the same town, they work side by side with one another, but the immigrants live in a particular sector of the town, and the rest of the people are indifferent to their needs. The work of the local committees, where there is the involvement of the voluntary bodies, of the local authorities, and of the immigrant organisations, is in desperate need of extension and strengthening.

In response to a question raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Northfield, one of the tasks which I hope to undertake is to consider closely and sympathetically how we can expand these local committees and give them more urgency and meaning—

And more money.

The question of more money will be gone into in due course—and to examine carefully the kind of support required in terms of full-time personnel.

My hon. Friend the Member for Northfield raised a question about my own office. Hon. Members will recall that I was asked to take on this work in a personal capacity as the Chairman of a Committee of Ministers. I have managed to establish a small department of civil servants in the Department of Economic Affairs, which acts as a focal point in Whitehall. These people are working exclusively on these questions. This means that there can be more effective coordination of effort and day-to-day liaison with their opposite numbers in other Government Departments. Similarly I have contact with the Ministers from the Departments referred to by the hon. Member for Dorking—those responsible for housing, health, education, home matters, and so on.

Arising from my visits, there is constant reporting back and information, and individual Ministries are considering what more they can do in this respect. I have been impressed in my visits by the sincere efforts being made at what I might call the professional and technical level—by public health officers, welfare officers, directors of education, medical officers of health, and so on—but it seems to me that many of them are working in isolation, as if they are the only people dealing with this problem. I think that we shall find shortly that different Government Departments will promote dialogue and discussion and bring together people concerned with particular questions—medical officers of health, town clerks, and so on—who have a problem in their area so that they may pool their experiences and sort out how they can help each other and how the Government can give them support.

Similarly, the work being done by the National Committee for Commonwealth Immigrants has effected, on an informal basis, the kind of co-ordination effort required among local committees. I was fortunate to be present a short time ago at a national conference of representatives of such local committees. People were able to pool experiences and to consider what the next steps should be. The worst possible thing is that people in a given town should feel, "We have this problem. No one else is interested; no one else cares". The fact that they can be taken out of their isolation and have a dialogue at their own level with people doing the same kind of work is to be encouraged much more. It is this kind of simple approach which can be so effective in sustaining effort and encouraging new effort and ideas.

The Department of Education and Science will shortly be issuing, not a White Paper, but a circular to local authorities giving advice on the education of immigrants. It would be wrong for me to anticipate its contents, but I am sure that it will be a positive step forward. Included in this is the point raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Northfield about courses for teachers. My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Education and Science, in a statement in the House in March, said that the Department was organising a series of courses for teachers. I have discovered at least a dozen local authorities which are promoting such efforts. I have had discussions with some of the leaders of the National Union of Teachers who are concerned with this matter.

The cumulative effect is likely to advance new ideas because there is no textbook and no set formula for the teaching of English to immigrant children and adults. There is improvisation, unorthodox methods, imagination, and trial and error. I am pleased about and encouraged by the efforts made by teachers. I recall that at a school in Birmingham, Mr. Brazier and his staff have produced a primer in teaching English. This book has been built around the lives and experiences of five children—one from India, one from Pakistan, one from the West Indies, and two local born—who live in the area. I should like to see many more imaginative efforts of this sort.

I have had discussions with Lord Hill and Sir Hugh Greene about what further might be done in television and radio. Both were most sympathetic. Both are anxious about and recognise the rôle that television and radio can play in creating greater understanding and a better climate. As a follow-up to this, there will be meetings at which leaders of the immigrant organisations will be present so that we can get a cross fertilisation of ideas. I hope that this will be taken a stage further within a matter of weeks.

On employment, the difficulty is that of determining facts in relation to alleged discrimination. This is the kind of subject about which people often get very emotional and mix up fact and fiction. We need access to the real facts. The question of children leaving school and taking up apprenticeship is in its infancy. So far as we are aware of difficulties, we can take the necessary steps to meet them. The problem arises when there are established patterns and standards for apprenticeship entry at the age of 16. If someone of 18 years of age wants to serve an apprenticeship, this causes great difficulties. If the answer is "No", it is usually taken to mean that this is because of the colour of the person's skin. I have come across cases of sheer discrimination, but we are now starting to emerge from this difficulty.

It is evident from my discussions with them that youth employment officers and directors of education are anticipating the problem and planning for it. I hope that we will be able to solve these questions of discrimination. I place a great deal of hope in the work of local committees in creating a better climate of understanding. I hope that they will tackle questions like the positive promotion of normality of relationships both in work time and leisure time activities.

My right hon. and learned Friend the Home Secretary dealt fully with the question of coloured policemen when he spoke at Llandudno on 1st May at the annual conference of the Police Federation. His remarks were quite widely reported at the time, and I do not think that there is need for me to go into them further. The other suggestions of my hon. Friend the Member for Northfield are being processed and considered. I would like to think that decisions might be reached quickly on this, but there is a lot of consultation to take place.

The question of dispersal, of housing, is, I think, one of the most difficult issues of all to deal with. There is, in fact, no short-term answer to this. I have said, and I really believe this, that in so far as we establish a sensible economic plan on both a regional and the national basis then there will be, in turn, a much more even spread of people and we shall avoid the problems of heavy concentrations in one area or another. In the short term, however, the only thing which can be done by the Government—and this is being tackled by the Government—in areas of heavy concentrations of people is to refuse to give development certificates to industry. It is the only way to deter expansion and further movement into those areas. It is a matter which we have taken up, and taken up vigorously.

In terms of future dispersal, it is a question of what local authorities themselves may do in relation to their development programmes, slum clearance projects, loan policies, and so on. One way in which I think a good deal more could be done is through the development of housing associations of a multiracial kind, which can be the means of effecting dispersal.

But there can be no question of moving people from one area to another. Once a person is accepted in this country he is free to come and go where he likes, and we should be chasing an illusion if we were to imagine we can say to someone who has a voucher or is a dependant of a man who has already arrived here, "You can come, but you must not go to Birmingham; we will send you up to Newcastle"; because we live in a free society in this country, in housing and in jobs.

There is another reality. Solving our housing problem virtually means somehow developing an economic plan in which perhaps industry can itself develop without over-concentration in particular areas.

My final remark on this whole question is that it is, above all, a matter of education. No matter how much we may devise by legislation, we cannot legislate for people's consciences, and the question of race relations, to me, is a matter of conscience, of morality; it is a question of education. I would hope that through our membership of the House of Commons, through our membership of various Churches, through our association with voluntary bodies, we shall be able to give a clear lead, and demonstrate that it is only by our personal attitudes and personal involvement that we shall solve the question of living with people whose skin is of a different colour.

Here we are, within two weeks of the conference of Commonwealth Prime Ministers. It is the racial difficulties and differences and incidents which hit the headlines in the Press, and they are reported throughout the world. If we want to demonstrate that we are members of a multiracial Commonwealth we have to put our own house in order in this country, and efforts to this end by the Government, by the Churches, by the voluntary bodies must play an indispensable part. It seems to me that in these ways we can visibly demonstrate to the rest of the world that people of different religion and colour, now living here together, can live here together in peace are harmony.

The subject which I wish to raise is that of compensation for civil servants transferred under Government dispersal schemes. The particular aspect of that problem which I wish to draw to the atention of the Financial Secretary is the transfer of part of the Customs and Excise department from Lytham in Lancashire to Southend in Essex.

The office concerned is at present in Lytham, and many of its officers live in my constituency of Blackpool, next door, and representations have been made to me on behalf of those concerned by officers of the Society of Civil Servants and the Civil Service Clerical Association.

The history of this branch is rather unusual. It was evacuated from London in 1940. That was true of many departments, but unlike most evacuated offices it was not transferred back to London after the war, because it was included in the general dispersal plan which the then Government drew up in 1947. For this office that dispersal plan did not become a live issue until about 1959 when the Customs and Excise Department indicated that it was proposing to proceed to move to Southend, and in 1962 and 1963 about 100 of the officers at that branch were transferred to Southend, and the intention is that the rest, numbering about 170 officers, will be transferred to Southend early next year. I want to make it clear that the case which I am presenting concerns both groups of officers, those who have been transferred and those whom it is intended should be.

The result of this history is that those officers who are members of this branch in Lytham, who were members in 1940, have spent some 20 to 25 years of their working life in the Lytham and Blackpool area, and even those who have joined since that time, have tended to regard the Lytham office as virtually a permanent office. It is, perhaps, not a surprising thing, in view of the length of time it has been there. They have consequently adapted their way of life to that which prevails in that area.

But this branch is in a special position not only because of its history, but also—I believe, perhaps a unique position—in one other respect, because the move which is taking place and which will continue to take place is a move from a low-cost area of the country to what now—whatever may have been the position in 1947 Or 1948, of which I shall talk in a moment—is undoubtedly a high-cost area. This is, of course, the reverse of the usual trend. The normal dispersal move is a move from a high-cost area to a low-cost one.

This is obvious, because the whole object of the dispersal plan was to move staff out of London, which is clearly the highest-cost area in the country, to other parts. Moves have taken place to Guildford, Newcastle, Liverpool, Bath and many other towns, all of them lower-cost towns than London, the place from which the offices were transferrd. Other moves have taken place from one provincial town to another, for example, from Morecambe to Durham. I know, however, of no other move which is so clearly a move from a low-cost to a high-cost area, as this one is. Perhaps if the Financial Secretary knows of another such case he will tell the House about it.

Let me give one or two examples of the difference in cost. The most striking is that of house purchase. It is a fact that nearly all the officers at the Lytham office, those who have moved or those who will move, are house owners, and I believe that those who are house owners should be put in the position that after the move they can sell their houses in Lytham or the Blackpool area and buy other houses of a similar kind in Southend, without having to suffer hardship. Now the plain fact is that the cost of buying in the Southend area houses of a kind similar to those which these officers own in the Lytham and Blackpool area is between £1,500 and £2,000 more.

Understandably enough, none of these officers could provide that sort of money from his own resources. Even if 100 per cent. mortgages were available to them, they would clearly be paying a very much higher amount of mortgage interest than they have been paying heretofore. The rate of mortgage interest is now 6¾ per cent., and on £1,500 that is about £100 a year. That, of course, assumes that these officers are paying 6¾ per cent. on their existing mortgages in the Lytham-Blackpool area, which is not the case, because many of them have mortgages on which they have been paying a fixed interest of between 3¼ per cent. and 5 per cent., so they will be faced with an even greater difficulty.

The second example of extra cost is that of rates. Last year the average rate paid per domestic dwelling in Southend was £9 a year higher than in Blackpool. This year the rate in Southend has gone up by 9d. and that in Blackpool by only 5d. This is one of the figures which tends to show not only that the difference in the cost of living between the two areas is substantial, but that it is widening all the time.

Had this move taken place in 1947 or 1948, when the original plan was drawn up, it would not have been a move from a low-cost to a high-cost area. For one thing, in 1948 the cost of housing in the Blackpool-Lytham area was high. It had been inflated by the presence of 50,000 soldiers who have been billeted in the area during the war, by the evacuation of many firms and families from the South-East to the North-West, and also by the fact that it was impossible to take holidays abroad at that time, and, therefore, those who took holidays away from home went to that area in unusually large numbers. It is a very important fact that the cost of a freehold house in the Blackpool-Lytham area now is no higher than it was in 1948, and if the Financial Secretary is interested in following up that point, he might care to look at an interesting article in the Sunday Telegraph of 2nd May this year. In contrast, there is no doubt that the cost of housing in the Southend area has gone up by leaps and bounds.

What about the general cost of living in the two areas? Unfortunately, apparently no precise statistics are available which relate particularly to the two areas in which I am interested, but I have come across some figures which compare average household expenditure in the north-west region with that in the eastern region—the two regions in which the towns about which I am concerned are situated—in 1953–54 and in 1963–64.

They show that in 1953, that is 12 years ago, average weekly expenditure in the north-west was higher than in the eastern region. In 1963, the position was the other way round, and I would hazard a guess that the Blackpool-Lytham area is now about the least expensive part of the north-west area, and that Southend is one of the most expensive places in the eastern area. Thus, those figures, so far as they go, confirm my case, but in any event I would be surprised if the Financial Secretary were to contest my case on the ground that this was not a move from a low cost to a high cost area.

