Commons Chamber

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House Of Commons

Friday, 24th May, 1968

The House met at Eleven o'clock

Prayers

[Mr. SPEAKER in the Chair]

Banks (Credit Restriction)

(by Private Notice) asked the Chancellor of the Exchequer if he will make a statement on the new credit restrictions announced by the Bank of England last night.

The new restrictions, which are described in an announcement by the Bank of England, which I will, with permission, circulate in the OFFICIAL REPORT, should ensure that the switch of resources into the balance of payments which devaluation and the Budget are designed to achieve is not frustrated by excessive expansion of credit for domestic spending.

Will my right hon. Friend tell the House frankly what truth there is in the allegation in The Times this morning that this decision by the Bank has been influenced by the I.M.F. Mission currently working in the Treasury? Moreover, since many of us are deeply concerned about the steady rise in the seasonal trend in unemployment, what estimates have the Treasury made of the effect on the level of unemployment this year of this new restriction?

There is no truth whatever in the statement that I did this in response to the Mission from the Fund. I have not yet had the pleasure of seeing the Mission myself, although I shall do so in a short time. It is the case that I envisaged some weeks ago that I would have to consider this position as soon as the May figures were available. On the latter part of my hon. Friend's question, I do not think that the new restrictions, which are not intended to have a net deflationary effect but to make possible a switch of resources, should affect the trend in the level of unemployment and, provided, as I believe is the case, that exports pick up rapidly, I am not pessimistic about this trend.

May I put three questions to the Chancellor? First, does he realise that this action goes straight against the forecast which he has made of unemployment and that the last three months' severe worsening trend comes on top of the worst consecutive period of heavy unemployment which we have known since the 1930s and is, therefore, bound to cause anxiety? Second, is he aware that, in relation to the effect which this will have on the so-called "spending spree", he was urged to act months ago and that what he is doing now is locking the stable door after nearly all the horses have bolted? Third, does he really not recognise that it passes belief that this restriction is not linked with some of the visits of our invigilators? Would he please resist the current heresy that the British economy is susceptible to the same sort of measures as the Americans?

On the first question, of course I follow the unemployment trend with close interest and great concern, as the right hon. Gentleman does, but I do not take the view that this is any argument at all for departing from the Budget strategy. Nor do I regard this announcement as a departure from such a strategy. I regard it very much as the leader in The Times Business News this morning made clear, as a natural action within the scope of that strategy.

On the right hon. Gentleman's question about the visit of the International Monetary Fund, I have already dealt with that. I propose to take such measures as I believe are necessary for the British economy when they are necessary and I do not regard this tightening of credit as being a locking of the stable door. It was necessary to see how the banks responded to the credit restrictions imposed in November by my predecessor, and it is not desirable to make these changes too frequently.

I do not entirely follow the thought behind the last part of his question. I intend to take what measures are necessary, and I have taken them, for the economy of this country, and they are certainly not necessarily the same as for the economy of any other country.

Perhaps I might put one further question to the right hon. Gentleman. It will be brief, because other hon. Members wish to raise points with him. On the unemployment position, the Chancellor now has three months' figures available since his Budget which were not available to him then. They show a worsening trend in unemployment on top of an already serious situation. Is he seriously telling us that they have no effect at all on his Budget judgment?

No. I am seriously saying that I believe that the way to deal with this trend is to see exports build up, as I believe they can and will. If the right hon. Member for Enfield, West (Mr. Iain Macleod) has another proposition that he wants to put forward, I would like to hear it.

Can my right hon. Friend say why bank lending has drifted upwards in the way that it has, bearing in mind that on Budget day he told us that the current level in November, 1967, was the level of bank lending at that time? Is. he satisfied that he has adequate control to ensure that it will be kept at the level he now proposes, and what is that level?

The clearing banks are at about 104 per cent. of the position that they were at in November, 1967. Other banks which are also affected are at about the same level or possibly a little below that at which they were in November, 1967. All banks are now asked to restrict their lending limits to 104 per cent. of the base period in November, 1967, and asked to accommodate within this, without restriction, the priority categories, principally for lending for exports, the scope of which can be seen now more clearly and brought within the whole. This is not merely restriction but dealing with the ceiling in a new manner and not leaving matters like lending for export outside the ceiling.

What effect will these new restrictions have on expansion in the development areas?

I would not expect an adverse effect. The banks are aware of Government policy here.

Since one of the main reasons for the present restriction is to cut back the high level of imports, especially of manufacturing imports, will my right hon. Friend not agree that these sorts of restrictions have had little effect in the past on the high and rising level of imports? Will he take the advice of the National Institute this morning and consider contingency plans for making sure that if the high level of imports continues he is ready to meet the situation with direct action?

No, Sir. This restriction will have a beneficial effect on the level of imports. To the extent that it does that it will have a stimulating effect on the economy and not a depressing one in that it produces import savings. The Government have no proposals for the imposition of direct import restrictions.

Is there not something familiarly ominious about this pattern of events? Is it not obvious that the whole burden of this restriction cannot be placed on the private sector, and is it not ludicrous that local authorities are still entitled effectively to borrow at 4½ per cent.?

No. I have made it clear that local authority lending should be brought back to normal by the banks and done so quickly. Lending to nationalised industries has been falling slightly recently. The hon. Gentleman should not exaggerate.

While appreciating that my right hon. Friend must give priority to exports in the directives that he gives to banks, will he give the same priority to the development areas where unemployment is still double the national average?

The banks are aware of the Government's policy in this respect, which is fortified by other aspects of Government policy to give all possible help to the development areas.

In answer to an earlier supplementary question, the right hon. Gentleman referred to having awaited the May figures. To which figures was he referring, and were they worse than he anticipated they would be at the time of the Budget?

No. I was referring to the May figures for bank lending. I do not think that that is the case. The management of the economy requires one to look at indices of this sort as they develop, and this seems to be a sensible time to take measures relating to bank credit to see that they fulfil the objectives of our policy.

Is it not a fact that none of the actions which my right hon. Friend has taken since devaluation has had the effect that economists expected them to have? Is not that because we have a new factor coming in, which is loss of confidence in the value of money by the ordinary man? Will he be able to avoid that without some really effective currency controls?

I do not accept that, nor do I think it is the case that there are many issues on which all economists agree. As for the response since devaluation, certainly it is the case that exports are running above the figure forecast and, I believe, will continue to do so.

Will the Chancellor bear in mind that this is a time of the year when agricultural overdrafts necessarily have to increase and make it clear to the banks that nothing should be done in pursuit of this policy to prevent the agricultural expansion which is so necessary for the balance of payments?

Certainly I take into account what the right hon. Gentleman says.

Will my right hon. Friend not close his mind completely to the need for import controls, bearing in mind our present difficulties, and not agree that the latest run on the £, news of which we have just seen on the tape, shows that there is a need for further measures by the Government to protect and strengthen our £ against further speculation?

On the first part of my hon. Friend's question, I have nothing to add to what I said. On his second point, by far the best measure to strengthen the position of the £ would be an improvement in the balance of payments, which I expect to see in the forthcoming months.

Why was not the Chancellor's statement made yesterday at 3.30, when the House was full? Why do hon. Members have to read about it in the papers this morning and be told about it by the Chancellor in answer to a Private Notice Question on Friday morning? Does he realise that many small firms who cannot borrow in the market because rates of interest are so high as a result of the Government's policy of excessive taxation upon dividends will find themselves in great difficulty and that the result will be increased unemployment?

The hon. and learned Gentleman is only here on Friday mornings.

In answer to the hon. and learned Gentleman's first question, I followed the precedent set by my predecessor in 1966, to which no objection was taken by right hon. and hon. Gentlemen opposite, of issuing the statement through the Bank of England, and then, if the matter were raised in the House, dealing with it by a Private Notice Question. As for the hon. and learned Gentleman's second question, I do not believe that the dire consequences which he predicts will follow from this adjustment.

May I press my right hon. Friend further on the subject of import controls, since the banks' decisions will have the effect of holding unemployment to its present level, whereas selective import controls, following the recommendations made to the Government by the T.U.C. in its "Economic Review", would have the effect of stemming purchasing power in respect of goods brought into the country that we do not want? Surely the Government should reconsider this matter?

As I have said on many occasions, this country has a vital interest in preventing the growth of a wave of protectionism throughout the world. We now have the best export opportunities that we have had since the war. We are determined to exploit them. To block them by our own action would be extremely foolish.

In view of the need to maintain the balance between the public and private sectors, will the Government move an Amendment to the Gas and Electricity Bill to reduce borrowing powers which at the moment it is proposed to increase to £1,200 million?

No, this is a different form of borrowing.

Does my right hon. Friend agree that the greatest damage to the British economy is done by those people who sell Britain short?

There is a great deal in what my hon. Friend says.

In view of what has been said about the importance of agriculture and the development areas, will the right hon. Gentleman confirm that the house building industry remains in a neutral class for loans?

The position is not changed by this announcement.

Does my right hon. Friend expect these bank restrictions to have an effect on restricting hire-purchase expenditure and, if so, to what extent?

They will have some effect on the general level of consumer credit, though I have not introduced direct hire-purchase restrictions for the reasons that I gave in my Budget speech.

Can the Chancellor say what change has taken place in the general situation since the Budget to make these new measures necessary?

There has been no marked change in the general situation. It is merely that this is an appropriate time, six months after the last ceiling was imposed, to look at how it is working, both from the point of view of its level and the way in which the ceiling is made up, with exemptions, as was hitherto the case, for priority categories, and I have moved on to what I believe will be a new and more effective system.

Did not my right hon. Friend at the time of his Budget forecast that he would, in certain circumstances, have to take just such measures as these? Is he aware that the great majority of hon. Members, on this side at any rate, are behind him in his efforts to redress the balance of payments?

I am very grateful to my hon. and learned Friend. I certainly always envisaged that the Budget strategy in no way meant that it was unnecessary to make a continuing review whether or not the level of bank credit was such as to fit in with that strategy.

The Chancellor of the Exchequer typically attacked one of my hon. Friends by asking what he would do. Having spent the last couple of days at a Parliamentary conference in Europe, may I ask the right hon. Gentleman whether he is aware that the only way to restore the confidence which is needed is a change of Government?

I hope that the hon. Gentleman was in a rather more constructive mood when he met colleagues at his Parliamentary conference.