The Treasury argument in refusing compensation so far is that the comprehensive agreement which was signed in 1948 between the staff side and the official side of the National Whitley Council makes no provision for compensation in a case of this kind, so I should like briefly to mention what the 1948 agreement does.

First, the whole document deals with moves out of London into the provinces. This is not surprising because that, after all, was the object of the exercise. The object of the agreement was to obtain the consent of the staff side to the principle of dispersal from London. Secondly, the agreement recognised that moves of this kind of Government officers would create disturbances in family and social life for the officers concerned, and in order to persuade the staff side to accept the plan, the official side agreed that everything practicable should be done "to mitigate hardship".

Thirdly, as an inducement to the staff in London to move from London, the official side agreed that when staff were transferred to the provinces they would continue to receive their London rates of pay, which were higher than the provincial rates, until they were promoted. That is what is being done, for staff who are moved out of London.

What about the Lytham-Blackpool staff? Unfortunately, nothing comparable is being done, or, as far as I know, is intended to be done, for them. They will be repaid the actual costs of moving. They will be paid the transport costs, and the legal costs involved in selling one house and buying another, but the only help which they will receive which will aid them at all with the higher cost of living, and of housing, is something called an excess rent allowance, which, in my view, provides them with a sum which is derisory in relation to the extra expense in which they will be involved in Southend.

This excess rent allowance is generally available in the case of all moves where the officer is involved in additional expenditure, for example on rent, but it is intended to be only temporary. It diminishes rapidly over a maximum period of seven years, and my hon. Friend the Member for Essex, South-East (Mr. Braine), if he is fortunate enough to catch the eye of the Chair, will deal with that point in more detail. But even in the first year the maximum which this allowance provides is substantially below even the extra cost of mortgage interest and rates in which these officers will be involved, and, as I say, the allowance diminishes very rapidly thereafter.

The result of this situation is that officers transferred to Southend from the Blackpool area will suffer a double disadvantage in comparison with officers transferred to the same office from London. They will not be adequately compensated for the extra cost of living in Southend, nor will they get the added inducement to move which is provided for the London staff by the 1948 agreement. Officers from the Blackpool area and from the London area will be working side by side in the same office, and one can imagine the sort of effect on staff morale which that situation is likely to have.

This is a case in which the Government have a clear duty to provide special compensation, and I hope that the Financial Secretary will say that they will, but in the correspondence that I have had with him so far he has been reluctant to do so, and I must therefore face the prospect that he may still need to be persuaded. I should like, therefore, to deal briefly with a number of points which I expect he will put forward.

The right hon. and learned Gentleman may say that compensation in this case is not provided for in the 1948 agreement. That is true, but to rely on that argument is simply to go by the book, and to ignore the merits of the case. The reason it did not provide for compensation was that the possibility of a move from a low-cost area to a high-cost area in the provinces was at that stage not foreseen. I believe that had it been foreseen at the time of the 1948 agreement there is little doubt that the official side would have agreed that proper compensation should be provided. Simply to rely on the letter of an agreement signed 17 years ago is not a very satisfactory posture for any Ministry to adopt, least of all one which claims to have so much at heart the welfare of employees.

The Financial Secretary might say that the cost would be too great for the Treasury to bear. I do not think that that is an argument which would be tenable. According to my information, the cost of paying outer London rates of pay to the staff concerned until they are promoted would be less than £40,000, in total—not per annum. I am not suggesting that the solution of paying outer London rates of pay is necessarily the one that should be adopted, but I mention it to give an indication of the order of magnitude of the sum involved. The Financial Secretary might say that this would set a precedent. I do not believe that there is anything in that argument, because this case is a very special one. If the hon. and learned Gentleman knows of comparable cases, no doubt he will mention them.

The hon. and learned Gentleman might also say that any of these officers can have council houses when they get to Southend and need not incur the cost of buying a freehold property. My hon. Friend the Member for Essex, South-East will deal with that point also. However, I would point out that the 1948 agreement provides that before carrying out a transfer a Department must assure itself of the existence of reasonable accommodation of an appropriate kind. I suggest that "of an appropriate kind" must mean of a kind to which the officer is accustomed.

The Financial Secretary may say that, apart from this block move, there are many individual moves of civil servants from low-cost to high-cost areas happening all the time. I suggest that most cases are nearly all covered by one or other of the following categories. The first category is those who are being transferred as individuals on promotion, and in that case hardship does not arise because there is an inducement in the form of extra salary. The second category is young officers who are appointed from the provinces soon after they are recruited to serve in London for a brief time for training and experience, or young officers without family ties who are moved about the country to acquire experience. The third category is people, such as many in the Customs and Excise branch, who are moved from a low-cost to a high-cost area for a short time and then moved back from the high-cost to a low-cost area, thus making up on the swings what they lost on the roundabout.

The point about the move in question is that it is a move permanently to a high-cost area. I ask the Financial Secretary to accept that this is a special case and agree that the Government should act like a good employer. I have made some inquiries of private firms, and it is clear that a responsible private firm faced with this situation would feel it necessary to make some special arrangements to avoid hardship. I believe that the Government should not do less well than a private employer. I ask the Financial Secretary to consult his officials, if necessary, and come forward with a new offer to the staff side which will remove the legitimate anxieties from which these loyal civil servants are suffering and also the hardship which will be inflicted on them if nothing is done.

I support my hon. Friend the Member for Blackpool, South (Mr. Blaker) in his representations on behalf of the Customs and Excise staff who either have been transferred from Lytham St. Anne's to Southend or are under notice to move there before long.

Perhaps I might explain my interest in the matter, since Southend is not in my constituency. Some weeks ago representations were made to me by the local secretaries of the two staff associations concerned—the Civil Service Clerical Association and the Society of Civil Servants—both of whom are constituents of mine. In addition, while the new Customs and Excise offices are in the County Borough of Southend, a number of the officers already live in my constituency or are seeking to do so.

It goes without saying that civil servants must move wherever their duties take them. Individual officers moving on promotion get some recompense for any disturbance or discomfort that a move may cause them. For those moving en bloc, as in this case, the situation is different. But it is a happy tradition of the Civil Service that the staff side always co-operates with the official side when the public interest requires that either a whole department or some part of it makes a move of this kind.

Everyone to whom I have talked is generally agreed that the plan drawn up in 1947 for the movement of Government Departments from London to the provinces was fair to all concerned in the circumstances of the time. Indeed, there was some advantage to the civil servants involved, because of the arrangements which allowed them to retain London rates of pay and hours of work in their existing grades when moving to areas where the cost of living was lower than in London.

Of course, there is good social and economic sense in the policy of dispersal. In the memorandum of agreement drawn up between the official and staff sides of the Civil Service National Whitley Council in June, 1948, it was stated:

"The Government are concerned with the tendency for London to expand disproportionately and to attract employment and population at the expense of other parts of the country. Such a trend is detrimental to the best interests of London as well as of the country at large, and in the view of the Government, therefore, it is necessary that steps should be taken to check such developments by diverting to other parts of the country a proportion of the establishments which would otherwise or do now employ industrial and non-industrial workers in London. By such transfers of activity opportunities of employment outside London will be increased and diversified and a better social and economic balance in the country at large will be secured."

Developments in recent years have lent even greater emphasis to this sensible view.

The official side said in the agreement that it understood

"the natural reluctance and misgiving of the Staff side in regard to a plan which will inevitably create disturbance in the family and social life of a large number of civil servants".

And for its part the staff side recognised

"the necessity in the interests of the country as a whole of proceeding with a plan for dispersing part of the population of London to the provinces".

The official side agreed

"that everything practicable should be done to mitigate these hardships."

That was the agreement drawn up all those years ago. But the situation which my hon. Friend has described is in an important sense a reversal of what was envisaged in the dispersal agreement. It is a situation which I submit runs counter to the whole spirit of that agreement. I make no comment on the decision to move the Accountant-General's Office back from Lytham to Southend—an area which in terms of the cost of living might just as well be said to be in London itself—except to say that since 1947–48 the whole area of south-east Essex, not merely the County Borough of Southend, has changed enormously. The population has at least doubled. I have been faced with three Parliamentary constituency redistributions during that period.

House prices have risen substantially. As my hon. Friend said, about 100 staff were transferred about two years ago from Lytham and I understand that about 170 more are to move to Southend early next year. Unlike the moves envisaged in the dispersal agreement, this is one from a low-cost to a high-cost area. The implications of that for the staff concerned have been described by my hon. Friend and I shall not go over the ground again. He has accurately described the plight of those who have already moved and the anxiety of those who are to follow.

Some of those who moved in 1962 or 1963 are still in temporary accommodation. Some who understood that they were to get council houses are still in council flats, and it seems likely that they will stay there for a very long time to come. But the majority of these officers have been and wish to continue to be house owners. They are that sort of people. Those who have moved are finding it extremely difficult—I would say that it is now impossible—to obtain houses within the scope of their resources.

Accordingly, I wrote to the Financial Secretary on 14th April:

"I understand that this is the first time a move has been ordered which will oblige civil servants to sell their homes in a relatively low-cost area and to find new ones in a high-cost area, as mine appears to be. … It seems to me that there is an unanswerable case for granting the civil servants involved some compensatory allowance to make up for the considerable difference in house prices."

The Financial Secretary replied:

"So far as the people who prefer to purchase their own houses are concerned, it is true that prices in Southend are higher than in Lytham."—

This is an important admission—

"But establishing a home wherever his duty takes him is essentially an officer's personal responsibility, although under standing arrangements for compulsory transfers in the Civil Service generally, a substantial contribution to the extra costs involved is made in the form of legal expenses of house purchase, a lump sum 'transfer grant' and an 'excess rent allowance' which tapers off over 7 years, as well as payment of removal expenses."

When one examines what this substantial contribution is, the picture is quite alarming. The differentiation in house prices between the two areas in 1963 was about £1,000. That was large enough. Today it is between £1,500 and £2,000. Moreover, the TSR2 affair, which has had quite a savage effect on the prospects of many people living in Lytham St. Anne's and Blackpool has made the selling of homes there very difficult indeed. In Lytham, I am told, 12 or so terraced houses with two or three bedrooms, central heating and garage priced from £3,100 upwards were completed about two months ago. To date only one has been sold. In our area, houses are sold before they are built. Selling is as difficult in Lytham St. Anne's as it is easy in south-east Essex.

The additional mortgage interest, as my hon. Friend pointed out, means that a man will have to pay in excess of £100 a year, without taking into account the repayment of the additional capital involved. The Treasury contribution is based on a formula which falls far short of meeting this extra cost. The maximum in the first year will be £75, tapering off very rapidly and ending after seven years. The formula assumes no difference at all in local authority rates, whereas, as my hon. Friend pointed out, there is a difference. By no stretch of the imagination can this be described as a substantial contribution to officers disadvantaged in this way.

The Financial Secretary said in his letter:

"Establishing a home wherever his duty takes him is essentially an officer's personal reponsibility. …"

Quite so. Nobody quarrels with that, but there is also a clear obligation on the Government to ensure that hardship is avoided. Let me quote the Whitley Council agreement of January, 1959, which said:

"Bulk movements of staff should only be undertaken when there are compelling reasons, and it should be the objective of Departments in planning and implementing such moves to minimise dislocation and avoid hardship for staff affected."

The words used are not to "mitigate hardship", but to "avoid hardship", for the staff affected.

Clearly, this move is an exceptional one. The Financial Secretary said in his correspondence with me that he did not consider it so. I was astonished to find him saying that he did not think that it was an exceptional one. Is such a move contemplated anywhere else? This is, as I have said, a unique case. It is not one of moving officers from a high-cost to a low-cost area, but the reverse. It is not a case of officers being moved on promotion, but a move en bloc of people whose homes must be uprooted because of considerations of public policy. The decision here, if the Treasury has its way, is to inflict great loss on faithful public servants, and to cover it up on grounds of public necessity. This is an attitude—I am not mincing my words—which is mean and short-sighted. I cannot believe that the official side of the Customs and Excise approve.

I invite the Financial Secretary to say whether the Treasury has been asked by the Customs and Excise to treat its staff more favourably. I beg him, therefore, not to bring forward the usual argument, about creating precedents. After all the recent discussion about congestion in the South-East, I cannot envisage that a move of this kind will ever be contemplated again. I ask him to treat this case on its merits, and to let justice be done. I am sure that, on reflection, the Financial Secretary, who is a fair-minded man—we all recognise that—will see the justice of the case and that the very least he will do today is say that he is prepared to look at this matter again.

I am sure that the hon. Member for Essex, South-East (Mr. Braine) did not want to misrepresent the contents of my letter. I did not say that this case was not exceptional. I said that it was not so exceptional that I would be justified in departing from the established practice.

Perhaps we can go back to the beginning. I would say a word about that. We have this somewhat surprising situation where staff are being moved as part of a dispersal arrangement, from Lytham to Southend, which is the reverse of the normal direction of removal and dispersal which this Government, at least, are trying to achieve. I should explain that it is part and parcel of a major operation to move well over 1,000 of the Customs headquarters staff from London to Southend. These are the staff of the Accountant and Controller General's Department. In the interest of efficiency that part of that Department which was transferred to Lytham from London in 1940 is being reunited at Southend with the remainder of that Department. This is the reason for it.

If I am asked why there is a dispersal move from London to Southend in the south-east area, I can only say that it was a decision of the previous Government, who, in their dispersal policy at that time, were concerned only to relieve the pressure on London. Some may think that they adopted a somewhat passive attitude towards the drift to the South-East. We are endeavouring, wherever we can—it is not always possible, of course, when there is a question of a dispersal from London—to try to get the dispersal right out of the south-east area. We are bound by the decision which has already been made. There can be no question of altering this dispersal move which has been agreed for a long time—

rose—

I am sorry. The hon. Member left me very little time—

We started late.

I know we started late, but I have been left only 10 minutes.

As I was saying, we could not alter these dispersal arrangements. They involve lengthy and complicated negotiations with the staff side. Agreements are reached, people make arrangements based on these agreements, and there can be no question of altering that now. As has been said, a considerable part of the move has taken place already, including the removal of one hundred people from Lytham to Southend.

I am asked why, since this is a somewhat exceptional operation, we cannot give special treatment to these civil servants. We must see these removals in perspective. For the reasons I shall explain, the numbers involved who are faced with the housing difficulties to which reference has been made—and I do not wish to minimise the difficulties—have been reduced to about 40 out of a total staff of about 70, not 170, who, at the maximum, may yet have to remove from Lytham to Southend. These 40, one must realise, are from a total of about 15,000 civil servants who are moved every year from one part of the country to another. This is a regular, well known and accepted aspect of life of civil servants; that they may from time to time be required to move.

This affects some Departments more than others and perhaps the Customs and Excise is one Department in which these moves are more frequent. Unfortunately, there are considerable differences in the cost of housing and the cost of living between different parts of the country. Consequently, it is by no means exceptional that there are large numbers of people who are obliged to move from low cost to high cost areas every year, including people who are not in the three categories referred to by the hon. Member for Blackpool, South (Mr. Blaker). There are family men who are moved without promotion and on a permanent basis, from low-cost to high-cost areas.

There are the most detailed arrangements to assist officers in these circumstances. They have been the subject of long and detailed negotiations with the staff side of the National Whitley Council and are the subject of agreements.

I come to the specific case of the move from Lytham. The Customs and Excise has done, and will continue to do, everything it can, in conjunction with other Departments in the area and with the Treasury, to keep to the minimum the number who have to move their households. Every effort has been made to find comparable jobs elsewhere in the area for those who do not want to move and some of those who have been appointed more recently have houses in the Southend area and are now serving temporarily in Lytham in anticipation of the transfer to Southend.

By means of these and other expedients, and excluding single people who do not have the same housing problem, the number involved with these housing difficulties has, as I say, already been reduced to about 40 out of the total complement yet to be moved, and 100 have already gone.

We recognise that some householders will have to move if we are to achieve this reunion of the Department at Southend with the gain in efficiency which that will achieve. It must not be thought that these people are objecting to moving in principle. The great majority of them have expressed their willingness to move but have expressed considerable worry and anxiety about the extra housing costs with which they will be faced.

I realise that people who have been home owners generally want to remain home owners. I accept that and I do not wish to make any false points about it. However, the Southend Corporation has been co-operative in this matter and any people who must make the move, and who are unable to find or who do not wish to embark on the responsibilities of buying a new house in the Southend area, will be able to obtain either a flat or a house to rent from the Council. There is adequate accommodation available.

The main question I am asked is why we cannot give these people exceptional compensation. The prime reason is that essentially they are not in a different position from a great many other civil servants who must move their houses in the ordinary course of everyday transfers. Many of these moves are taking place from less expensive to higher cost areas, just as many are moving the other way, from high-cost to low-cost areas, and are, therefore, benefiting from that.

Reference has been made to what is available in the way of assistance. It includes not only assistance with legal expenses and house agents' fees relating to the sale of the old house, the costs of removal and storage charges for furniture until a new house is available, but also there are allowances for the extra cost of temporary accommodation until a permanent home can be found and lump sum transfer payments and miscellaneous expenses over and above the ordinary costs of removal ranging from £60 to £165, depending on salary and size of family.

Legal expenses are paid relating to the purchase of a new house and, in addition, there is the rent allowance which is something of a misnomer because it covers not only the rent but the equivalent of mortgage payments at the new station. This will, broadly speaking, make up the difference, to a maximum of £75, for the first two years, after which it tapers off, being reduced by one-sixth, until the final payment is made in the seventh year. This affords, certainly in the initial stages, a substantial contribution to the additional costs of the housing. We were given the figure of £1,500 as the sort of difference that there is between Lytham and Southend and I would not challenge that figure. But the assistance which is given will go a long way towards meeting that difference, certainly in the early years.

It is said that these people will be working side by side with ex-London staff who will retain the London rates under the 1948 agreement. This is something which arises in many cases as a result of that special dispersal agreement which was reached with the staff side covering dispersals from London. In almost every case where staff are transferred they will be working side by side with locally recruited staff or staff moved from elsewhere other than London, who do not enjoy this privilege and who will be getting less pay.

I was asked for specific examples where this could occur. There is a removal about to take place. It is the dispersal of the Ministry of Public Building and Works from London to Hastings. They will be working together with staff who have been moved across the country from Portsmouth as well as some staff from from other regional offices. If it is said that Portsmouth is still in the South and that higher prices prevail there, I could quote the example of the General Register Office, where staff were moved from London to Titchfield, which is between Fareham and Southampton, retaining their London pay and hours. Others were moved from Southport, which is near Lytham, and are working side by side with the dispersed staffs from London without alteration in their preferential rate of pay and hours.

I could not, therefore, accept that we are considering an exceptional situation. If one considers the civil servants in the same town, though not in the same office, it would be a very frequent situation. In any place where one has dispersed staffs from London there will be many civil servants in the same town of the same grade with different rates of pay. These are the reasons why I do not feel I can make a special exception in the case of these officers.

I do not want to give any impression that I am insensitive to their problem. I realise that they are faced with a real problem which, unfortunately, occurs to many people in the Civil Service when they are moved from low cost to high cost areas, and it is one which we make every effort to minimise and mitigate. We have tried to reduce the number of such cases to the minimum and that has been done. Great efforts have been made in this case, but I do not think it would be right for me to intervene in these circumstances and authorise a special compensation payment which would not be available to other Civil Servants in a like situation.

I suppose that the most intractable social problem facing us today is housing. This has been referred to in the previous debate. No political party has yet devised a satisfactory solution to it.

Order. The hon. Gentleman must speak up.

A very unusual request.

The Tory Party in the last 13 years had a cruel prejudice against local authority building for renting purposes. The building industry in that period was let loose to build increasingly for the deeper purse. A stone's throw from where I live, in the Dulwich area, houses were going up for £15,000 to £20,000 each. This did not do very much to solve the kind of housing problem of the people I represent. This was the kind of policy which was pursued by the Tory Party and increasingly intensified over the last 13 years. So far as one can see, irrespective of whatever Government are in power there will be a mixture of private house-building for sale and building by public authorities for letting purposes.

Quite rightly, Parliament allows considerable freedom to local authorities in the formulation and implementation of their housing policies. In any event, if there are abuses in the public sector they can be ventilated adequately and publicised and the electorate, if they wish, can change the policies of the public authority of which they disapprove. This is not possible in the private sector. There the buyer and the seller are left to the tender mercies of private enterprise profit-making concerns. It is in this field that the consumer needs the greatest protection. I talk about the buyer and the seller as the consumer for this purpose. It is precisely here where the consumer gets the least protection. Indeed there is less protection in the buying or the selling of a house than there is in the buying of a loaf of bread.

The transaction of buying or selling a house is usually, for most people, the biggest single business transaction that they are ever likely to engage in, very often employing all their capital, down to the last penny. Because the consumer does not do it very often, maybe once or twice in his lifetime, he knows very little about the snags or traps that may be laid or the mistakes he can make. Due to a combination of circumstances such as full employment, which we have enjoyed more or less continuously since the end of the war, early marriages and an increased birthrate, a seller's market has been created since the war, especially in the big cities and conurbations.

As a consequence of that, there have been continuous increases in house prices and there seems to be no reason at all to suppose that this is going to come to an end in the immediate future. According to the bulletin on house prices issued by the Co-operative Parmanent Building Society in February, 1965, in the last five years from the final quarter of 1959 to the last quarter of 1964 the prices of existing houses, not new houses, increased by almost 50 per cent. The exact figures are 49 per cent. for the modern type and 48 per cent. for the older house.

In London the increase has been about 70 per cent. For modern houses it has been 74 per cent., and 69 per cent. for the older houses. It is in these lush pastures that the housing estate agents flourish. That they do flourish is evidenced by the fact that new agents appear like mushrooms all over the country, especially in towns and cities. Entry into this business is completely unregulated. No qualifications whatsoever are required. Any man or woman can set up as an estate agent. This is private enterprise at its naked worst. At Question Time in this House on 28th April I described it as

"… one of the biggest rackets in the land today."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 28th April, 1965; Vol. 711, c. 449.]

The hon. Gentleman the Member for Harrow, Central (Mr. Grant) got up to defend it.

Since then I have received considerable correspondence, some of which I intend to quote this afternoon. Predictably, most of the estate agents who wrote to me objected to my remarks, some of them in more violent terms than others. I want to quote one of the more violent and more prejudiced letters, from Folkard and Hayward of Baker Street which says:

"… despite the fact that the Government rejected the registration of properly qualified estate agents"—

they did not do anything of the kind in fact—

"with the result that any layman can set himself up as an estate agent, in fact very few unqualified agents find that they can effect business at less than the scale of commission laid down by the professional bodies of the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors and the Chartered Auctioneers' and Estate Agents' Institute and their two kindred associations … the vast number of agents who are properly qualified offer to the members of the public who are sufficiently discerning to use their services, as opposed to the unqualified touts, a reliable service of great integrity."

Then the political bias of this agent is laid bare:

"It is high time you directed your efforts towards ensuring that those members of the community who stand on their own feet by living under their own roof, that save the tremendous rate burden most largely arising as a result of having to subsidise, whatever their means, thousands of the privileged class that have been given the golden rent shake in the form of a council house."

Will my hon. Friend tell the House what qualification an estate agent, as distinct from a valuer or surveyor, is supposed to have?

Under present legislation, no qualifications are required. A man can enter the business without being qualified. My hon. Friend could enter it—I do not know why he does not—

I know that the hon. Member for Fife, West (Mr. William Hamilton) wants to be quite fair. He is correct in saying that there is no statutory obligation to have qualifications, but we should not lose sight of the fact that a very great number of agents go through very rigorous examinations set by the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors, and others.

I do not want to be unfair, but the hon. Gentleman may agree with me when I say that the estate agents in general are all being a tarred with the same brush. Their image is not as good as possible, because a minority of them are unscrupulous—I do not know whether it is a minority or a majority, because I cannot prove it one way or the other. Later, however, I shall make some suggestions which I think are worth while. Public attention should be focused on the abuses that undoubtedly go on.

The National Association of Estate Agents asked me to quote cases. The letter said:

"I shall be interested to learn of any cases that may have been reported to you regarding overcharging by estate agents, or any other matter which would justify your calling this business a racket."

I propose to do just that.