The Chancellor of the Exchequer has said that he has not met the delegates of the International Monetary Fund, but does he say that he had no communication with the authorities of that Fund before making his decision on these restrictions?

I have had no direct communication with them. This decision is based on my judgment and not on theirs.

I should like to return to the matter of borrowing for nationalised industries. Is the Chancellor of the Exchequer saying that he wants the nationalised industries to be as careful about their borrowing as the private sector is about its borrowing? If that is the case, how can the Government possibly press forward with a Bill enabling £1,200 million to be borrowed by the gas industry?

I most certainly want the nationalised industries to be every bit as careful as the private sector. They are subject to very severe controls, but it does not follow that important nationalised industries should not be able to carry out vital investment programmes.

Will the Chancellor of the Exchequer reduce the special deposits that have to be provided by the Scottish banks so that they may maintain lending in areas of high unemployment?

No, Sir. I have no such proposals.

Following is the announcement:

CREDIT RESTRICTION

In November 1967 banks were asked to hold down most of their lending in sterling to the private sector and to borrowers abroad to the level then current. At that time it was not possible to foresee with any reliability the rate of growth in lending directly related to exports which would be needed over the immediately ensuing months; and such lending was therefore not brought within the quantitative limit then requested: Because the prospective growth of exports is now clearer, it has become possible to make an adequately reliable estimate, for the months ahead, of the growth in bank lending directly related to exports. Accordingly, the authorities have concluded that the administration of credit restrictions can both be simplified and made more effective by accommodating all lending directly related to exports, and to the financing of shipbuilding (under the special scheme relating thereto), within a new overall ceiling on bank lending to the private sector and overseas.

The authorities have also decided that the restrictions requested last November should be modified so as to achieve a greater reduction in lending to non-priority borrowers than has so far taken place and at the same time to leave sufficient room for lending for exports and for activities directly related to improving the balance of payments.

The clearing bank figures for May published this morning show, after seasonal adjustment, that the total of their lending in sterling to the private sector and to borrowers abroad, including export finance and other hitherto exempted categories, now stands at about 104 per cent. of the level reached in November 1967. These banks are asked not to allow this lending to exceed this percentage figure until further notice. All other banks should restrict their lending to the same percentage increase over November 1967.

Within this new ceiling and subject to normal banking criteria, banks are asked to give priority to lending for export transactions, to finance for production and investment necessary to sustain increased exports, for the promotion of invisible earnings or, as in the case of agriculture, for securing a saving in imports. The banks will need to make room for such lending within the new ceiling by curtailing lending to persons and for other non-priority purposes. They are asked especially to intensify restrictions on the granting of credit associated with imports of manufactured goods for home consumption or imports for stock accumulation.

Banks are asked to apply the restrictions set out above both to credit given through loans and overdrafts and also to credit given through commercial bills and leasing facilities.

Personal loans where related to the purchase of goods subject to hire purchase terms control should be on terms no easier than those permitted by the Board of Trade for hire purchase contracts.

The authorities have noted that lending to local authorities by the London clearing and Scottish banks, through advances, has risen appreciably since last November, largely because of switching from other forms of short-term finance. The banks are asked to ensure that such lending returns to normal levels.

Business Of The House

With permission, Mr. Speaker, I should like to make a short business statement.

In order to meet what I deem to be the wishes of the House, the Business on Thursday, 30th May, has been rearranged as follows:

Consideration of the Lords Amendment to the Industrial Expansion Bill.

Remaining stages of the Housing (Financial Provisions) (Scotland) Bill, which is a Consolidation Measure.

Prayers relating to the National Health Service (Charges for Drugs and Appliances) Regulations.

Is my right hon. Friend aware that those of us who objected yesterday have sympathy with him in the difficult task he has been set by the bad timing resulting from the arbitrary decision to impose the charges on 10th June? I express to him our appreciation for the quick way in which he has responded to our wishes.

Can the Leader of the House confirm that it is intended that the remaining stages of the Transport Bill will be taken also on Tuesday morning and Thursday morning? Has the right hon. Gentleman seen the Motion in today's Order Paper in my name and the names of some of my hon. Friends representing Scottish constituencies deploring the fact that this will mean a clash of times with the Scottish Grand Committee, resulting in hon. Members being unable to take part in important debates on the Floor of the House on a Measure that will have an adverse effect on Scotland?

[That this House deplores the fact that the Government have so overloaded Parliament with undigested legislation as to make it necessary for the remaining stages of the Transport Bill to take place on the mornings of Tuesday 28thand Thursday 30th May, when the Scottish Standing Committee will be sitting, with the result that members of the Committee are unlikely to be able to partici pate in debates in the House on a measure which would seriously affect their constituencies.]

I answered this question yesterday. It does not arise on this statement.

I should like to press this matter further. There are not only Scottish Committees, but a number of other important Committees sitting—

Order. We cannot go back to yesterday's business questions.

Complaint Of Privilege

The hon. Member for Glasgow, Maryhill (Mr. Hannan) addressed to me yesterday a complaint of breach of privilege relating to the text of a letter published in The Scotsman on 23rd May, 1968, over the signature of the hon. Member for Hamilton (Mrs. Ewing). In my view, the hon. Gentleman's complaint does raise a matter of privilege conferring on it precedence over the Orders of the Day.

It would be in accordance with practice if I now offered an opportunity to the hon. Lady the Member for Hamilton to address the House, if she wishes to do so, on this point. If, on the other hand, she does not desire to address the House, it is customary that she should leave the Chamber at this moment.

On a point of order, Mr. Speaker. I have always had the impression that it was traditional, in view of your Ruling, for the Leader of the House to move that a matter of complaint such as this should be referred to the Committee of Privilege. I should have thought it in the interests of the House if there were to be no further debate or comment at this stage, but that the traditional practice should be followed.

The Chair acts on advice. The Ruling that I have given is given on advice. The Leader of the House will be entitled to move the Motion, but I have invited the hon. Lady to speak.

Further to that point of order, Mr. Speaker. Following the explanation of the hon. Lady the Member for Hamilton (Mrs. Ewing), will it be open for hon. Members to make comments? What is the position?

What will happen is this. We will hear the hon. Lady—I have invited her to speak—after which it will be for the Leader of the House to move a Motion. That Motion is debatable.

Further to that point of Order, Mr. Speaker. Do I understand that the Motion will be debatable?

Yes. Mrs. Ewing.

Mr. Speaker, if people reading the letter I wrote, and to which reference has been made, read it as impugning the honour of the House of Commons and, in particular, of the hon. Member for Glasgow, Maryhill (Mr. Hannan), I most sincerely regret it because it was not my intention so to do. I may say that the hon. Member for Maryhill, as an hon. Member, has lobbied for many years on matters of law reform, and I know him to be a teetotaller. It would be patently absurd for it to be suggested that I would ever impugn his honour in this way—at least, I would hope so.

The question of malice was raised yesterday. I should like to assure the House that the motivation in the writing of the letter had nothing to do with malice. The letter is now in the foreground of the attention of the House, and it has been mentioned and quoted in the Press. But, as in most cases, I am sure that hon. Members will note that where there is a foreground there is usually a background. I categorically deny that malice motivated me to write the letter. Rather, I was motivated by what I thought at the time to be self-defence.

This letter is one of a chain of many. I would not ask hon. Members to go back in time to read the whole chain. That, perhaps, would be to tax them too severely, because the chain would take us all back to the time before I even took my seat in this House. I felt, at any rate, that I had been the victim of a series of personal and sometimes vicious attacks. These ranged from implications that I enjoyed free holidays at the taxpayers' expense—including one on a date when I was sitting in the Chamber, when it was then suggested that I was gallivanting in Mull—to being accused of being a well-paid tool of the Daily Express, which does not pay me at all.

As I am trying to explain to the House, the motive was self-defence against what seemed to be a double standard in attendance being expected, one for me and one, it seemed, for other hon. Members. I hasten to assure the House that this was nothing to do with drinking; it was to do with attendance. I wish to explain that so that you will be able to bear it in mind, Mr. Speaker, in whatever decision you make.

In the legal profession, to which I belonged before I became a Member, this is one of the oldest and most common jokes about being called to the Bar. Lawyers usually take it in jest. If I had stopped to think about it, I would not have put that part in the letter. But I wrote it in the spirit in which I presumed politicians would take it. There was no malice aforethought. I regret very sincerely if I have impugned the honour of the hon. Member for Mary-hill or of the House of Commons.

In view of your Ruling, Mr. Speaker, it falls to me as Leader of the House, in accordance with past practice, to move,

That the matter of the complaint be referred to the Committee of Privileges.

The hon. Lady the Member for Hamilton will be kind enough to leave the House.

The hon. Member then withdrew.

I wish to oppose the Motion. It elevates into a matter of national importance something which I believe to be a relative triviality. Complaints sent to the Committee of Privileges should be limited to matters which are important, vital and essential to the dignity and working of the House. I do not believe that this case falls in that category.

This was a letter printed in a comparatively obscure place in the Scotsman. Although I read the Scotsman fairly regularly, I should never have heard of it if it had not been raised as a matter of privilege. I understand that the Scotsman was a very popular newspaper here yesterday. The result of sending the complaint to the Committee of Privileges will be to elevate into a matter of national discussion something which, as the hon. Lady the Member for Hamilton (Mrs. Ewing) said, was not the beginning but the fizzling out of a controversy. I believe that that controversy would have fizzled out and that it will continue if we send it to the Committee of Privileges and give it an undue sense of proportion.

I have been editor of a Scottish newspaper. I was the editor and acting editor of Forward for over 22 years. These controversies are often not very mealy-mouthed. There is a certain ascerbity of expression and personal irrelevancies are sometimes brought into issue. But, as one interested in the freedom of the Press, I believe that the rights of hon. Members are already guaranteed by the law of libel.

What is the issue in the letter? The hon. Lady alleged—this was the gist of it—that some Members stand at the bars of this House more often than they stand at the Bar. That was a sort of feline aside which I do not wish to defend. But the fact is that there are bars in the House. Some Members to whom I have spoken about this question think that they can discuss matters of politics in the bars with great advantage to themselves.

I understand that recently a bar called Annie's Bar—I have not discovered its whereabouts—was established for the purpose of Members discussing politics and the ramifications of politics. I share the personal habits of the hon. Member for Glasgow, Maryhill (Mr Hannan): I am allergic to alcohol. If the Prime Minister sent a messenger to ask me to join the Cabinet, the last place in which he would look for me would be the bar. I am tolerant of other people and realise that we must treat this matter in a mood of toleration.