In certain cases, I shall not identify the writers as I do not have permission to do so, but a Mr. W. of London W.9 states:

"I have spent a fortnight seeking an unfurnished flat in London. All the house agents I have visited charge either 10 per cent. of the first year's rent or a month's rent. Thus for a flat rented at £500 a year, their fee would be either £50 or £41 odd. Whether they charge a student seeking a furnished 'bedsitter' at the same exorbitant rate, I cannot say. Their fees are out of all proportion to the services rendered".

I have a letter from a Mr. W., who lives at Pagham Harbour, near Bognor Regis. He writes:

"For the last twenty years estate agents have experienced a boom. During almost the whole of that period there has been a 'sellers' market' and agents have become accustomed to expect high rates for little work … If a report on the property has to be done, the agent charges extra fees. He also gets extra fees for introducing the applicant to a prospective mortgagee—building society or otherwise. No legal work has to be done by the agent since a solicitor prepares the contract".

Mr. W. also talks about misleading advertisements of houses, to which I shall also refer later.

One estate agent has given me permission to use his name. I suppose that he will not be very popular with the rest of the estate agents, but Mr. H. F. Bath, of Allan and Bath, Bournemouth, writes:

"In consequence of the publicity given to your allegation of the racket of estate agents' charges, which appeared in the Daily Express recently, I immediately wrote a letter to the Editor of the Daily Express which was duly published and in which I complained that there was a racket going on with regard to the charges, and I support your allegations wholeheartedly."

Mr. Bath gives me a whole lot of further information, with which I shall not bother the House now.

The scale of charges is recommended—it is not statutory—by the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors and the Chartered Auctioneers' and Estate Agents' Institute. My point has always been that the recommended fees bear no relationship whatever to the work done. The charge is 5 per cent. on the first £500 of the sale price; 2½ per cent. on the next £4,500, and 1½ per cent. on the remainder of the price. That means that on a house selling at £2,000, the estate agent collects £62 10s.; on a £3,000 house—£87 10s.; on a £5,000 house—£137 10s.; on an £8,000 house—£182 10s., and on a £10,000 house, £212 10s. That is just for the selling of a house—

Would not my hon. Friend agree that in contrast to or in association with the racket of lawyers' services for conveyancing, registration, and all that nonsense, these charges are not unreasonable?

I am aware that my hon. Friend tried to get one of these debates in order to deal with that very point. In fact, this was to have been a collective exercise to focus attention on the needless costs imposed on people seeking houses. My hon. Friend had hoped to deal with the legal side, and I am dealing with the house agent aspect. My hon. Friend did not succeed in getting a debate, but he has made his point.

In this context, I want to quote a letter from someone in Hailsham, Sussex. These are not Labour areas, but areas where people find great difficulty in getting houses. Before I read the letter, I want to point out that the fees vary a good deal from one part of the country to another. Generally speaking, the fees charged are very much higher in the South-East than elsewhere, because the discrepancy between demand and supply is that much greater in the South-East that advantage is taken of it.

The letter I will now quote is from a gentleman who was brought to court by a well-known firm of estate agents for non-payment of advertising and out-of-pocket expenses incurred by the firm in an unsuccessful attempt to sell his property in the Midlands. The action failed—this gentleman won his case. He says:

"You may be interested to learn that estate agents in London and the South charge a scale fee (but different to the Midlands) if the sale is effected, they charge advertising only by special arrangement in exceptional circumstances. In the Midlands, however, 'It is the accepted practice of reputable house agents to charge their advertising and out-of-pocket expenses whether the house is sold or not—if the property is sold by them then these costs plus 2 per cent. commission on the value of the property (up to £10,000) is charged'."

The writer goes on:

"I agree with you wholeheartedly that such people derive too great a return for very little effort, indeed under this system, the more inefficient the agent, then the higher the expenses charged to the vendor, this is very wrong and requires exposure on a national scale."

When I made the charge in the House a few weeks ago, the hon. Member for Harrow, Central quite rightly said that no one is obliged to sell his house through an estate agent. If one tries to sell privately one finds that the agents go round and tout for business or they send an undercover agent to try to get the vendor to put his house into the hands of an estate agent. They advertise the bait of generous mortgages, sometimes quite falsely. They advertise 95 per cent. mortgages, and the young couple go along thinking that they will have to pay only 5 per cent. of the purchase price, only to find that they are hundreds of pounds short and that they are put to all sorts of expense, anxiety and disappointment as a consequence. Some of them try to give an impression that they have a tie-up with building societies. Some of them may have such a tie-up for all I know, but they certainly try to give this impression.

Many people see the use of the estate agent as the easy way, if not the only way, of buying or selling a house. If they are buying, the estate agent provides a very ready access to the prevailing market. I accept that at once. But it means an enormous duplication of effort and information. One has only to have experience of it—and I have had such experience—to know what it means. One goes to several agents and says, "Send me details of three-bedroomed semi-detached or detached houses", and one is then deluged with information, enormously duplicated, with six or seven agents all pushing the same information into one's letter box. It is argued by the estate agents that the fees must cover the abortive activities in which they engage, but this system ought to be examined if for no other reason than that it is grossly wasteful of manpower and time.

That brings me directly to the second complaint of false advertising. Nowhere is this so blatant as in the private housing market. The claims of the manufacturers of washing powders and detergents are models of accuracy, reticence and modesty compared with estate agents' advertising of houses. The seller of the house does not object if his house is described in the most outrageously glowing terms, and the estate agent who is keen to get the highest fee possible is a very willing partner in this duplicity. The terminology which they use has long been a music hall joke. "Rural aspect" very often means that it is miles from anywhere, with mud up to one's knees. "two minutes from shops and station" means anything up to half-a-mile or a mile an Olympic runner could not do it in the time. "A kitchenette" means that there is not enough room to swing a cat. "Quaint old-world cottage" means that it is a mystery how it stands up at all.

I quote a letter from Truro in this connection:

"I therefore hasten, before the big moment with Mr. Jay arrives.."—

I have a Question down to my right hon. Friend the President of the Board of Trade—

"to add a few of my own recent experiences of this sort of thing."

The lady who has written the letter explains what she found when she followed up advertisements. One advertisement reads, "comprising two bedrooms". She says,

"Up the stairs was a landing with a bed and a cupboard on it. Leading off this landing was one bedroom approximately 12 feet by 6 feet."

The advertisement said "useful outbuildings". The lady says that these were

"a row of tumbledown corrugated iron sheds with leaking roofs and muddy earth floors."

The advertisement said, "two greenhouses". She says,

"These were mock-up lean-to wooden frames covered with some sort of plastic sheeting. A moderately strong wind would have blown them down."

The advertisement stated:

"the rear of the house is screened by a small wood".

That sounds very romantic. The lady says:

"The house was built right against the foot of a steep bank, almost a cliff, going up some 60 or 70 feet, with a few stunted trees growing on it".

"Mains electricity and own water".

What did that describe?

"A pump and a well down the lane used by everybody who required 'own water.'"

The lady said:

"I have also seen a property advertised as 'on the outskirts of St. Austell with splendid views over open country, as far as Bodmin Moor on a clear day.' This was plumb in the middle of the china clay workings, most of the views being of high mounds, almost hills, of clay and sand which accumulate in these areas."

This is the kind of advertisement which estate agents use. They send a man round to the house and then they get their romantic script writers in their offices to do the work. People are involved in enormous expenditure of time and effort going round these houses and being progressively disillusioned as they try to marry the description with the realities. I will leave it at that. We all know the kind of abuse that this involves.

The third complaint which I make relates to deposits requested by estate agents. Some shocking examples of this were quoted by the hon. Member for the Isle of Ely (Sir H. Legge-Bourke) when introducing his Estate Agents Bill on 22nd March, 1963. He quoted an article in the Sunday Pictorial of about that time which estimated that £1 million had been lost in 1962 by this means. Some hair-raising examples were given by the hon. Member who introduced the Bill on that occasion. The figure is probably greater today. This is three years after that debate took place. In any event, the evil still exists and will continue to exist in the jungle in this sector of private enterprise which is unchecked and unregulated.

That brings me to the last point. The Bill to which I referred was debated in March, 1963, and was talked out. It received support from both sides of the House, although there was a good deal of opposition to it. I was opposed to it on several grounds. First of all, it was much too complicated, and I believe is much too complicated, for a private Member to handle. Secondly, the Bill as drafted said nothing whatever about fees, and I think that fees are a considerable part of my objection and the objection of many other people outside the House. That Bill seemed to have been designed by a professional body to create a closed shop, a private monopoly, not designed to protect the public but designed to protect the profession.

What I suggest to my hon. Friend is fairly simple—namely, that local authorities should be permitted to conduct estate agency business in housing. They should be allowed and encouraged to keep registers of houses available for sale, and people who wish to buy houses should be able to go to the town hall or the local authority office and to get names and addresses of property and accurate descriptions of them made by local authority officers who have no particular axe to grind. This is not to say that estate agents should not continue to exist, but the Government should take action to reduce and standardise the fees, to establish a registration or licensing board of control with representatives from all the existing professions and institutions—

Order. I think that the hon. Member is getting rather far into a discussion involving legislation, which is almost the only topic of which I can think which he may not discuss.

I am obliged, Mr. Speaker. I thought that I was getting very near the line. Perhaps I might make the other two points which I wish to make which I should like my hon. Friend to consider—the establishment of a much stricter code of conduct and ethics, which I believe would not necessitate legislation, and to require compulsory insurance of all estate agents against dishonesty or fraud.

As my hon. Friend the Member for Woolwich, West (Mr. Hamling) pointed out, this is only a relatively small part of the problem involved in the sale or purchase of a house. Solicitors' fees, mortgage interest charges, surveyors' fees and the rest all combine to make the burden of house purchase increasingly intolerable. It seems to me and to many other people that there are many stables to be cleaned out in this sector of our national life. To the extent that the Government do this job thoroughly and fairly, they will earn the gratitude of millions of our citizens. I should like from the Government a firm and categorical assurance that they will do precisely that.

I shall be very brief. I listened with much amusement to the descriptions of advertisements given by the hon. Member for Fife, West (Mr. William Hamilton), but I remind him that these agents were acting solely for the seller and not for the buyer and that the buyer pays no commission at all. He is entitled to instruct an agent to represent him to cut through this procedure. I am certain that the hon. Member would not like to employ an agent who advertised, "Ramshackle hovel near Westminster for sale by Labour M.P. who will shortly be leaving the House".

That would not be accurate.

I, as a practising solicitor, know probably better than does the hon. Member that there are a small number of bad, dishonest and disreputable agents who are guilty of all the things about which he complained, such as touting, misleading advertisements—all practices condemned by the professional bodies which represent the vast majority of responsible agents. It should be noted that it is mostly the minority of bad agents who charge considerably higher commission than the scale laid down by the reputable bodies. There are many more good agents than there are bad, and in my experience very few of them have to sue for their commission. In my professional experience many of them have no complaints from their clients and their clients come back to them again.

Apart from a small increase in 1958, the commission has not been increased for about the last 50 years. Although it is on an ad valorem basis and rises with the value of the property we should not lose sight of the fact that overheads, including rent, rates, staff and motor cars and all the other essential features of an estate agent's business, have gone up rather more than the value of property, so that in that sense estate agents are not necessarily any better off. Moreover, the rate of commission in this country is rather less than it is abroad, including America and Europe.

There is no need for anyone to use an agent, but it is usually found that by doing so a better price is obtained, anxiety is avoided and the citizen is relieved of many of the negotiating problems. That is precisely why the public feel that it is worth while to pay this commission and to use an agent, and the vast majority are completely satisfied.

I am surprised that the hon. Member did not mention that the greatest trouble, apart from touting and misleading advertisements, which members of the public suffer from disreputable agents is the fact that they are the sort of people who are condemned entirely by the nine professional bodies. I refer to the agent who gets an innocent person to sign a committing document without obtaining proper legal advice. This practice is condemned not only by the legal profession but by the reputable estate agents. The best advice to people who go to buy a house at an agent's office is to leave their fountain pens and pencils behind and not to sign anything. If an agent persuades people to sign a contract, one can almost certainly guarantee that he is one of those who do not belong to a professional body and who are condemned by such bodies and over whom statutory control would be useful.

We have all enjoyed the hilarious speech of the hon. Member, but he fell into the trap of condemning a large responsible and respectable body of people because of dishonesty and disreputability on the part of a small number. The hon. Member said that he had no figures, but I can tell him that between 1947 and 1957 there were about 18 convictions a year against estate agents for fraud. That is a remarkably small proportion. The matter should, therefore, be kept in perspective. It would be most misleading if this debate gave the impression that bad agents were anything but a small and much publicised minority. The vast majority are respectable, honest, responsible people rendering a valuable service to the public.

My hon. Friend the Member for Fife, West (Mr. William Hamilton) has earned for himself a reputation for being outspoken and courageous. Today, he has rendered a service by bringing to the attention of the House a matter which is of the utmost concern to every family in the land. People who never thought that they would want to sell their house sudenly find themselves requiring the service of professional people, and the question of the fees to be charged is one that for many reasons causes anxiety in the minds of those who are about to buy their own homes.

The hon. Member for Harrow, Central (Mr. Grant), to whom I am grateful for being so brief, rather concentrated his argument accordingly, but I do not agree that my hon. Friend had abused the whole profession. He indicated rather that he was speaking of a part of the profession and I had the feeling that he was calling for certain controls because a minority is able to abuse the existing position.

It is true that any man can put up a plate outside his house and call himself an estate agent without any knowledge of property; and that however dubious his record might be the police cannot interfere. He can establish himself as an estate agent. No one is more disturbed about this than the reputable estate agents themselves.

I suppose that all of us have from time to time received representations from the Chartered Institute, from the Chartered Land Agents' Society, or the Chartered Auctioneers and Estate Agents asking for action to be taken to prevent this abuse. As Mr. Speaker has reminded us, however, in this Adjournment debate we have to deal with things as they are, for legislation is out of the question. There is, therefore, very little that we can do.

My hon. Friend spoke about excessive fees. There is no statutory control over the fees that can be charged. People would be wise, when they enter into negotiations with any estate agent, to have an understanding at the beginning of what the fees are likely to be. As my hon. Friend has been told before, this question is now being considered by the Government as part of the general review of the cost of house purchase on which we are embarked. The Government seek to establish as best they can grounds for helping to reduce the cost of house purchase, but, first, we have to undertake this major review.

Sometimes it is suggested, and it seems to have been in the air today, that the fees to be charged should be related to the proportion of work done rather than to the price of the house and that, somehow, it is wrong for the fees to be related to whether a house costs £10,000 or £2,000. This could lead to difficulties, particularly for the sellers of small houses, upon whom a heavier burden would fall. There would be an element of uncertainty, even more than there is today, because no one would know what the fee would be likely to be at the end of the day, and nobody has yet been able to establish how we can calculate the amount of work that is done professionally by an estate agent in the selling of a house, what inquiries he undertakes and the other work in which he is involved.

I understand that estate agents make their charges only on completed transactions, but there are many abortive transactions. People come to make inquiries and an agent's office has to be kept open for them. Obviously, all this is added into the question of the fee that an agent ultimately charges.

My hon. Friend raised the question of deposits and referred to the hon. Member for the Isle of Ely (Sir H. Legge-Bourke), who had indicated that £1 million was lost in 1962 by those who had placed deposits. Again, from both sides of the House, hon. Members will know of people struggling to buy their homes who have fallen into the hands of unscrupulous people and have lost their deposit. I have tried to help such people myself in the City of Cardiff when this has occurred, not too often, but from time to time.

The misappropriation of funds is, of course, a criminal offence and could be dealt with in that way, but I cannot see how the sharp practice which unscrupulous agents might adopt could be corrected without legislation. There are no remedies open to the Home Office or to any other Government Department under the law as it stands.

I turn to the question of misleading advertisements. Like my hon. Friend, I find pleasure from time to time in reading advertisements of houses that I know. I recognise them because I know the address and not by the description which is given. I assure the House that my right hon. Friends the President of the Board of Trade and the Minister of Housing and Local Government are both embarked upon considering whether it would be appropriate to extend the scope of new legislation which is being prepared on trade descriptions to include houses and advertisements for houses.

The Advertising Standards Authority, which is the voluntary system of control within the advertising industry, is prepared to look into cases of misleading advertising of all kinds with the appropriate professional body. My hon. Friend reminded us that he has tabled a Question for answer later in the month on this subject. Some of these advertisements are so misleading that I believe that the public divide by three or four when they see advertisements. In any case, anyone would be foolish to enter upon a transaction without seeing for himself, although, as my hon. Friend said, it can lead to a lot of cost when people travel to view property upon which otherwise they would not have cared to waste their time.

My hon. Friend made the constructive suggestion that local authorities should conduct estate agencies themselves. At that point, Mr. Speaker, you drew our attention to the fact that legislation would be required. My hon. Friend suggested that local authorities might have a register of small houses for sale. This, I suppose, could be possible without legislation, though it is not very likely. My right hon. Friend the Minister of Housing and Local Government is at present considering this possibility. He is pursuing the matter with the local authority associations and with a number of local authorities themselves. He is considering the possibility of estab- lishing registers in selected areas on an experimental basis. It is possible that we shall find a new chapter in the business of estate agency if this experiment is entered upon and if it succeeds.

I remind the House that there are difficulties in this matter. Local authorities could not offer any guarantee to prospective buyers that properties on the register were not due for demolition or compulsory purchase. It might be all right on the day on which a prospective purchaser looked at the register, but if the local authority took a decision a little later on a clearance order question it would be greatly embarrassed by the register that had been in its possession and it would be open to much criticism.

Even if the register were with the local authority, it would still be necessary to employ a solicitor, the hon. Member for Harrow, Central will be pleased to hear, to make the necessary searching inquiries. If the vendor offered his property through the local authority register and through an estate agent at the same time, and even if the house were purchased due to an inspection of the register, the estate agent would still be able to claim his fee.

I agree with my hon. Friend that the purchase of a house is the biggest transaction that most people undertake in the whole of their lives. It ought to be a question where needless fears and anxieties of dishonesty do not arise. The plain truth is that there are people in large numbers all over the land who feel that things are not what they ought to be.

I conclude by saying that the professional organisations have tried for years to get the House to help them to put their house in order. Until the House is prepared to do that, there is no really satisfactory solution to this matter, but I can assure my hon. Friend that the Government are resolved to do their utmost, in their major review, now being undertaken, of the cost of house purchase, to ensure that fair play and fair prices are guaranteed.

I am sure that the House was a little amazed at the statement about local authorities entering into the estate agency business. I hope that the hon. Gentleman will assure the House that although there are many estate agents who are not qualified as members of the chartered bodies they do a great service to the public as estate agents and sellers of property. I hope that any scheme which the Government may have to put on the local authority the responsibility of carrying out estate agency will not interfere with the reasonable profession which people are carrying on.

I am grateful to the hon. Member. I do not want to leave the wrong impression. I was not suggesting that local authorities will enter into the full estate agency business, but that my right hon. Friend the Minister of Housing and Local Government—and I watch these words carefully—is at present pursuing with the local authority associations and a number of local authorities the possibility of establishing a register of houses for sale.

That is the question which is now being considered seriously and I think that that was the request which my hon. Friend the Member for Fife, West was making.

Can we now turn to another subject, namely, the return of the appropriate forms under the Water Resources Act, 1963? I must begin by declaring my own interest. A hundred years or more ago a spring was tapped behind what is now my own cottage and I, like everybody else who abstracts water, must now apply for a licence of right to avoid the loss of my water rights and also to avoid the penalties contained in the Act.

The provisions of the Act have received wide publicity. Apart from debates in this Chamber, the farming journals and the provincial Press have carried reports of the requirements under the Act. Farming and horticultural associations have also done their best, but not all those who are affected are farmers. Even so, not all farmers are members of farming organisations and it is obvious that the publicity has been somewhat less than 100 per cent. efficient.

To begin with, the necessary forms do not arrive on one's doorstep. They have to be applied for—the applicant must know about them and how to get them before he can make the return which is appropriate to his requirements. Clearly there are many people who possess a claim to a licence of right under the Act who do not appreciate the fact that they have only 28 days left to return the form to the water authority.

I must say frankly that I was one of these. It was only when I received a letter from a constituent that I realised that I was affected. He wrote to me to ask me to investigate

"a piece of quite incredible bureaucratic nonsense concerning the application for a 'licence of right' by existing drawers of water under the Water Resources Act, 1963."—

Inter an awful lot of other explosive alia he said—

:I cannot recall having seen such extraordinarily bad official forms before, accompanied by such poor official explanations. I find it extremely difficult to understand them and I have no idea what the answer is to many of the questions. These forms have to be filled in by the owner of every existing private borehole and I do not believe that many smallholders etc. will make any sense of them."

Firstly, there are obviously people who are entitled to a licence of right who are still unaware of the provisions of the Act. Secondly, there are these awful forms, which are quite the most appalling pieces of bureaucratic abortion masquerading under the name of "forms" ever produced by the mind of misguided man.

On 28th April, my hon. Friend the Member for the City of Chester (Mr. Temple) prayed against the Water Resources (Licences) Regulations, 1965, Statutory Instrument No. 534. The opening words of my hon. Friend are beyond dispute. He said:

"These Regulations are extraordinarily complicated. Everyone is agreed on that …"—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 28th April, 1965; Vol. 711. c. 564.]

I would comment in passing that there also seems to be far too many of them. In the last year—exactly 12 months—the Ministry of Housing and Local Government has begotten no fewer than 59 of these Statutory Instruments. I trust that the Department will be a little less fecund in future. It is virtually impossible for hon. Members to keep up with such an output of paper, or anyone else for that matter, with the consequence that people may suffer substantial loss simply and solely because the administrative machine is operating so fast that even professional advisers are unable to cope with the output.

On realising the seriousness of the complaint in my constituent's letter, I did two things. First, I approached the Chair with a view to getting a little Parliamentary time in which to debate the importance of this matter. Secondly, I wrote to my own solicitor in my own interests. I must quote his letter because it is of some significance. After thanking me for my letter, he said:

"The use of underground water for household purposes by the occupier of the land does not require a licence but the use of that water for agricultural purposes does need a licence for the necessary Application Forms. You and I have written to the Water Authority … for the necessary Applications Forms. You may not require a licence if you take not more than 1,000 gallons but I cannot ascertain whether this is daily, weekly or monthly consumption as it does not stipulate the period. It may, of course, mean 1,000 gallons at a time, but that seems a very loose restriction".

To put it bluntly, he does not know the answer either. This is a letter from an old established firm of solicitors in one of the biggest market towns of an agricultural area. It would be useful if the Joint Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Housing and Local Government, when he replies to the debate, could define the meaning of the phrase "household purposes". If a householder wishes to use his own water to water his garden, will that offend the provisions of the Act? Would a householder who has his own private water supply come within the phrase "household use" if he uses that water to irrigate his garden and sells the surplus produce commercially?

Thirdly, swimming pools are becoming more and more popular. Our coasts and roads are becoming more and more crowded and more and more private swimming pools are being installed. Would the use of a private water supply to fill a garden swimming pool constitute household use? In view of the wider popularity of private swimming pools, this question is of fairly common interest and importance.

As I understand it, anyone who has used a private water supply—whether it is a well or a spring, a borehole or a catchpit—must, under the requirements of the Act, obtain a licence to continue to do so. A provision was written into the Act to protect such users. This provision entitles them to a licence. The river authorities cannot deny them a licence; hence the phrase "licence of right". They have an indisputable right to a licence.

The rub, however, is that in the Statutory Instrument against which my hon. Friend the Member for the City of Chester prayed a period of only three months was laid down in which users had to apply for their licence and protect their rights over their own water. That three-month period began on 1st April and it expires at the end of this month and there are still many water users who remain unaware that there is now considerable urgency about their applications.

Today I received an Answer to a Written Question, and from it I learned that river authorities in England and Wales had by 1st June received just over 3,000 applications for licences to abstract water. Having all my life been a countrywoman, and knowing the number of wells and springs which are in use, I am quite sure that that figure is considerably under the number of such users in the country as a whole.

In the debate on 28th April the Joint Parliamentary Secretary said:

"The hon. Member asked what would happen if a licence of right was out of time. He asked whether there was any discretion to give a licence after the expiry of the date of 30th June. The answer is 'No'. A licence of right is a privilege, and it must be claimed by the prescribed date."—[OFFICIAL REPORT. 28th April, 1965; Vol. 711, c. 575.]