What will happen if this matter goes to the Committee of Privileges? We had the case of the former Member for Colne Valley, Mr. Duffy. He made a far more definite allegation than the hon. Lady the Member for Hamilton. He accused masses of Members of attending debates under the influence of drink, and the matter was reported to the Committee of Privileges. Anyone who has read the evidence will know that Mr. Duffy ultimately bowed to the feeling of hon. Members and withdrew. But there is no allegation in this case of widespread intoxication among hon. Members. Pressure was brought to bear on Mr. Duffy by the Chief Patronage Secretary to end this incident so that we should not spend any more time on it. I believe that at one point Mr. Duffy was rather stubborn and said that he would not withdraw, but ultimately he did.

The hon. Lady is a rather different kind of person from Mr. Duffy. She might put up a fight. This House would look ridiculous if it came to a fight with the hon. Lady, who might not be prepared to retreat. What will we do then? The hon. Lady has a grievance, and she will discover a new grievance in the Committee of Privileges because on it there is an overwhelming majority of Englishmen. That may seem a strange argument, but it is the argument of the Scottish National Party. We shall have this new political St. Joan having to face an inquisition by a majority of Englishmen.

We are, therefore, on the way to making ourselves look completely absurd and to wasting the time of Privy Councillors who should be doing something else. There is only one Scottish Privy Councillor on the Committee of Privileges, and I understand that he is so bogged down in the Finance Committee that he will not be able to attend the Committee of Privileges.

Suppose that the Committee of Privileges decides to impose a sanction. Many of us remember how this has been done in the past. There was the case concerning the Sunday Express, when Mr. John Junor was brought into the House to be rebuked by the Speaker. The Speaker donned his ceremonial robes and Mr. Junor was marched to the Bar of the House where he read a solemn apology. He behaved with such dignity that in the end we did not know who was rebuking whom. Suppose that the hon. Lady appears at the Bar and says, "I believe what I said. Do what you damn well like with me". What will we do then? The House will have elevated the hon. Lady into a person of supreme national importance. The House will have given the greatest boost to Scottish nationalism that would be possible, and it would probably mean at least 100,000 more votes for Scottish Nationalists.

I ask the House to stop and not go further into this ridiculous business. I am not a Scottish Nationalist. The hon. Lady has established, I understand, about a dozen branches in South Ayrshire, in the hope that I will disappear along with many other Scottish Members. I have nothing personally to gain, but I ask the House not to proceed any further with this business. If we do, we shall embark on something supremely silly. I ask the House to reject the Motion.

I think that hon. Members will agree that I am probably one of the most tolerant of Members. Whilst I may get involved sometimes in fairly heated exchanges with hon. Members opposite and with my hon. Friends, this is not a matter which continues, and one expects to have the rough and tumble of political life. If we cannot take that, we should not be in politics. I make that point first, because I rise to support the Motion that this matter be referred to the Committee of Privileges.

I do this because, if we do not follow that practice in this case, the House will be guilty of double standards. I can remember one of my former hon. Friends, Dr. Duffy, explaining from the back benches that the statement he had made had been made at a private meeting; he had no knowledge that the Press was present; then the matter was reported in the Press. We did not debate the matter in the House. The matter was brought before the House. As far as I can remember, no voice was raised against it going to the Committee of Privileges. Neither my hon. Friend the Member for South Ayrshire (Mr. Emrys Hughes) nor any other right hon. or hon. Member said that in the circumstances the matter should not go to the Committee of Privileges. It went there. We know what happened.

We should be guilty of a double standard if we were to say that it was right to follow that course in the case of Dr. Duffy, who has now unfortunately left the House, but not right in the case of the hon. Lady the Member for Hamilton (Mrs. Ewing), whose cause we might be helping to boost by a few thousand votes if we send the matter to the Committee of Privileges.

That is a matter the House must face up to. Because it might mean a few more votes for the Scottish Nationalists, and because the hon. Lady may appear to have been martyred, I do not think that we should dodge our responsibilities. We cannot dodge our responsibilities. We must not be accused of having double standards.

The hon. Lady writes a considerable number of letters. She also writes a number of articles. I do not seek to judge some of the things she says in her articles, but I became a little upset when it was suggested that I, along with other hon. Members, was more interested in dead birds on the south coast than I was in dead people in Glasgow. How does one answer that sort of thing? How do my Scottish hon. Friends answer this matter except by taking the action they are taking?

The trouble is that too many people are now saying that Members of Parliament are a bunch of layabouts and that they do not work hard. That is not the complaint we hear from the Opposition; their complaint is that we are doing too much work. However, we hear the other accusation throughout the country. Members of Parliament are constantly being attacked in this way.

It is said that the answer is for an hon. Member to write to the Press himself. However, if people constantly drip away at the concept that Parliamentary democracy is a dead letter and that we are not doing any work, the whole basis of Parliamentary democracy is undermined. That is what I am afraid is happening in Britain at present. It is high time that the House faced up to the issue. We are in very serious political times. Therefore, we have a duty. Members of Parliament certainly ought not to have any privileges above those enjoyed by anyone else, but they should at least have the right to protect themselves when they are wrongly attacked, as they have been in this case.

I can count on one hand the number of times that I have been to the various bars in the Palace. It is not just my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow, Maryhill (Mr. Hannan) who was being attacked. It was every hon. Member. I resent the suggestion that I am constantly in bars in the House drinking. The implication is that we are all in the bars more than we are in the Chamber.

No one said that.

I resent it. It is untrue.

It is untrue, because it was not said.

The hon. Lady should have said that it was untrue.

If my hon. Friend reads the alleged breach of privilege he will see that the word was "some ". He is now translating that into "all".

How many is "some"? "Some" could be 99 per cent. That is not true. When I came to the House of Commons I was more than pleasantly surprised to find that most hon. Members on both sides work hard. In fact, I do not know any who do not work hard for their constituents and who do their work in the Chamber and who have a cameraderie which I never expected would exist. That is what I found. I have been very proud to be a Member of the House of Commons and to have associated with hon. Members on both sides, even if I have disagreed intensely with their political point of view.

It is time that we defended ourselves in the country. It is time that we stopped knocking ourselves. It is time that we stopped suggesting that Parliamentary democracy is a dead letter. This is why I support the Motion. We cannot have double standards. We cannot have a position in which odd Members —I use the word "odd"—think that they can, in letters and articles throughout the country, say things like that to undermine our basic democratic system without our protecting ourselves.

The hon. Member for Liverpool, Walton (Mr. Heffer) has said —with this I agree—that it is important that we in the House should do our best to defend ourselves and to resist unfair attacks upon the House. I want to suggest one over-riding reason why we should support the hon. Member for South Ayrshire (Mr. Emrys Hughes). The only purpose, as I have understood it, of having the privilege of Parliament is to try to uphold the dignity of Parliament. We must ask ourselves whether we are doing anything to uphold our dignity if we decide to refer this matter to the Committee of Privileges. I believe that we are not.

I believe that it was probably unfortunate that the hon. Lady the Member for Hamilton (Mrs. Ewing) wrote what she did. I agree with the hon. Member for Walton that it was an insult to Members of the House. I have absolutely no doubt—I say this with respect, Sir—that there was no possible Ruling that you could have given other than that which you gave. I honestly believe, however, that having been said, and the hon. Lady having, perhaps not in the most choice words, explained her motivation and having apologised to the House—[HON. MEMBERS: "No."]—I said that I did not think that the hon. Lady's choice of words was necessarily the best, but she made an apology—maybe not a wholly fulsome apology—to the House. I do not believe we improve the dignity of this place any further by referring a matter of this kind to the Committee of Privileges. By doing so we tend to make ourselves a laughing stock rather than to improve our dignity.

I suggest that because of the dignity of this House we should take no further action in this matter.

Mr. Speaker, as I understand it, the position here is that you rule as to wheher it comes within the rules of privilege. If I may respectfully say so, this clearly does. Then it is for the House to decide whether it is of sufficient weight for us to take notice of it and, in a sense perhaps, to make ourselves ridiculous in doing so.

There is nobody more jealous than I of the reputation of this House, but I do not think that we serve it by displaying an over-sensitivity over trivialities of this sort. We must remember that the saying,

"The greater the truth the greater the libel."

is certainly true of our law where truth is always a defence and it may be true to say that the greater the truth the greater the breach of privilege. Unfortu- nately, our history of privilege was designed upon what was the then necessity of this House to conceal what it was doing. Our basic privilege was to not have our proceedings reported and the present system of privilege has emerged from that.

Let us consider for a second what this lady did say. She mentioned a particular man and wrote:

"… the customary stance of some M.P.s whilst at the House is closer to the many bars than the Bar of the House. Some M.P.s interpret their duties in a different spirit doing constituency work. Others seem to do neither."

Are we not very greatly hypocritical if we do not note that in all the history of Parliament there have been hon. Members, a few, who have spent more time in the bar than they spent at the Bar and that there will always be people who do that? In an assembly of 600 people we do not get 600 conscientious paragons. Are we to say that we are going to take this formidable machinery of a Committee of Privy Councillors— and, as the hon. Member for South Ayrshire (Mr. Emrys Hughes) said, English Privy Councillors—to judge this lady who is here as an individual without a party and without advice as a national party member and then conceivably to bring her to the Bar of the House?

Yesterday an hon. Lady placed herself, not at the Bar of the House but before the Mace. She got suspended for five days, losing her Parliamentary salary but earning television fees and avoiding work in a kind of week which I should think most of us would be profoundly happy to avoid. Are we readily going to do this for this other hon. Lady? I urge the House to say that we have noticed this and we have heard what she had to say. Now let us get on with more serious business.

I support the hon. Member for South Ayrshire (Mr. Emrys Hughes). This is not something I am in the habit of doing, but I found his argument entirely convincing.

I should say straight away that I join with all who have made it absolutely clear, with great respect to you, Mr. Speaker, that we do not believe you could possibly have arrived at any other Ruling than the Ruling you gave this morning. The question, as the hon. and learned Member for Northampton (Mr. Paget) said, is whether nevertheless the matter should be referred to the Select Committee. I thought it necessary to refute two points which the hon. Member for Liverpool, Walton (Mr. Heffer) made, and made effectively.

The first was that if we did not refer this case to the Select Committee we should be acting on double standards in view of the way in which the case of Mr. Duffy was referred to the Select Committee. I believe we would not be acting on double standards if we made this distinction. I say that for two reasons. First, I think there was a very clear difference, of degree at least, between remarks which Mr. Duffy made and the comments contained in the letter written by the hon. Lady the Member for Hamilton (Mrs. Ewing) to the Scotsman.

Secondly, and I suggest this is not unimportant, the hon. Lady is on her own here. She does not have more experienced colleagues to advise and help her about how she should handle a matter of this kind. It is fair to say that she has been the object of a certain campaign of personalised criticism directed against her by certain hon. Members opposite. [HON." MEMBERS: "Oh."] Hon. Members, particularly hon. Members from Scotland, can hardly dispute that there has been a personalised tone of attack since she became an hon. Member. [HON. MEMBERS: "No."] This is my view. Under the circumstances one would accept that the phrasing of her letter to the Scotsman was unwise and indeed perhaps deplorable, but she does not have more experienced colleagues to advise here. We should take that into consideration.

The second argument, a far more important one, raised by the hon. Member for Walton, was that we needed to defend the dignity of Parliament at a time when it was under very serious assault and that by referring this case to the Select Committee we should be doing that. If I believed that to be true, I would certainly agree with the hon. Member because I do not dispute for a moment that there is a very grave decline in the public's respect for and support of Parliamentary institutions at the present time, but I question whether it is the hon. Lady the Member for Hamilton who has produced this situation, or even contributed to it to a great extent. I am afraid we have to face the fact that it has been the conduct of our affairs over the past three years which has produced it. [HON. MEMBERS: "No."] I appreciate that this is bound to appear a partisan point, but I believe it is true. I furthermore believe—

Order. I do not question the hon. Member's right to his opinions, but those are not the subject of this debate.

All I wish to say in conclusion, Mr. Speaker, is that, in my view, far from enhancing the dignity of this House and far from enhancing public respect for it by referring a case of this really trivial nature to the Select Committee, we should be doing precisely the opposite. We should be encouraging the feeling of contempt which already exists outside the House, and we should be very ill advised, for those reasons, to do it.

I do not agree with some of the comments which have been made suggesting that there is a great contempt in the country for the House of Commons. Such ideas might be in the mind of certain people who write in the newspapers, but they do not represent the opinion of the mass of ordinary people, who are proud of the House, proud of the way in which we can have massive rows, perhaps shouting at one another and being called to order by you, Mr. Speaker, because of our behaviour, while, at the same time, there is never any hon. Member blooded or maimed because of it all. The same cannot be said of other Chambers in the world. People are proud that we can in our House have heated debates which are reported in the newspapers and then, at the end of the day, conduct ourselves in the Division Lobbies so as to register the views which we hold.

I felt that it was somewhat distasteful —I must say this—of the hon. Member for South Angus (Mr. Bruce-Gardyne) to try to snatch a bit of party advantage out of an issue of this kind. It was an unwholesome and distasteful approach.

I agree with much of what was said by my hon. Friend the Member for South Ayrshire (Mr. Emrys Hughes), but I totally disagree with his conclusions. I support what has been said by my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, Walton (Mr. Heffer) and my right hon. Friend the Leader of the House. It is not right to say that the hon. Lady the Member for Hamilton (Mrs. Ewing), the cause of this debate, has been neglected in the House. Hon. Members who share the bench where she normally sits have helped her. From my place on this side, I have seen how hon. Gentlemen opposite have assisted and guided her.

And on this side, too.

And probably on this side, too, I remember the days when I first came to the House. Not knowing my way around, I did not bother, in seeking the help of experienced hon. Members, to consider whether those whom I approached were Tories or Socialists. If an hon. Member was a well known figure in the House, I went to him and asked for his advice. I was at once assisted. He did not question whether I was a Welsh Nationalist, a Scottish Nationalist, a Socialist or a Tory. Help was immediately forthcoming. Such questions make no difference in the House of Commons in a matter of that kind. When it is said that the hon. Lady has sat lonely with no one to help her, it sounds to me like a cheap melodrama, not worthy of discussion in the House. I am sure that such suggestions are not right.

Let us consider what my hon. Friend the Member for South Ayrshire said. I have never heard a speech of such appeasement, appeasement to another party, a nationalist party, carrying the suggestion that we in the House of Commons have not got the guts to carry on in the way we should, with proper respect among ourselves and to organisations outside and that we ought somehow to hold back in this particular instance.

I do not recall my hon. Friend the Member for South Ayrshire making such a speech in defence of Dr. Duffy. I sat on this bench when Dr. Duffy had to apologise to the House. I sat next to him, and, naturally, there was private conversation between us, as there is so often when you are not looking at us, Mr. Speaker. There was a man whom I knew to be desperate moved and upset because he had offended the House of Commons, although no such thing was in his mind. He had had no desire to do that, so he was prepared to make the wholesome and forthcoming apology which he did. I know how he felt. He said to me, "It is the House of Commons which I have inadvertently, certainly unintentionally, besmirched, and that was not my intention".

We have heard an explanation from the hon. Lady. There was one apology to one hon. Member. But all of us have been impugned by her allegations. As my hon. Friend the Member for Walton said, who are the few, who comprise the cabal, the small number who frequent the bars, who do not work either in the House or in their constituencies? Unless this nameless few are identified, we can all qualify. This is why I believe that we ought to proceed in the way proposed.

My hon. Friend the Member for South Ayrshire sincerely believes in justice and in seeing that the right thing is done. I say to him that this is an occasion for us not to wilt before any form of political organisation, not to wilt before attack in the newspapers, not to wilt, if we think we are right, before the majority of ill-informed people, people who may be ill-informed because of biased reports in the newspapers.

This occasion presents a challenge to the House of Commons. It must do its duty and not be put off or frightened by the suggestions coming from my hon. Friend. The good name of the House of Commons has been impugned. From time to time, we all get irritated with the procedure here. When it does not suit us, we call it archaic. When it does suit us, it becomes the fruit of wonderful foresight which we have inherited. We all behave like that. But behind it all, and in some ways because of it, we love this place. Ordinary good people outside want to love the House of Commons, because they recognise that it is their House, too. They do not like to see it besmirched and impugned either in attacks on Members or in attacks on the establishment of the House itself. Not only has our good name been impugned, but the name of the House of Commons been impugned.

I conclude with some words from Shakespeare—

"Who steals my purse steals trash; 'tis something, nothing;

'Twas mine, 'tis his, and has been slave to thousands;

But he that filches from me my good name Robs me of that which not enriches him, And makes me poor indeed."

I hope that the House will have the courage to defend its good and honourable name.

I hope that I shall carry the hon. Member for Ealing, North (Mr. Molloy) with me on two points. First, whatever he might have felt about the remarks of the hon. Member for South Angus (Mr. Bruce-Gardyne), this is not a party-political matter, and it is quite possible for hon. and right hon. Members in all quarters of the House to take different views. I am sure that, if this matter goes to a Division, the voting figures will show that. Second, this is not a question of saying that, if we do one thing we discharge our duty but if we do another we fail. It is a question of how we in the House of Commons shall exercise our judgment.

The hon. Lady the Member for Hamilton (Mrs. Ewing) wrote an unwise letter, and in the particular allegations referred to it was unfair to the generality of hon. and right hon. Members. Not surprisingly, it has been hurtful to quite a few hon. Members. If I may say so with respect, Mr. Speaker, you gave the only Ruling possible on the precedents. But it is now for us to decide whether the matter should go further, and that is a question of judgment.

I have for a long time felt that the House of Commons was a little too ready to cry "Privilege". I have felt it particularly since I acted professionally for the editor of a newspaper who was referred to the Committee of Privileges. I caused a Petition to be presented to the House, drafted in precisely the terms of the one which John Wilkes presented to the House, asking that one should have the right to be represented by counsel both before the Committee of Privileges and, if necessary, at the Bar of the House.

That was in the 1956 episode. The House took the view, after Mr. John Junor had been summoned, that this had gone far enough, that "This dance will no further go". It therefore dropped it because it was not prepared to have a show-down, because it felt—

indicated dissent.

It dropped the case in which I was concerned. I can assure the hon. Member for Eastbourne (Sir C. Taylor) that although I may be declining in my mental capacities I know the outcome in the case in which I was concerned, which was not the Junor case. It concerned an Essex newspaper. The House was right in the action it took.

The hon. Lady has explained what she was trying to convey. Hon. Members may well feel that she might have been more magnanimous and might have gone into greater detail, but at any rate the House has been able to hear what she said. I always think that the greatest thing about the House is that it is fairly magnanimous. It is also pretty thick-skinned we are not as thick-skinned as in the days when Lord Sandwich would ask Charles James Fox whether he would die of the pox or the rope. If I had the courage of Mr. Leslie Hale, the former Member for Oldham, West, I would carry on and give the reply. But we are at any rate pretty thick-skinned.

Every one of us, whatever our view on this issue, is jealous to maintain the reputation of the House.—[Interruption.] Perhaps the hon. Gentleman would allow me to finish, because I am sure that he believes in freedom of speech as much as anybody else in the House. The reputation of the House depends much more on how we comport ourselves as a Chamber, the way in which we look after our constituents, and the work we do in Committee, than simply the letters which happen to be written unwisely to local newspapers—or great national newspapers.

If the House is to show that it has its sense of balance and priorities, now that the matter has been raised, Mr. Speaker has ruled, and there has been a discussion, let us drop the thing and get back to serious work.

In intervening briefly in what has been a very interesting debate I must confess that I agree very much with a great deal of what has been said. but my view, as one who has been concerned in the matter, is that it has been taken completely out of its background. I should have assumed that those who have taken part in the debate would have read the correspondence in the Scotsman on Wednesday and yesterday.

I replied on Wednesday to certain things the hon. Lady had said and to certain inferences that might be drawn from them. I may say without flattering myself that my letter was generally welcomed by all my Scottish colleagues. A large number of them spoke to me about the matter and said that what I had written fitted in with their thoughts.

The hon. Lady replied yesterday, and again I was approached to ask if I was taking any further steps. After thinking very carefully about her concluding passage I said that I did not feel it was worth while continuing the correspondence.