There we have the problem. People who have had the use of private water supplies in the past stand to lose their right by the 30th of this month if they do not apply in time, and there is nothing, I understand, under the Act which the hon. Gentleman can do about it.

I think it is fair comment to say that the hon. Gentleman's Department could have been a little more helpful in this case. The Ministry of Housing and Local Government and the Central Office of Information publish a leaflet headed

"Abstraction of Water: the new law".

It is top headed: "Water Resources Act". But this leaflet only came off the printing presses a fortnight ago, I understand. It certainly was not generally available by 1st April when it ought to have been, and yet S.I. No. 534 was made on 19th March and laid before Parliament on 31st March. The most thorough and efficient way of appraising private water users of the effects of the Act would have been to have had the leaflet available for local authorities to distribute in the light of their much greater intimate local knowledge of their ratepayers to whom they could have distributed the leaflet with the rate demand notices. Some people risk incurring substantial financial loss which after 30th June they will never be able to recover.

I should like to take examples of these bureaucratic abortions, as I call them, the forms, 16 sheets of multi-coloured paper, a dozen of them of foolscap size. Having gazed upon these objects I have come to the conclusion that a law degree, perseverance, an estate agent's training, stamina and an expert knowledge of geology would be required by the poor innocent applicant who hoped to complete them fully and accurately.

Dealing with the form of application for a licence of right only, one is confronted with seven foolscap pages with 15 questions and six tables. One has to do that in triplicate, so that it works out at 45 and 18 respectively. At first sight they are quite the most confusing and bewildering and daunting forms I should think have ever been drafted. What is worse, they are virtually impossible to complete accurately. One of the tables calls for details of the amount of water abstracted annually per day and per hour over the past five years. Another table demands a forecast of water consumption per hour and per day, but is quite unclear for what period.

Apart from the sheer bad layout and design of the forms, it is just not possible to give accurate answers to such questions. Water requirements cannot be forecast unless the rainfall is known. If one wishes to make an accurate forecast, it is necessary to know not only the average mean temperature and the average wind velocity for that area but the nature of the soil of a particular field, and also the nature of the crop, because the water requirements of early potatoes, middle crop potatoes and late crop potatoes are all quite different.

If my legal adviser is uncertain about Clause 24 of the parent Act, owing to its indeterminate phraseology, surely it is unreasonable to expect a non-professional man to know exactly what he is meant to do with these forms? Indeed, the hon. Gentleman is not entirely unaware of the reception these forms have had, because in answer to my hon. Friend during the debate on the Prayer he said:

"The hon. Gentleman asked about the possibility of having a simplified form of application. The difficulty here is that we cannot start changing our minds—to use an appropriate metaphor—in mid-stream. We have started with these forms and we must, for the present, carry on with them."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 28th April, 1965; Vol. 711, c. 575.]

We must, I suppose, accept that we are landed with these forms and we must make the best of them, but I think that the hon. Gentleman ought to try to ease the difficulties in regard to these forms, and particularly in regard to those who are entitled to a licence of right, by using his influence with river authorities to get them to accept forms completed in the bare essentials only owing to the shortness of time and their very complexity.

There is evidence that some river authorities have adopted a very stiff attitude towards those who have had to return them. One clerk of a river authority wrote to one of my constituents saying quite flatly:

"The Authority cannot, of course, accept this as a valid application, and it will not he open to them to consider your request for licences unless and until they receive forms completed in accordance with the Water Resources (Licences) Regulation 1965.

I must stress that applications for licences of right must be in my hands before the 30th June next."

Some of these forms are quite impossible to answer, and perhaps I might quote my own case to illustrate this. On page 2 I am asked to describe in column 5 below:

"How, if at all, the work is or will be lined."

My spring was tapped 100 or more years ago, and there is nobody alive today who knows how it is lined. The only means that I have of accurately filling in this form is to go and dig the thing up.

I have to return this form saying whether I have something which is called a heading or an adit and specifying

"the point of communication, length, diameter and orientation of each heading or adit."

I do not know what this is. If I look at Nuttall's Dictionary, the sort of popular dictionary to be found in most homes, I see that it is something to do with mining, and that makes it a great deal clearer for everybody. I should have thought that a little imagination could have been deployed in sending out these forms, and that a glossary of technical terms could have been included so that those who were supposed to include things would know what information they were required to provide.

The layout of the form is most unimaginative. Question 4(b) says:

"if you claim to be entitled to a licence of right to abstract water from underground strata (see note (d)). in Table 1 below."

One looks at that, but there is no note (d) on it. It is only when one gets to the end of the form, where one sees a threatening note that it is an offence to make a false statement that there is a collection of little notes which tells one to look at various Sections of the Act, and that is not particularly helpful, because when one reads the Sections of the Act, the phraseology is so confusing to the average person that it is quite useless. Therefore, I would urge on the hon. Gentleman that he should consider allowing river authorities to accept forms completed with the bare essentials which people can supply without going into the technical details which are so confusing to them.

I also ask him to consider the question (if the maps which have to be returned with the forms. Maps of six-inch scale are required. In the average country town maps of that scale are not normally stocked; they can usually be obtained in much larger towns, but even then with some difficulty. Will he consider allowing maps of lesser scale to be used? Where local authorities have a six-inch map available, would he allow tracings of it to be returned, because that would be a help?

It would also ease the difficulties of those returning the forms if some method of duplication were acceptable. The licence of right form requires three copies—of a seven page form. One cannot use carbon paper. Would the Minister accept as valid forms with the second and third copies duplicated, each having been signed by the applicant?

Applicants have to give an estimate of the quantities of water to be abstracted. Has the Minister any views on the use of meters? If any river authority contemplates making the use of meters compulsory, would the hon. Gentleman consider what could happen? I have lived in a house which was metered from a farm supply. These meters can be the most appalling nuisance, as I know to my cost. Like speedometers, they can he "fiddled". There is also the expense of their purchase, installation and protection. In addition, very often grit can get into them and stop them working.

Finally, could the hon. Gentleman clarify the position which affects not only my spring but many farms throughout the country? Where a spring or stream has been impounded near its source for the benefit of several farms, the main pipe runs from the point of abstraction and is tapped by various farmers using the water, so to speak, lower down the line. Should a licence of right be obtained by the person on whose land the point of abstraction is or by those who subsequently tap the pipe? In other words, should it be obtained by the tappee or the tapped?

I thank the Joint Parliamentary Secretary for his courtesy in attending this afternoon, and I hope that I have not trespassed too much on the time available.

I thank the hon. Lady the Member for Petersfield (Miss Quennell) for having taken this opportunity to raise this question, which we discussed some time ago in great detail but which is a very important matter. It is a most public spirited use of her time that she should have used it for this purpose. I should also like to thank her for her courtesy in giving me some idea of the kind of point which she wanted to raise.

I do not think that I can be helpful on the question about people sharing the water pipe. The difficulty in answering that specifically is that it must depend a great deal on the facts of the particular situation. It depends, to some extent, on what the water is being used for and whether or not the land is contiguous to the river from which it comes.

If there is a dispute about a licence, of course, there is an appeal to my right hon. Friend. Therefore, in these matters where there is a dispute, I want to make it clear what is the particular responsibility, the immediate responsiblity, of the river authority. My right hon. Friend has no power or duty to interfere in the way they do their business. He is responsible in regard to appeals which may come to him later.

The hon. Lady raised the question of publicity. I think that there has been a good deal of publicity about this, though I agree that there cannot be too much. Not very long ago, I was awakened at 6.45 in the morning by a mellifluous voice inviting me to apply for a licence of right, which, as I am in the safe arms of the Metropolitan Water Board, was not relevant. It showed, at any rate, that a good deal of attention was being paid to the need to get these licences. Too much attention cannot be drawn to this need, because this is a very important and major operation. This is not just the bureaucratic front. I will come in a moment to the reason why I say this.

The hon. Lady made the point that there were, so to speak, only 26 shopping day left to Christmas. It is important that all these licences of right should be in by the end of the month, because there is no power under the Act to vary the time. That is not my idea, but is in the Act which we inherited.

I should also like to correct something which the hon. Lady said. She said that it was the Regulations which had fixed this date. The three-monthly period is not in the Regulations: it is in the Act. So the hon. Lady was wrong about that. I am not hiding behind the factors in the Act, because I want to emphasise that the longer one takes in getting one's licences of right settled, the longer one takes to deal with new applications, because one has, first of all, to get one's commitment for licences of right clear before one can go on to deal with new applications. If we are under fire for difficulties over the applications for licences of right, we are also under fire from people who want to sink a well but who are held up because they cannot get the licence. They can go on doing the work if they have made their appli- cation, though they run the risk that if they do not get the licence they may have done abortive work.

As regards the availability of forms, so far as we know, every river authority now has available application forms for licences of right, because everyone has had returned forms. So far as we know, only one river authority still has not a supply of the new application forms. The hon. Lady asked about exemptions—what were the domestic purposes for exemption. I would explain that the 1,000 gallons does not apply to regular use, but is meant for the occasional use by somebody who, for some particular reason, happens to draw a supply of water. It does not apply to somebody who regularly uses water.

The hon. Lady asked a number of questions about the supply of water for domestic use. This is not a matter of administrative decision but of law and there is no clear definition of it. For example, I draw the attention of the House to the definition given in the Water Act, 1945, which refers to the supply of water for domestic purposes as being

"… a sufficient supply for drinking, washing, cooking and sanitary purposes, but not for any bath having a capacity in excess of 50 gallons."

I do not know whether the hon. Lady's bath has a capacity of more than 50 gallons, but provided her requirements, and those of domestic users, are modest, they would come within the definition of "domestic purposes".

The moderate use of water for garden watering is permitted. If, say, a common, simple watering can was being used, nobody would get excited about that. However, I understand that a sprinkler is a different matter, because that might come within the definition of spray irrigation. It would be wrong for anyone to assume that he was covered for that purpose.

My right hon. Friend wrote to all river authorities on 31st March last on the subject of maps. He wrote:

"No doubt river authorities will arrange to state the scale of maps which they require to have submitted when they issue application forms … It will be helpful if river authorities will avoid demands for maps to a larger scale than is essential."

I hope that that letter, and the publicity which will be given to this debate, in the OFFICIAL REPORT and elsewhere, will lead to people being sensible and reasonable about their requirements.

As to the difficulties and complexities of the form, I have taken the trouble to check some of the requirements in the form with the Act. I have found that almost all the matters which have been criticised are specifically referred to in Section 30 of the Act. I assure the House that they are not just matters which have been shoved into the form with a sort of lightheartedness by the drafters of the Regulations. That, equally, applies to the questions the hon. Lady asked about the amount of water being taken, when it is taken, and so on.

As I say, these requirements are not merely things that someone has suddenly thought up. This whole matter has arisen as a result of the grave shortage of water which we face. The consumption of water is increasing and there must, therefore, be controls governing its supply. The more we get the sort of fine weather we are having today, the more emphasised are the difficulties of the problem.

The hon. Lady referred to the timetable. I assure her that it is something which my right hon. Friend inherited, although we accept it as being necessary in view of the importance of obtaining quick control over our water resources. A licence of right application is a once-and-for-all thing and an essential requirement because until the river authorities know their commitments as a result of the licences of right they cannot judge how much water they will have available for future use.

We are asking users of water to co-operate, in a patient and understanding way, and to complete the forms as well as they can so that we will have the basic information which is necessary for river authorities to do their work. I appreciate the paralysing feelings of inadequacy which the hon. Lady confessed that she had had on examining the form. I examined the form and I admit that I wondered whether I could fill it in. But they are necessary forms and I think the river authorities should be sympathetic to some of the difficulties which arise.

In law I think that there is no way of saying that a river authority must accept a half-completed form. On the other hand, I think that where essential information is available to enable them to make their decision it would be reasonable for them to be a little tolerant in regard to the other information. I hope this would be regarded—

The hon. Gentleman has reached a most important point, and has quoted Section 30 as to the items which have to be included in the licence. Is it really necessary for the applicant to include all that information when making his application? All he is required to do under Section 33 is to make an application to the river authority claiming his licence of right. This is the important point which my hon. Friend the Member for Petersfield (Miss Quennell) made. If a person makes an application he need not necessarily fill in at that stage all the items required by this form and if he does not fill those in he surely does not lose his licence of right?