I hope I shall not be revealing anything that is secret between us, but if my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow, Mary-hill (Mr. Hannan) feels that I am he can interrupt me. I trust I am not going too far when I say that he did not accept my point of view yesterday and felt that further steps should be taken. I did not regard myself as being inpugned in the closing passage of that letter. Therefore, in view of the disturbance in his mind, I suggested that he should seek advice from a quarter more competent than I on these affairs, and what has happened is the result of that advice.

As one who has been concerned in the matter, I think we should be going too far if we pursued the course now suggested, because there are two things at least that the House must preserve— freedom of speech and freedom for Members to express themselves freely in public in correspondence over as wide a field as possible. I agree that there are limits, but in my view the limit was not reached at any stage in this correspondence. The statement which has given offence was:

"The customary stance of some M.P.s whilst at the House is closer to the many bars than the Bar of the House."

If that were something new I could understand the reaction amongst Members, but it has been said in other words time and time again during the 23 years I have been a Member.

I put this point to my hon. Friends who are using that argument: if bars are such an evil influence in the House why license them to operate here at all? Why did we just recently open a new bar in the House? Why should we be the authors of the evils which inherently we are condemning? There are certain things that we must preserve. If the hon. Lady comes to stand before the Select Committee—and I hope that that will not be the verdict of the House—I would place beside her my hon. and good Friend the Member for Ebbw Vale (Mr. Michael Foot), who said yesterday:

"Is not one of the difficulties that all Scottish Members, whatever their condition, will be in Scotland tomorrow? "—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 23rd May, 1968; Vol. 765, c. 887.]

That is not true, but it is widely believed. It is openly said that Scottish Members continually neglect their duties on Friday and that they are all in Scotland. My hon. Friend made that false charge yesterday and helped to spread that rumour. That is not true. Therefore—

We cannot debate on this Motion whether the hon. Member for Ebbw Vale (Mr. Michael Foot) should go before the Committee of Privileges.

All right, Mr. Speaker. But I have made one thing clear, that Scottish hon. Members are here, and I am one who does a five-day week along with others of my hon. Friends.

I think that the matter has been sufficiently dealt with by the House this morning, and I suggest that on this issue we should proceed no further.

Nearly all the arguments that I should have used have been used by the right hon. Member for Devon, North (Mr. Thorpe). I merely want to make an appeal to the Leader of the House now. I am as jealous of the honour and dignity of the House as anybody because I have my unofficial position, but I believe that we are making fools of ourselves in this debate and wasting a great deal of valuable time.

The Ruling that Mr. Speaker gave enabled the House, if it so wished, to give an expedited procedure for dealing with the alleged case of privilege. This is for the House to accept or not to accept. In this case it was followed, I believe rightly, by an opportunity for the hon. Lady the Member for Hamilton (Mrs. Ewing) to make an apology. She took that opportunity perhaps not quite so satisfactorily as many of us on all sides of the House could have wished. However, she did make a qualified apology.

What has impressed me most in the debate and given me my greatest difficulty has been the speech by the hon. Member for Liverpool, Walton (Mr. Heffer), with whom I normally disagree but whom I always respect. He drew attention to the case of Dr. Duffy. Having been in the House now for nearly 40 years, I feel that the House is becoming more and more sensitive to the charges in respect of the conduct of hon. Members. I wish that in Dr. Duffy's case there had been an opportunity for an early apology to the House and that it could have finished there. But I warn the House that if we are to say that because we delt three years ago in the Dr. Duffy case in this way we are debarred from adopting a more lenient way here, we shall become more and more sensitive to these charges.

Therefore, I beg the Leader of the House, who is new to his office but has come with long experience of Parliament in other capacities, to withdraw the Motion at this stage. Surely if I am right in my definition there is nothing to prevent hon. Members such as the hon. Member for Ealing, North (Mr. Molloy) and the hon. Member for Liverpool, Walton from placing on the Order Paper an Early Day Motion expressing their views on the hon. Lady's epistolic expedition, which they do not like. There seems to be plenty of opportunity for Early Day Motions. It is one of the new changes in the House. We are getting more and more every day. This seems to me to be the right way to deal with the matter and to place it in the right perspective. Therefore, I make an appeal to the right hon. Gentleman: may we now get on with the business that we have on this Friday, and will he now withdraw the Motion?

I rise to say a word or two in support of the proposition put to the House by the right hon. Member for Thirsk and Malton (Mr. Turton). I do so—I apologise for not having been able to be here at the beginning of the debate—as a result of the experience that I had during the course of the year or more in which I was first of all a member and later the Chairman of the Select Committee which examined the whole question of Parliamentary Privilege. The report of that Committee has not yet been debated in this House. If it is accepted, there will be profound changes.

One of the matters which appealed to the Committee unanimously was the view that the House does itself no good and incurs the disrespect of the public if it spends a great deal of time in public dealing with matters which are relatively trivial. An hon. Member opposite spoke about the disrespect in which he thought the House is held by the public as a whole. I do not agree with him about that.

Is my hon. and learned Friend aware that many of us were in the House at the beginning of the debate and heard the statement made by the hon. Lady the Member for Hamilton (Mrs. Ewing), and that we also feel that what he may think is trivial is not trivial to other hon. Members?

I apologised to the House for not having been here, and I hope that my hon. Friends and hon. Members opposite will accept that. I hope that I have a point of view as the result of the experience that I had in the capacity that I mentioned which I am entitled to express to the House.

I was saying that an hon. Member opposite expressed a point of view with which I do not agree, that this House is held in contempt or disrespect by the public generally. However, what I feel is that if the House spends a great deal of time discussing matters of this kind when it could be engaged on the real business for which our constituents sent us here it is likely to be brought into considerable contempt.

The matter which brought this question before the House has now been very adequately ventilated. My hon. Friends and hon. Gentleman opposite have made their points of view known to the House as to the impropriety of a letter such as that which was written. In my personal view—and I think it is the view of the Select Committee—a statement such as that which was made by the hon. Lady is more reprehensible coming from a Member of the House than it would be coming from somebody outside the House, and it would be right for the House to take a more serious view of such charges made by a Member of the House than such charges made by someone who was not a Member of the House.

None the less, weighing that up and bearing that point in mind, I cannot see what advantages will be gained by referring the matter to the Committee of Privileges now. It is highly likely—indeed, almost certain—that the Committee of Privileges on the material available to it will come to exactly the same sort of conclusion that the House could come to now having become aware of what the allegations are, and it is highly likely that it will follow the usual course which it follows in these circlumstances and that in the end there will be no further steps taken.

The Ruling which you gave to the House, Mr. Speaker, as has rightly been said, enables the House, if it so desires, to give this matter precedence over the Orders of the Day. It used to be the practice of the House where a matter was considered to be either relatively trivial or to have been dealt with adequately in the course of the debate for the Leader of the House at that stage, instead of moving that the matter should be referred to the Committee of Privileges, to move that the House should proceed to the next business of the day.

It seems to me that the matter has been adequately ventilated. It seems to me that it is far more trivial than some of the matters that have been brought to the attention of the House as possible breaches of privilege. I think that any lesson that needs to be learnt has been learnt by those concerned, particularly the hon. Lady, and I hope that my right hon. Friend the Leader of the House will think it right and appropriate to withdraw the Motion, substituting the course to which I have referred and which is in accordance with practice.

While thanking you, Mr. Speaker, for your courtesy in giving consideration to this matter, I hope that right hon. and hon. Members will pay regard to the course of action I propose to support. I think that those hon. Members who know me will recognise that I would not have raised a matter of this character without feeling that the conventions and orders of the House had been infringed. Some serious statements have been made about hon. Members outside the House and, by your Ruling, Mr. Speaker, you have made it clear that you, as representative of the House and guardian of its rules, are of opinion that this is at least a sufficiently serious matter as to constitute a prima facie case for reference to the Committee of Privileges.

The hon. Gentleman is wrong. Mr. Speaker has established that there is a prima facie case. It is now for the House to decide what to do.

I am sorry, but the right hon. Gentleman does not appear to have heard me properly. I think that that is precisely what I was saying. Mr. Speaker indicated that the matter was of sufficient importance for the House at least to consider it.

These allegations were not only about the behaviour of hon. Members within the House but, indeed, outside it. It was alleged that hon. Members were not seen in the House for months and that no records were kept. My hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow, Govan (Mr. Rankin) made it clear that he exonerated himself. The hon. Lady appeared to aggravate the position by casting further aspersions on the habits of hon. Members in the House.

While it is true that your Ruling, Mr. Speaker, affords us an opportunity to discuss the matter, I do not think we should forget the precedents, particularly the case of Dr. Patrick Duffy in 1965. The Committee of Privileges examined the precedents then, and in paragraph 6 of its Report reference was made to the fact that it had been resolved by the House that

"… to print or publish any books or libels, reflecting upon the proceedings of the House of Commons, or any Member thereof, for, or relating to, his service therein, is a high violation of the rights and privileges of the House of Commons."

Other precedents were referred to in the memorandum by the Clerk of the House in that case. In addition, in the case of my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary, the Committee considered a memorandum submitted by the Clerk which said in paragraph 7:

"To constitute an infringement of privilege, the imputations against Members do not have to relate to named individuals. Imputations on unnamed Members …"

by the use of the indefinite article "some Members" was casting an aspersion on the House. He said that unless names were given, it was doing an injury to the House. In Erskine May, on page 117, it is stated:

"Reflections upon Members, the particular individuals not being named, or otherwise indicated, are equivalent to reflections on the House."

It was with these thoughts in mind that I sought successfully to have your consideration of the matter, Mr. Speaker. In the light of the present circumstances, and having heard the hon. Lady today, I regret that she did not go further in her apology. I was not seeking a personal apology. I believe that I was expressing the views not only of Scottish hon. Members but of many others on both sides who are jealous of the reputation of the House.

I want to be as kindly as possible. The right hon. Member for Thirsk and Malton (Mr. Turton) thought that the hon. Lady's apology might have been more felicitous. Perhaps because she is new to the House she did not quite recognise that her apology was due to the whole House, but in view of the personal apology which she made pointedly to me, I ask my right hon. Friend the Leader of the House to accept what I think was perhaps her real intention, although it is not for me to say—that she wanted in her spirit to be more all-embracing.

In view of all that has been said, I hope that the hon. Lady will seriously reflect on the matter and I think that it would meet the general wish of the House if I asked my right hon. Friend to consider the course suggested by my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Dulwich (Mr. S. C. Silkin)—that of withdrawing the Motion.

The House has taken this matter extremely seriously this morning and it has been in generous mood. Dealing with a colleague is always a difficult problem. I have listened carefully to the debate and I should like to say to my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, Walton (Mr. Heffer) that his speech impressed us all. He should be proud of it as a parliamentarian.

I trust that I do not sound patronising in any way to the Father of the House, but I was also deeply impressed by the speech of the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Thirsk and Malton (Mr. Turton). I have known him for 30 years and I have always listened carefully to his advice. He spoke with great common sense.

We have to judge, in view of Mr. Speaker's Ruling, whether to refer the matter to the Committee of Privileges. I must bear in mind the advice of all right hon. and hon. Members who have spoken and must try to assess the feeling of the House. I must not in any way seek to make a party case because this is a matter for the whole House.

I recognise that, as the Father of the House has said, we are trespassing on important private Members' time, and I think that we should now come to a decision. In the circumstances, in view of the advice I have had, I think that we should accept the view of my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow, Mary-hill (Mr. Hannan), who first raised this matter. I trust that the speech of the hon. Member for Hamilton (Mr. Ewing) will be regarded as an apology to all hon. Members. If it did not necessarily appear so, probably this was because of the reason mentioned by my hon. Friend, to whom she made a personal apology.

I think that we can accept that, in the end, the hon. Lady regrets what she has done. Perhaps she gave the impression that her apology was not as fulsome as it should have been, but in the circumstances I trust that she will have learnt her lesson in the best sense. The House is always jealous of its practice and procedure but I am sure that it will be tolerant and wise and in the circumstances I recommend that I should be allowed to withdraw the Motion.

If the Leader of the House is about to withdraw the Motion, may I says one or two things? As a Member of the Committee of Privileges, I did not intervene in the debate, because the House might have decided to send the matter to the Committee, but, as it appears to be likely to be the general wish of the House that the Motion should be withdrawn, I should like to make some comments.

Personally, I deeply deplore the publication of this letter and I sympathise with those who have expressed the view that it is damaging to Members of Parliament when a letter of this kind is published. One finds that for months and years afterwards it is suggested to one in correspondence and in questions at meetings that this was the condition in the House. When it comes from a Member of the House of Commons it is gravely damaging, and I hope that the House will never under-estimate this, nor the importance of maintaining its good name.

Secondly, I greatly regret that the apology which was made by the hon. Member for Hamilton (Mrs. Ewing) was not the full apology to which the House is accustomed and which the House should expect.

Thirdly, I hope that no countenance will be given to the sentiment of the hon. and learned Member for Northampton (Mr. Paget) and the hon. Member for South Ayrshire (Mr. Emrys Hughes) that this matter would be referred to an English Committee of Privileges. Nothing could be further from the truth. It is nonsense. The Committee of Privileges is a Committee of the House, and when a Member is appointed to it, nobody asks whether he is an Englishman, a Welshman, a Scot or something else. In any case, two distinguished Scottish Privy Councillors sit on the Committee of Privileges. It is just this sort of sentiment which gives emotional fervour to a situation which I believe to be deeply regrettable.

Lastly, I think that the Leader of the House is quite right to suggest that the Motion should be withdrawn and that, having expressed our views frankly and forcibly, in the interests of its own dignity the House should take no further action.

The House has been at its best this morning. I beg to ask leave to withdraw the Motion.

Motion, by leave, withdrawn.

Orders Of The Day

Highlands And Islands Development (Scotland) Bill

( Changed from Highlands and Islands Industry (Scotland) Bill)

As amended (in the Standing Committee) considered.

As is my custom, I have published the Amendments which I have selected.

New Clause 1

RESTRICTIONS RELATING TO FINANCIAL ASSISTANCE TO COMPANIES

The Board shall not make any loan or grant to or acquire shares in a company unless that company observes and undertakes to observe trade union terms, rates and conditions in respect of all persons employed by them.

The Board shall not make any loan or grant to or acquire shares in a company which carries on or proposes to carry on any business or undertaking in any part of the Highlands and Islands which is or is likely to be in competition with any similar business or undertaking operating in that part of the Highlands and Islands unless such loan or grant is made or such shares acquired at the commercial rates then prevailing.—[ Sir C. Black.]

Brought up, and read the First time.

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

With the new Clause we are to discuss the following Amendments:

Amendment No. 1, page 1, line 8 after 'the', insert 'fully paid'.

Amendment No. 3, in page 1, line 9 after 'a', insert 'public'.

Amendment No. 4, in page 1, line 12 at end insert:

'(with the consent of the Company).

Amendment No. 6, in page 1, line 20, at end insert:

(3) In exercising the powers specified in paragraph (c) of subsection (1) of this section the Board shall first offer the holding, or the part thereof to be disposed of, at a fair price to the person from whom such holding or part was acquired and if such person shall decline such offer or if within six weeks he neglects to signify his desire to accept such offer the Board shall offer the holding or the part of the holding, as the case may be, at a fair price to the members of the Company.

Amendment No. 7, in page 1, line 27, at end insert:

'in the event of the Company being unable to repay the loan in cash on the due date'.

I want today to observe a self-denying ordinance in view of the time of the House which has already been not lost but consumed as a result of previous business. There are three main issues raised by this series of Amendments, and I will briefly deal with them one by one.

First, the first part of the new Clause lays it down that the Highlands and Islands Development Board shall not make any loan or grant to, or acquire shares in, a company unless that company observes and undertakes to observe trade union terms, rates and conditions. I do not imagine that there is likely to be any difference of opinion or controversy about this. We are all familiar with the fact that Government and local government contracts usually contain what is called a fair wages clause, which imposes the condition on contractors that they observe trade union conditions and pay trade union rates. It seems quite proper that we should secure that position by making this provision.

The second issue arises from the latter half of the new Clause. There may be some room for a difference of opinion about this, because it lays down that the State shall not provide assistance and funds to assist one business, either an existing business or a proposed new business which will be in competition with any similar business or undertaking operating in that part of the Highlands and Islands, unless such loan or grant is made, or such shares acquired, at the commercial rates then prevailing.

12.45 p.m.

I see no objection to the Board's assisting a company which may be in competition with another company carrying on a similar business in the same area if the financial assistance accorded to the first is on ordinary commercial terms. If the first company borrows money from the Board at the rate of interest which it would have to pay to a finance house or bank, that is a normal business transaction. If the Board subscribes for shares on the same terms and conditions as the commercial world would be willing to subscribe for them, that, too, is a perfectly normal commercial transaction. What seems unfair and objectionable would be a condition in which there were two businesses in competition in the same area, or one business with a new business proposed to be started in competition with it, when the State provided assistance on less than commercial rates to one, so that the other was not thus assisted. That would be a distortion of that normal fair competition which is very desirable between businesses, particularly businesses in the same area, carrying on the same line of business.

I come now to Amendment No. 6 and Amendment No. 7 to both of which I am one of the signatories. Amendment No. 6 is a very important provision. The Bill lays down that the Board may sell in whole or in part any equity shares which it has acquired or for which it has subscribed in a business in the Highlands and Islands which it desires to assist. I am not in any way challenging the main purpose of the Bill, but I suggest that it would be reasonable, if the Board decided to sell its shareholding in whole or in part, that in the first instance it should offer those shares back to the original owner, and that if the original owner was unable or unwilling to acquire them, they should be offered at the same fair price to other members of the company in which the shares are held.

There might otherwise arise the position that the Board had a shareholding which held the balance between two elements of shareholders, and it might have a decisive voting effect on the company, and those shares might be acquired by one of the two other groups of shareholders, or by some competitor in the same area, and that might prove to be to the disadvantage of a minority shareholding, a minority which may be a family holding in a family business which has been carried on as a family business for many years.

If we assume, as I assume in the Amendment, that the price at which the shares are to be sold is a fair price, it is not unreasonable to safeguard the position to the extent of giving the original vendor the first chance to buy them back, and, if he does not do so, to offer them to the other shareholders before offering them to the general public.

I now come to Amendment No. 7. One has to bear in mind that a loan may be made by the Board to a company with the right to convert the loan at some future time into share capital. I see no objection to that in principle. If a point is reached at which the loan is repayable and the company is unable to repay, in that event by all means give the option to the Board to convert the loan into equity capital, but if when the loan conies up for repayment the company is able, willing and anxious to repay the tax, then it should have the right to repay in cash before any question of conversion into equity capital arises.

I have been brief. I hope I have said enough to make my points clear, and with a view to getting on with the business I shall certainly conclude what I had to say.

At each stage of the progress of my Bill I have tried to make clear that its purpose is only to extend in certain respects powers conferred on the Highlands and Islands Development Board by Sections 6 and 7 of the parent Act. New Clause 1, in my view, would import entirely new conditions into the Bill, conditions which are quite outside the range of provisions which Parliament put in the 1965 Act. Both parts of the new Clause, the trade union part and the second part, are restrictive.

Turning to the trade union part, I see no need at all for it. Indeed, I would regard it as positively disadvantageous for the Highlands and Islands Development Board to enter into the delicate field of industrial relations. Speaking with experience of a Highlands constituency, I have no evidence which leads me to think that there is a special problem in the area to justify the exceptional course proposed by this Clause. If the hon. Member has such evidence, then I would suggest that he ought to pass it on to the appropriate quarter. I cannot accept that the Board should be asked to inquire into the history of companies' labour relations, or that it should set itself up as the arbiter of whether or not a company is a good company or a. bad company in trade union terms. Such an obligation is not laid upon the Board of Trade which has similar rights and operates a similar scheme.

With regard to the second part of the new Clause it would effectively emasculate the power of the Board to make loans at flexible rates of interest. Any company to which the Board makes a loan is likely to be in competition with other concerns. The idea of giving grants at uncommercial rates is certainly a new one to me.

The purpose of the 1965 Act was not to set up the Board to make grants and loans at commercial rates of interest. It was to encourage the development of the Highlands area in the widest and best sense, and for this reason the Board was given a unique range of powers and duties, with a certain flexibility in the power to make loans and grants, and that has always been an important feature of the Board. I cannot honestly believe that hon. Members would wish to see this go.

I would urge the House most strongly to reject the new Clause.

Turning to Amendments No. 6 and No. 7, to which the hon. Member referred, I think the point should be made that, since the interests of those who sell shares to the Board are already protected as those of willing sellers, I do not think that there is any need for amendment in the way the hon. Member suggests.