What goes into the form is now covered by the Regulations and, within the terms of those Regulations, the river authority is entitled to require the information. I am not saying that it ought to require it merely as a system of bureaucratic authority but because it is necessary for its job. I hope that this will be regarded as a partnership between the people who are entrusted by Parliament with the very great responsibility of looking after the water resources and those members of the public who want to use water.

It should not be regarded as a criminal thing to want water. River authorities are there to serve the consumer and to provide him with the water he wants. That is the whole idea of the Act. Therefore, as far as possible, they should be reasonable and understand the pressure and difficulties under which water consumers are going to be. As the same time, I hope that water users will not regard this as a sort of a war between us and them.

It is a partnership in what is a grave situation. We want to be sure that our water resources are organised and dealt with prudently and I hope that the effects of this debate will be that people will understand some of the difficulties and will feel that the river authorities are there to co-operate with them. On the other hand, I hope that the river authorities, which are hard pressed and have had to work hard to get a new machine working very quickly, may not be too impatient with those of us who look a bit idiotic when we have to make out our forms.

Before the House departs from this subject I want to make this important point to those who are entitled to licences of right. They are required under Section 33 of the Act to make application for that right. In whatever form they make that application they are entitled to that right and nobody can deprive them of it. It may be that in Regulations certain forms are set down upon which they can make that claim, but the fact that the forms require innumerable items of information from them and the fact that they fail to fill in those innumerable items cannot deprive them of that right. If they make an application for that right and prove they have it, that they have already abstracted water in the past, it should be made perfectly clear that whatever regulations the Minister may make, he cannot deprive them of the right.

It is right that he should require this information in order to put it into the licence. The licence has to contain certain facts. He can go on requiring them, but if these people entitled to those rights get their application in before 1st July then they should not be deprived of this right. The authorities should be informed that they cannot refuse applications merely because some little item in the form is not filled in. I think that ought to be stressed and those who are entitled ought to be allowed to send in their forms even if they cannot, as my hon. Friend said, tell what is the lining of their well.

My hon. Friend the Member for Crosby (Mr. Graham Page) has been talking of the extraction of water; I am glad that he has ceased to extract time from my Adjournment debate.

I should like to thank you, Mr. Speaker, for yet again giving me the opportunity to raise the subject of the passenger services on the Richmond to Broad Street railway line. I apologise to the Parliamentary Secretary for dragging him here for the final debate before the Whitsun Recess. I am sure that he is, as I am, anxious to get away, as this has been an extremely busy week. I would also say how much we on this side of the House are mindful of the hard work that he has put in at the Ministry over the last few months. We realise that he carries much of the burden of the Department in the House of Commons. He has carried it with great ability, and I congratulate him. I hasten to add that this will not stop me making criticisms this afternoon.

My aim is to try to persuade the Minister to end the existing uncertainty about the future of the passenger services on the Richmond to Broad Street line. The proposal to close these railway services was contained in the original Beeching Report in 1962. As I said on 11th December, 1964, I have always fully supported Dr. Beeching's modernising proposals for British Railways, but everyone probably accepts that certain proposals can be classed as major closures that are clearly unacceptable for various social reasons. The passenger services on the Richmond to Broad Street line come under that category.

The Minister has said on previous occasions in the House that he considers that proposals for major closures should always be looked at carefully. I suspect that behind the scenes he probably accepts that these passenger services must not be stopped, but I want him to say so in public. That is why I asked for this debate.

I have put the case against the closure of passenger services time and time again, and did so in the Adjournment debate on 11th December last, so I will not go into details now. A great deal of work has also been done by various committees, from Richmond to Hampstead, and they have produced extremely well-documented and impressive evidence to show why these services should not be ended. In spite of this, and of our debate last December, no action has been taken by the Government to end the uncertainty.

The Parliamentary Secretary and the Minister of Transport himself must be ashamed of the shabby story of broken faith with the electorate and the House of Commons. During the General Election campaign, pledges were made by Labour candidates in the constituencies through which the line runs that on taking office a Labour Government would remove the uncertainty about the future of the passenger services. I do not think that any hon. Member opposite will deny that. In our debate on 11th December last, the hon. Member for Willesden, West (Mr. Pavitt) indicated, in column 2076 of the OFFICIAL REPORT, his assent to this statement. So far, that pledge has been broken, because no effort at all has been made to end the uncertainty.

I turn now to the debate of 11th December, 1964. In that debate certain statements were made by the Parliamentary Secretary who is to answer the debate this afternoon. As reported at the foot of column 2080, he said:

"I have the utmost sympathy for the users of the line in their state of uncertainty and the fact that they are having to wait a very long time for an announcement to be made about its future. I can say that we and the Board are extremely anxious to come as quickly as possible to a definite conclusion on this matter, from the point of view of railway efficiency and finance and the social values involved."

He went on:

"The Board has now told me that it hopes to reach a definite conclusion on the basis of all this within the next month or so."

That was 11th December, 1964. He said:

"I cannot say what the conclusion will be. Only then shall we know exactly whether, for financial reasons, the Board still proposes to close the line or, perhaps, merely some of the stations on it or to withdraw the proposal altogether."

At the end of the speech, he said:

"However, I can tell them two things. The first is that very soon indeed we shall have from the Railways Board either the cancellation of the proposal, or the full proposal or a modified proposal, and that will go through the 'early sift' procedure and be immediately considered by the Minister."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 11th December, 1964; Vol. 703, c. 2080–84.]

That is nearly six months ago, and since then nothing has happened whatsoever. Since 11th December, 1964, some of my hon. Friends and myself, and some hon. Members opposite, have put down a series of questions to the Minister on this subject. One was put down on 11th February. The answer was received two-and-a-half months after that debate, and it was:

"The Board has not yet put any proposals to me. I understand that it is still examining possible ways of maintaining an economic service. I hope to have its proposals before very long."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 11th February, 1965; Vol. 706, c. 122.]

On 24th February we finally received a statement from the British Railways which stated that the examination

"is aimed at determining whether more economic ways of running the service can be evolved while at the same time affording a satisfactory service to the public. New possibilities have enabled several alternative solutions to be studied, but until the whole examination is completed it is not the intention to make any proposal to withdraw the service nor does it follow that the outcome will result in such a proposal. The region appreciates the public anxiety and intends to resolve this matter as quickly as possible."

Following this, during March and April, some of my hon. Friends and myself, and particularly my hon. Friend the Member for Brentford and Chiswick (Mr. Dudley Smith) and my right hon. Friend the Member for Hampstead (Mr. Brooke), who is sorry that he is unable to be here but supports me today, asked further Parliamentary Questions of the Minister about what had happened. All that we got, I am afraid, was more evasion. At one point the Minister told me in the House that there was no uncertainty and that the statement by British Railways had ended it, when it was clear that it had done nothing of the sort.

I again look back to what the Parliamentary Secretary said on 11th December—

"The Board has now told me that it hopes to reach a definite conclusion on the basis of all this within the next month or so".

I cannot help feeling that the Parliamentary Secretary must be a trifle embarrassed at having to sit here this afternoon and must feel that this is a sad story of unfulfilled pledges and assurances.

The Parliamentary Secretary is a member of a Government who were elected as a dynamic Government. Certainly there has been no sign of dynamism in reaching a decision on this matter over the past six months. I do not place any blame, and I do not think my hon. Friends place any blame, on British Railways. They have been making a detailed study and survey of the situation on this line. They have been making a great effort to obtain economies, which I welcome. Indeed, I have always had the utmost co-operation and courtesy in any inquiries which I have made from British Railways. The Region are making a mammoth effort to try to avoid closing the passenger service, and I in no way criticise them.

The criticism which I make is that I do not see why the Minister could not relieve anxiety by saying that if British Railways find that they are unable to make the necessary economies, and if they submit a firm proposal to the Minister stating that they intend to cut down or to stop the passenger services on the line, he will make it quite clear that he would turn down any such proposal.

In reply to a Question in the House on 11th November, as reported in column 999, the Minister said:

"As a matter of fact, with regard to a great many lines I shall ensure that there will be no uncertainty in the public mind at all, because the proposals will be put to me and I will make up my mind without putting the public to any uncertainty."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 11th Nov., 1964; Vol. 701, c. 999.]

That statement reads strangely this afternoon.

I must confess to a feeling of gloom when I read the answer of Wednesday of this week to a Question put to the Minister on 2nd June. In reply to a Question from me as to whether the Railways Board have yet completed their investigation into passenger services, the Minister said:

"I understand that the Board's investigations are now nearing completion and that it expects to make an announcement within the next few weeks."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 2nd June, 1965; Vol. 713, c. 228.]

I do not know how long that will be or whether we shall have a decision by the Government before the next General Election—or whether the candidates all the way down the line when we have an October Election, as I expect we shall, will again be forced to say that they will end the uncertainty if a Labour Government is elected. It will be very difficult for them.

May I put some points to the Parliamentary Secretary. A firm proposal to close the passenger services has not yet been finally put to the Minister, although in principle it was suggested in the original report by Dr. Beeching. It is clearly unacceptable to the Minister if that proposal is made, for several reasons. I will not detail them beyond mentioning, in passing, the hardship which will be caused and the intolerable strain which will be placed on London Transport, because the Broad Street line provides a vital link across north-west London. For these and many other reasons, it is clear that the passenger services cannot be withdrawn. Will the Parliamentary Secretary therefore announce, in answer to this debate, that if a firm proposal to close the passenger services is put to him or his right hon. Friend by British Railways, he will not accept it and that he will class this suggestion as a major closure and, therefore, not allow the passenger services to be withdrawn?

That is all that the Parliamentary Secretary has to say today. It is quite easy. His right hon. Friend and himself have been making heavy weather of this for many months. By making a statement this afternoon, the hon. Gentleman would not only fulfil the election pledges which his party's candidates made before the election all the way down the line, but he would fulfil the assurances which have been given in the House by his right hon. Friend and himself on many occasions. He would end the uncertainty which is in the minds of many people who travel on the line day by day and, last, but not least, the hon. Member would give a great deal of pleasure to the hon. Member for Richmond, who would finally be successful in his efforts to get the line saved. Indeed, the hon. Gentleman would give great pleasure not only to hon. Members on this side, but also to hon. Friends on his own side of the House who have an interest in the line and two of whom I am glad to see present this afternoon.

I beg the hon. Gentleman to think again, to give a positive statement to finish this unnecessary controversy, which has gone on for far too long.

I join the hon. Member for Richmond, Surrey (Mr. A. Royle) in thanking you, Mr. Speaker, for enabling this debate to take place. I also join the hon. Member in his tribute to my hon. Friend the Joint Parliamentary Secretary, who, as we all know, has carried an enormously heavy burden, particularly on Adjournment debates, during the present Session, mainly in dealing with requests by hon. Members opposite that the policy of the Minister of Transport in their Government should be reversed.

This is the first occasion when, as the Member for Acton, I have had an opportunity of speaking on the subject of the Richmond-Broad Street line and I should like briefly to refer to the importance of the line to people who live and work in Acton. The line traverses my constituency of Acton from south-west to north-east, with two stations in the constituency and one just outside it. It is of great importance not only to those who live in Acton, but to the many people who come to work there.

People who live in Acton use the line during the week to go to work in the City or in other parts of London. School-children in large numbers use it to go to and from school. In a constituency where 50,000 people come in from outside each day to work, a line of this nature is of considerable importance to them. We should not forget also the importance of the line at week ends and at holidays. For people who live in Acton, it provides a unique and easy method of travelling from Acton to such open spaces as Hampstead Heath, Richmond Park and Kew Gardens. They can get there far more quickly than by any other method.

Therefore, from the viewpoint of my constituents, the line is of real economic and social value. The closure of the passenger services would bring a great deal of genuine distress to many people in the constituency, a great deal of inconvenience to many people who use it regularly to go to and from work and, undoubtedly, increased congestion on the other routes which they would have to use.

My view is not merely that the line should be kept open, but that there is a strong case for developing the services on the line and making it much more attractive than it is at present. There is room for better services, certainly later during the evening. Many people who wish to travel on the line to see their friends in the evening are able to make their outward journey on the line only to find that there is practically no means of coming back along the line because of the scarcity of the evening services. It would also be well worth the while of the Railways Board to make the stations on the line a little more attractive. This in itself would do something to increase traffic.