As to Amendment No. 7, I have stressed in all my speeches on this Bill that its main purpose is to give greater flexibility to the Board in providing financial assistance, and I believe that the Amendment would seriously erode that. The hon. Member concedes that there will be cases in which the interests of the Board do not coincide exactly with the interests of a company. I accept that, but if a company is to seek the help of having public funds at its disposal the Board must continue to have power to impose conditions on the loans.

Therefore I would ask the House to reject the two Amendments likewise.

When I read the Bill I thought that the proposer of it was seeking to protect a first company as distinct from companies which might come later. I am wondering whether that is the intention. If I may dare say so as a Sassenach, the Bill is rather treating industry in the Highlands and Islands—indeed, in Scotland generally—far too generously, and unfairly so by comparison with industry established in other parts of the country. There is a general tendency nowadays, I believe, to diminish the forms of protection. I speak nationally now. It would appear that, if an industry is established in Scotland and is to be protected in such a way that no one else can go into the area except on different conditions and at different rates, we are giving industries already there extremely unfair advantages over others. Surely, as much as is required has already been given to them in the form of regional employment premiums, and through the Selective Employment Tax changes. I may be completely wrong about this, but I should like clarification either from the Minister or from the sponsor of the Bill.

I shall be unaccustomedly brief on this occasion as there are other Bills to come which I expect most hon. Members want to support and debate, and so I shall make this speech as quickly as possible, but there are one or two points which raise considerations of very considerable importance. I do not know whether my hon. Friend the Member for Caithness and Sutherland (Mr. Maclennan) could be accused of having dismissed them altogether, in replying on the Amendment, but perhaps he did refer a little lightly to one or two of them in passing.

What the hon. Member for Pudsey (Mr. Hiley) said was a most interesting extension of the argument which I heard from one hon. Member for a Border constituency a week or two ago—and on this Bill and in this House—who said that Border firms are disadvantaged because of the very favourable terms which are offered by the Highlands and Islands Development Board to firms setting up in the Highlands and Islands. That was also the hon. Member's point of view today. It is indeed interesting evidence that the Board and the Government and their policies have been so extremely effective that hon. Members from other parts of the country feel that firms going to the Highlands and Islands today are going to the best possible place in which to develop, because of the conditions which the Government and their Act and the Board have created and made possible. It is an extremely good advertisement for the Government's policy, and of the Act and of the Board, and I am glad to take the compliment, however obliquely, from the hon. Member.

Will the hon. Member not concede that, they having gained so much success in their attempts, it may now be asked, why should they pursue them to the disadvantage of industry in other parts of the country?

Of course, the hon. Member is speaking as an Englishman, and as an Englishman I quite agree that he has a point, but nowadays there is an emphasis on regional interests and policies and on regional development. For many years I have argued for differential subsidies and incentives, weighted heavily in favour of firms, prepared or officially pressed to set up and invest in areas of less obvious commercial attraction in the Highlands and Islands.

In those areas there should be substantial inducements offered to firms who come into them, to compensate them one way or another, since they face exceptionally difficult conditions and prospects. I do not think it is an unreasonable point of view, and I think the hon. Member will agree that some assistance to effect an equalisation of costs might be desirable in the case of firms coming into especially difficult areas.

1.0 p.m.

This might, indeed, apply in the Highlands and Islands region as a whole, if for no other reason than that there has been, over generations, little accumulation of local capital, for reasons which are well understood. That region has suffered grave neglect under many Governments, while depopulation and emigration went on and there was a sterilisation of possible development by those who owned the land, who took it largely as their own private paradise, to be developed for sport to the neglect of industry and almost everything else. Consequently, there was no industrial development and to this day many landlords give it little encouragement.

Therefore, the Development Board having been created, it should be given the greatest possible freedom of action and the right to offer the greatest reasonable inducements to make up for those years of neglect, during which there was no possible accumulation of capital for industrial development and the purposes which the Bill is designed to assist. The hon. Member made his point reasonably —one has often heard it put more harshly —but I hope that he and other hon. Members from England who feel the same way will make allowance for the great backlog created by these arrears of neglect in the Highlands and Islands and give the Board the greatest possible help to assist firms which are struggling in the area or those willing to enter it but requiring assistance in this or some other form.

My hon. Friend mentioned the advantage of grouping firms for marketing and other purposes. I hope that the Board will be able to approach firms with like interests pursuing the same kind of business to get them to come together. This would make it, in some cases, a better proposition for the taxpayer and the Board to help.

I support the spirit of the first part of the Amendment. It is particularly important that employers in the Highlands and Islands should be expected and pressed to observe trade union terms, simply because union organisation is so much more difficult in an area where the working population is so widely scattered. Rates and conditions are both very important matters. After all, we expect a Government contractor to observe the fair wages Clause and we make sure that he does.

It is not enough to say that the Board of Trade is not specifically and statutorily expected and enjoined to lay down to all to whom it advances money that they should observe trade union terms, rates and conditions. There is, moreover, a final point at which the observation of those wage rates and terms by the companies concerned as employers is of the greatest importance. That is, when a man or woman becomes unemployed. Then, through the operation of conditions governing the social services, the wage stop has to operate in direct relation to the level of the applicant's normal wage. That means that what a person gets when he most needs it, when unemployed and distressed, must be determined largely by the rates and conditions under which he or she had normally been working.

I accept that this new Clause is well-intended and it has a great deal of sense. I hope and believe that, whatever is finally written into the Bill, the Board will in practice ensure that every point in the first part at least is observed. I am not quite so happy about the second part of the Amendment and my hon. Friend covered the point, saying that, in practice, there need be no fear about the Board's activities in this field and that it will be conscious of any danger of going into unfair competition with existing firms, which is the last thing we would want it to do.

I therefore hope that it will not be necessary to press the new Clause but I welcome the spirit, especially, of the first part.

Faced with the impressive picture of the hon. Member for the Western Isles (Mr. Malcolm MacMillan) overcome by the virtues of brevity, I too must be brief.

The main arguments for and against the new Clause have been rehearsed. The hon. Member for Caithness and Sutherland (Mr. Maclennan) said that if it were accepted with the Amendments, it would have a restrictive effect and would introduce new elements which were not part of the main object of the Bill.

While talking about the objects of the Bill, I would refer to the Standing Committee debates and remind the Minister of State, who is about to speak, that the hon. Member for Caithness and Sutherland expressed himself then as dissatisfied with this wording and its ultimate effect. He said:

"… I had hoped the scope of the Bill to be substantially wider than that which is before us today."

But he found it very difficult to do anything about it, for procedural reasons. Replying to him, the Minister of State said:

"We on the Government side will certainly give him what assistance we can in trying to meet his objectives … Therefore, I take the procedural point about this, even though it involves widening the scope of the Bill at some later stage."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, Scottish Standing Committee A; 8th May 1968, c. 10, 11, 12.]

This is "some later stage", but, although the Order Paper is well distributed with Amendments—it is highly gratifying to note the interest which certain hon. Members have suddenly taken in the economics and development of the Highlands, which we hope will continue and will not flag—I see no Government Amendments, despite that reference by the Minister of State. Is he thinking of making some Amendments when the Bill goes to another place?

My hon. Friend the Member for Wimbledon (Sir C. Black) will be aware that, in Section 8(2) of the 1965 Act, the parent Act, it is stated:

"On making a grant or loan … the Board may impose such conditions as they think fit …"

The Board has therefore been given fairly wide discretion. This Bill seeks to clarify a particular point in relation to its powers which was not, I fear, clear from the 1965 Act. It is an important point, which requires careful thought about the circumstances which can arise.

The first part of the new Clause concerns industrial relations. In some cases, industrial relations in general could be a matter of concern to the Board. It is one of the many factors which the Board will have to take into account before giving its assistance. In the Highland area, it is not necessary to spell out precisely what my hon. Friend has suggested, but he has drawn attention to one of the important points. I can think of one or two cases in the last 20 years of firms in the Highlands where, unfortunately, industrial relations have not been very good. It is a situation which has caused trouble with certain enterprises. The instances have been few, but they have occurred.

My hon. Friend the Member for Pudsey (Mr. Hiley) expressed doubt and disagreement about the proposals for grants and loans to the Highlands and Islands. At present, only about 10 per cent. of the jobs in the Highland area are in manufacturing industry. The area is paying a much bigger proportion per job of Selective Employment Tax which, in the form of refunds and premiums, has been handed out to industrial areas such as that represented by my hon. Friend. I know that he dislikes the Selective Em- ployment Tax and the way in which it works, just as I do, but it should be pointed out that the Highland area has been suffering and positively contributing per job in the form of S.E.T. money which has then been redistributed in industrial areas in Scotland, England and Wales.

I appreciate my hon. Friend's point, but there is a distinction between new industry in an undeveloped part and industry in Scotland which has been long established. The working of the present regulations is very unfair when one compares established industries of that sort with similar industries in the non-development areas.

My hon. Friend has opened up a wide subject, and I do not want to discuss development areas as a whole. There are some where there is a great deal of manufacturing industry. I am concentrating on the seven crofting counties which, administratively, make up the area of the Highlands and Islands. The amount of manufacturing industry there represents a very small proportion of the total.

The effect of taxation in the last two years has been to hand out more in the way of refunds and premiums to areas where there is a large proportion of manufacturing industry. As a result, the Highlands have suffered, and that fact must be put in the balance against the special help which is now suggested.

Perhaps I might qualify the broad regional picture which the hon. Gentleman is painting with a rather narrower example. Taking the labour exchange area in my constituency, 24 or 25 per cent. of the employees registered are in manufacturing. The proportion in service industries is about a third. There are areas of that kind as well which benefit very much from the Selective Employment Tax premiums.

1.15 p.m.

The hon. Gentleman has made a point of which I am very much aware. When the tax was announced as a surprise in the Budget on 3rd May, 1966, a number of us immediately began to check on such matters as whether cottage and crofters' weaving would count as manufacturing industry. When we found that it did, those with a large; percentage in our constituencies were greatly relieved, as were those, like myself, who are concerned about the Highlands and Islands in general. However, even counting weaving and distilleries, which, I am glad to say, also qualify as manufacturing, the latest figures indicate that only 10 per cent. of the employment in the area of the Highlands and Islands as a whole is in manufacturing industry, qualifying for refunds and premiums. The great majority of jobs have to pay the full amount of tax to which, except in the case of hotels, it is now proposed to make additions. I would not like my hon. Friend the Member for Pudsey to feel that the area was just receiving benefits from Government policies, because that is not the case.