I have never been convinced by the argument which has been advanced that it is impossible to include the line on London Transport maps. I accept the difficulty of transferring responsibility for the line from British Railways to London Transport—that would be difficult because of the freight complications—but I cannot see why it should not be included on the London Transport maps. I believe that there are many hundreds of thousands of people in London who have no knowledge of the existence of the line and who, if it were brought to their attention by being shown on London Transport maps, would use it and find it extremely valuable.

For all these reasons, I have always been convinced that on any intelligent consideration of the problem, taking into account not simply narrow profitability but the public service and economic and social needs, the decision must be that the line would and should be kept open.

The hon. Member for Richmond has referred to hon. Members on this side of the House who represent constituencies along the line making pledges, he says, at the time of the General Election. I merely told my constituents that I was convinced that if a Labour Government were returned to power the ultimate decision in this matter would be that the line would be kept open. Realising the unwieldy nature of some of these processes, I was not so unwise as to say that the decision could or would be taken immediately, because I realised that this might be more difficult.

In considering this question, we are entitled to consider why the uncertainty has existed and why the line has ever been in jeopardy. The simple answer is—because of the policies and doctrinaire attitudes of the former Conservative Government and, in particular, of the former Minister of Transport, the right hon. Member for Wallasey (Mr. Marples).

The hon. Gentleman may not know, because he was not in the last Parliament, that my hon. Friend the Member for Brentford and Chiswick (Mr. Dudley Smith) and I opposed my right hon. Friend the Member for Wallasey (Mr. Marples), who was then Minister of Transport, in his attitude to the Richmond-Broad Street line, in the same way as we oppose the present Minister's attitude.

I accept that entirely. Indeed, I knew it.

What we have on this occasion, and what we have had on many occasions since I have been in the House, is the spectacle of hon. Members opposite who supported the Transport Act, 1962, and who in general terms supported the Beeching proposals, pleading that these proposals should not apply to their constituencies. This is the not unusual technique, in my experience, of Tories suggesting that the rules should apply to everyone but themselves.

I have always been convinced, as I have said, that on any proper assessment of the problem the decision would ultimately be taken that the line should not be closed. The hon. Member for Richmond accuses the present Government, who have been in office for only about seven months, of being extremely dilatory in this matter. In fact, the proposal that the line should be closed was made many years ago and the previous Minister of Transport had much longer than seven months in which to make up his mind.

When the Minister is in a position, on the basis of recommendations from the Railways Board, to give us a decision on this matter, I am confident that the deci- sion will be that the passenger services on this line will not be closed. When that time comes, I agree entirely that all those who live along the line will owe a debt of gratitude to those who have campaigned individually and collectively, particularly the joint committee which, as the hon. Member for Richmond has said, has produced such good publications and information on this subject. They should also remember, if they are honest, that the fact that the line has ever been in jeopardy at all and that there has ever been uncertainty about whether it should continue to exist is entirely and solely due to the attitude of the party opposite and, in particular, of the Minister of Transport in the Conservative Government.

Although it is said that there is no gratitude in politics, I hope that, when the decision is announced, as I am sure that it will eventually be announced—the sooner the better—that the line will be kept open, those along the line will realise that they owe a debt of gratitude to those who have campaigned for it and that thanks will be due to the fact that we now have a Labour Government and a Labour Minister who view these problems from the point of view not simply of narrow profitability and financial accounting, but of the social and economic needs of the area and of those who live in it.

This may seem to be a very narrow and parochial matter at the end of a day of very interesting and varied Adjournment debates. Nevertheless, I assure the House that it affects many people living in the London area. Although I agree with some of the remarks made by the hon. Member for Acton (Mr. Floud), I must disagree entirely with some of the polemical points he made towards the end of his speech.

I pay great tribute to the assiduity of my hon. Friend the Member for Richmond, Surrey (Mr. A. Royle) for continually pressing this point, not only during the time of the former Government, but certainly in the course of the last four or five months. But for him, this matter might have died a natural death. He has constantly pressed this point, and I hope that in the end he will be successful.

The hon. Member for Acton made play of the fact that this was an ideal of the last Government. I am positive that, if we had been re-elected last October, all the doubts about the line would have been dispelled and there would have been an announcement by now that the line was to remain in existence.

I should like briefly to support my hon. Friend. This is and always has been a special case. It is not one of the ordinary branch lines where hon. Members say, "This is a good plan for British Railways as a whole, but my line is peculiar and should be exempted." The line is almost an integral part of the London Transport system and if it is closed many hundreds of people would converge on to buses and the rest of the underground railway. I agree with the hon. Member for Acton that if only the line were incorporated into the London Transport system there would be far greater patronage of it than there is at present.

I agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Richmond that many specious promises were made at the election about the closure of this line. I exempt the hon. Member for Acton, but there were others who said that if the Labour Government were elected the line would be kept open and a decision made quickly. My opponent made that promise in my presence in the local town hall. He has now been replaced by another candidate and I hope that the same thing will not happen at the next election.

There is a great deal of feeling about this matter. If we could dispel the propaganda atmosphere of party politics we would all realise that a large number of people are concerned about the line. They feel that after 18 months' waiting there should be an announcement of what will happen. They still use the line, but they are worried that eventually an announcement will be made that it is unprofitable and will be closed down and they will have to find alternative means of transport.

I acquit the Parliamentary Secretary of discourtesy. The matter does not rest with him. It is a matter for Ministerial decision. The hon. Gentleman is one of the hardest-working members of the Government. I read in a newspaper the other day that he has answered a record number of Adjournment debates. He always seems to be here; he observes the utmost diligence in the pursuance of his duties. Nevertheless, the hon Gentleman is a worthy enough man to convey to the Minister that there are strong feelings on this subject and that the time is approaching when we should have a decision.

As a result of the activities of my hon. Friend the Member for Richmond we have had two or three Adjournment debates on this subject and innumerable Parliamentary Questions. The time has now come for British Railways to say whether or not they propose to close the line and for the Minister to say whether or not he will countenance such a proposal. If, as the Parliamentary Secretary has said in an Answer, a proposal comes forward from British Railways in the next few weeks, and if that says that the line will be closed, will the hon. Gentleman give an undertaking that the Government will say, "No. This is an important part of the London Transport system and whatever may be the question of the finances of the line it is essential that it should be kept open in the general interest of the public"? If the hon. Gentleman does that, he will earn the gratitude of hon. Members on both sides of the House and many people outside the House.

This is the second time that the hon. Member for Richmond, Surrey (Mr. A. Royle) has raised this subject on the Adjournment. The hon. Gentleman started by making some rather nice remarks about me. I suppose that he hopes that he has softened me up, but I would point out that the hon. Gentleman's assiduity did not run to raising this matter on the Adjournment in the last Parliament. It was raised on the Adjournment by my hon. Friend the Member for Willesden, West (Mr. Pavitt) and of course other hon. Members have played a part in other ways in raising this issue.

I must say once again that the constitutional and formal position of the line has not changed since the publication of Dr. Beeching's Report. The Richmond-Broad Street line is still listed in that Report for closure. But let me repeat that no proposal has been made to the Minister of Transport and therefore, since the publication of the Beeching Report, it has not fallen to the Minister of Transport to take any decision whatsoever about this line.

How did this situation arise? This is the second occasion on which we have discussed this matter, and it is fair enough to state the position. It arose because the Conservative Government insisted that the British Railways Board must pay its way. The Conservative Government imposed on the Board the statutory obligation to pay its way. Moreover, the Conservative Government and Minister of Transport instructed the Board, which that Government set up, to apply the profitability test to every local line and station. Those are the facts. During the last Parliament, we had many discussions about the terms of reference given to Dr. Beeching and the basic assumptions on which the Report was made. This line is listed for closure in the Report because of the application of the profitability test.

Hon. Members opposite are constantly denouncing nationalised industries for not paying their way. They are constantly pressing us about alleged extravagance in public spending, including the Treasury obligation to cover the railways deficit. Nevertheless, as my hon. Friend the Member for Acton says, we have a queue of Tory Members asking the Minister of Transport for heavy subsidies for their lightly used railway lines and stations. This has been my persistent experience.

Apart from Adjournment debates, I have been pressed to receive deputations from hon. Members who have in their constituencies railway services and stations which are notoriously unremunerative, which cannot pay their way and which do not fulfil the profitability test of the right hon. Member for Wallasey (Mr. Marples). Nevertheless, they press on us that these lines should be heavily subsidised by public spending. Some people might call this a piece of organised hypocrisy.

While the constitutional and formal position of the Richmond-Broad Street line has not changed, the policies have changed, because we have a Labour Government. Which policies have changed? First, we have declared for a co-ordinated and integrated transport system, and we are determined that this shall be established. Second, we have declared for economic planning, and the Government are engaged in establishing the machinery for economic and social planning. Third, we apply the test of social cost and benefit, which is of the greatest importance, to railway closures and, in road transport, to road schemes. We apply the test of what is the social significance and value compared with the social cost, and we make our judgment.

That is why out of the first 13 railway closure proposals put to my right hon. Friend by the Railways Board, he rejected five. He refused to give consent to five out of the first 13 proposed railway closure proposals—some of my hon. Friends thought that he should have refused more—on the ground that these lines should be kept open, not because of their profitability, unfortunately, but because of their social benefit and necessity for the community.

Moreover, in recognition of this, in January, when we in the Ministry of Transport managed to mount on Merseyside a conurbation/land-use transport survey with all the local authorities and transport providers, the Railways Board suspended the very controversial proposal to close the Liverpool-Southport line.

We want to save the Richmond-Broad Street line.

The hon. Gentleman has waited quite a long time since the Beeching Report and he must learn to be a little patient. I am pointing out the principles of policy which are now governing the situation.

I come to the statement made by the Railways Board which was foreshadowed in my reply to the debate last December, when the hon. Member for Richmond first raised this matter. What did this statement say in the light of the policies which I have just mentioned? It said the Board was carrying out a new and comprehensive examination of the situation of the Richmond-Broad Street line. It said:

"This examination is aimed at determining whether more economic ways of running the service can be evolved while at the same time affording a satisfactory service to the public".

That was the new approach published by the Railways Board on 24th February in the light of the newer policies governing the situation.

One point in passing, the Richmond-Broad Street line is now on the large map of London Transport. Hon. Gentlemen should inform themselves a bit better, and if they inquire of London Transport they will find a new—since the Labour Government came in—map of the situation and that that line is on it.

Finally, I will spell this out for those who can understand the principles on which this Government are founded. In the light of the statements of my right hon. Friend, this should not be necessary and the situation should not cause the anxiety and uncertainty which is alleged, but let me spell out what the situation is for those who can understand the present Government's policies. I have the full authority of my right hon. Friend to say this.

Those who understand the significance of the principles of the present Government will realise that the railway service represented by the Richmond-Broad Street line is going to continue. They will appreciate and understand, if they understand the principles to which I have referred, and the meaning of the transport policy which is being pursued by my right hon. Friend, that the railway service represented by the present line is going to continue.

In what form will it continue? We have set up a national board and charged people with responsibility for railway operations. We in the Ministry of Transport are not conducting railway operations. We have charged people with responsibility for working out the very difficult technical problems and problems of financial management and viability and so on. But I am saying quite categorically that those who can apply the principles about transport co-ordination, about the test of social cost and benefit, to the situation to which our attention has been drawn this afternoon, will see quite dearly that this railway service has got to continue in some form for the community's social benefit. We are in discussion with, and are awaiting proposals from, the Railways Board about how these principles are going to be applied.

Is the hon. Gentleman saying that when an application for closure comes the Government can guarantee that passenger services will be continued?

Really. The hon. Gentleman must see that no proposal has come. As was said in the debate in December it would be foolish of hon. Gentlemen to expect me or my right hon. Friend to present views on a proposal we have not seen and do not know about. We cannot. How can we be asked to prejudge a proposal we have not seen? What I have said on the matter of principle of the transport policy we are pursuing should enable hon. Gentlemen and, I hope, the users of the Richmond-Broad Street line, if they apply the principles, to see that it is crystal clear that the railway service there will continue. Is that not enough? Will that not end the uncertainty? As the pattern evolves we shall see that the principles are applied to the proposals when they come.