The Highlands and Islands present very special problems, and special help to prime the pump is needed. When the pump has been primed for the kind of industry which can take root and flourish in the Highlands, it can make use of resources in the Highlands which will make their contribution in the future, repay the loan, and generally help Britain by making a proper contribution to the economy.

One very good example is the winter sports development. If the pump had not been primed, this rapidly growing part of the tourist industry in Scotland might never have been created. But it was from private contributions producing the first £40,000 or £50,000 to start the first chair-lift in Strathspey, that this very high risk operation began. I had a part in the first Government grant to the winter sports industry in Strathspey eight years ago. Since then, the Government have given further help, and no doubt the industry will be a flourishing one in the future and will repay all the pump-priming given to it, not only by providing excellent holidays for those who otherwise would not have been able to participate in winter sports, but by contributing to the economy in that part of Britain.

I turn now to Amendment No. 7. The hon. Member for Caithness and Sutherland (Mr. Maclennan) replied to the suggestion invoking flexibility. The suggestion of my hon. Friend the Member for Wimbledon (Sir C. Black) seemed a very reasonable point to add to this part of the Bill. Judging by the anxiety expressed by both sides in Committee and on Second Reading, it is a point about which hon. Members representing Scottish constituencies have been concerned. In view of the assurances which the hon. Gentleman gave in Committee, it appears that he would expect the object of my hon. Friend's Amendment to be fulfilled in most cases, and it is merely to retain flexibility that he does not want the words written into the Bill.

I believe that the intention is excellent. If the Board does its job properly, it will wish to get its loans repaid. Only if a firm was in difficulties and could not repay its loan would the Board want to seek to impose this condition. The permission of the Secretary of State is required for the taking up of an equity shareholding. I am sure that he would not wish the Board continually to be taking up equity shares in firms which could not repay their loans, because if those firms then failed, the Board would find itself holding shares in them.

I am sure that the House is indebted to my hon. Friend the Member for Wimbledon for raising these points, because he has drawn attention to situations which might arise. However, I doubt whether we shall need these additions in the Bill.

I particularly welcome the closing remarks of the hon. Member for Moray and Nairn (Mr. G. Campbell). I agree that the Amendments, and particularly the new Clause, while they highlight some points of question, need not be incorporated in the Bill. I welcomed the statement of the hon. Member for Wimbledon (Sir C. Black) that he did not wish to spend a lot of time on the new Clause, but that it was important that matters should be clear.

The comments of my hon. Friend on Amendments Nos. 6 and 7 and the two points made on new Clause No. 1 were good and do not need stressing by me. I accept the point of my hon. Friend the Member for the Western Isles (Mr. Malcolm MacMillan) that it is important that the Board should seek to encourage the activities of companies in connection with their industrial relations. I do not know of any evidence that firms which have been given assistance since the Board was established have not observed that. Like my hon. Friend the Member for Caithness and Sutherland (Mr. Maclennan), I should like to have any evidence to that effect. The Board is a particularly enlightened body. One of its members was formerly a very active trade unionist. I should be surprised if he were party to any arrangement whereby a firm in receipt of loan or grant from the Board behaved unfairly towards trade unionists and their interests.

I presume from what the hon. Member for Moray and Nairn said that he was talking historically of evidence and not of the time during which the Board has been in operation.

indicated assent.

I am glad to have that confirmed.

I do not wish to comment on the second leg of the new Clause. I should like to underline what has been said on Amendment No. 6. The hon. Member for Moray and Nairn asked about Amendment No. 7. I accept his view that we must balance the flexibility of circumstance with a regard for the Board. The Board's primary purpose is the welfare of the Highlands and Islands. But its secondary purpose is to protect the taxpayer. I am sure that that is the concern of the hon. Member for Wimbledon.

There is nothing in the Bill to compel a company to accept a convertible loan, but once it has accepted such a loan the responsibility for deciding how it is to be discharged must clearly rest with the Board. The decision must be taken in the light of the prevailing circumstances and of the original purposes of the Board in agreeing to the loan. This matter is debatable in the House. Questions can be asked about it. We can discuss any doubt which may arise when we debate the annual report of the Board presented to Parliament. I hope that the sponsors of new Clause No. 1 and Amendments Nos. 6 and 7 will not press them to a Division.

The hon. Member for Pudsey (Mr. Hiley), whom I, too, welcome to our deliberations, has perhaps misunderstood one or two points about the functions of the Board. The Board tries to help, not only new industry, but existing industry. As the hon. Gentleman has learned from exchanges across the Floor of the House, existing industry has some advantages under legislation. I should like to give one or two examples of existing industries having prospered by receiving assistance through the Board without which they would have been unable to expand in an area in which it is not highly profitable for private enterprise to operate.

I take it that the hon. Gentleman is distinguishing between the whole of Scotland and the Highlands and Islands?

In this specific instance, I am distinguishing the Highlands and Islands from the rest of the country. We might debate this matter on another occasion. I do not think that it would be in order to do so now. The hon. Gentleman can rest assured that his comments will not go unnoticed in some parts of Scotland. I am glad that he is not anxious to press the point. He and one of his hon. Friends are co-authors of the two Amendments on which we have not touched very much.

We should not like to see Amendments Nos. 3 and 4 made. They would interfere with the object of achieving the flexibility in the Board's operations which we need. That is the purpose of the Bill. I can give the assurance that there is no question of the Board interfering in the affairs of a private company against its wishes. My hon. Friend the Member for Caithness and Sutherland made this point on Second Reading and, I believe, in Committee. There is no good reason why private companies, if they wished assistance from the Board in the form hinted at in Amendment No. 3, should be denied the opportunity of getting it.

I assure the House that if such a situation as is hinted at in Amendment No. 4 arose—it is a hypothetical situation, but, nevertheless, it is a possibility—we should hope that the Board would be free to decide the matter without hindrance. The Board must be allowed to go into all the circumstances of the company concerned so that it can make the right decision, given the primary and secondary purposes which I mentioned.

Turning to the point made by the hon. Member for Inverness (Mr. Russell Johnston), when my hon. Friend the Member for Caithness and Sutherland raised it in Standing Committee, as he did on Second Reading, it was in connection with proceedings in another place. I hope that my hon. Friend will be able to persuade some of his colleagues in another place to pursue the point. Depending on what the other place says, perhaps we shall be able to debate the matter later, but at this juncture I cannot say more than what was said on Second Reading and in Committee and underline the fact that we shall not be unsympathetic to my hon. Friend's intentions later if he gets the concurrence of another place.

Question put and negatived.

New Clause

APPEALS

Any body, company or person aggrieved by any requirement, refusal or other decision of the Board may appeal to the Secretary of State whose decision shall be final and binding. —[ Sir C. Black.]

Brought up, and read the First time.

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

This is a simple point which can be explained in a few words. Under the Bill, if the Board decides to give assistance to a business, the terms and conditions of it are subject to approval by the Minister and the Treasury. That is as it should be. But there is no provision to cover the situation in which a company seeks the aid of the Board and the Board comes to the conclusion that it is not a case in which assistance should be given. No appeal is available to the applicant in those circumstances.

It is important, not only that justice should be done, but that it should be seen to be done. One knows from one's experience in public life that when it comes to making or refusing grant there is often local dissatisfaction among people not fortunate enough to get a grant, even though the circumstances may justify the Board in refusing a grant. Therefore, it would be reasonable for an aggrieved person to have a right of appeal to the Secretary of State. After all, the right hon. Gentleman's approval is required when a grant is made. It is not unreasonable that there should be a right of appeal when the Board refuses a grant.

1.30 p.m.

The new Clause would introduce a further condition which I believe to be quite outside the terms of the parent Act. The Highlands and Islands Development Board was set up as an independent body, and although it is true that some of its activities, clearly defined in the Act, require to be approved by the Secretary of State and, in some cases, by the Treasury, the Board itself, has been given the responsibility for the day-to-day running of its affairs. In my view, this position must be maintained if the Board is to do its job effectively.

It seems to me that to accept the new Clause would not only be contrary to Parliament's intentions in passing the 1965 Act but would constitute a quite burdensome condition on the working of the grants and loans schemes if every decision of the Board were to be open to the scrutiny of the Secretary of State. The Board requires this capacity to make these judgments on its own, and it would be a work of supererogation to give possible applicants this right of appeal. Therefore, I ask the House to reject the new Clause.

I support the new Clause, and I hope that the Minister of State for Scotland will also be favourably disposed towards it. We have here a Board set up out of public funds, and it would be of the very greatest assistance to a company or other body or a person who had been refused a grant to be able to go to the Secretary of State. That would not mean that every case would be appealed to him, but some cases would. It is proper, as the public are spending the money, that there should be some right of appeal if the Board refuses to make a grant. This would in no way affect the Board's working, but would add a safeguard that I hope the House and the Minister will agree would be useful.

I hope that the Minister will do no such thing. The implications of such an Amendment as this were the Minister to take it seriously, are very considerable. The Secretary of State is heavily burdened already without having to consider each and every protest and appeal against the non-award of a grant. The hon. Member for Wimbledon (Sir C. Black) said that many of the Board's powers are already subject to the Secretary of State and to the Treasury, but these are basically reserve powers, and are necessary. There is a world of difference between a reserve power that is not often exercised and the power to use the Secretary of State as an appeal court—

There appears to be a very genuine cleavage of opinion among hon. Gentlemen opposite. One view is that there should be a right of appeal and the other it that there should be no such right. Does not the hon. Member for Inverness (Mr. Russell Johnston) think that it would be anti-democratic if this provision were not put in the Bill?

I am not quite sure that I follow the hon. Gentleman. There is certainly a cleavage of opinion between this bench and other benches, but I do not understand the hon. Gentleman's point about the Bill being otherwise non-democratic.

Does not the hon. Gentleman feel that where an aggrieved party thinks that an injustice has been done, there should be a right of appeal?

I see that point perfectly clearly, but if we were to set up a mechanism making each and every individual case subject to appeal, it would mean a very long and attenuated process. As the hon. Member may know, and as the Minister and the hon. Gentleman the Member for Caithness and Sutherland (Mr. Maclennon) certainly know, one of the main objects of setting up the Board was to get quick and definite decisions. We knew that mistakes would be made, and that risks would be taken that would prove to have been unjustified. This long drawn out mechanism would not help the Board nor, at the end of the day, would it make very much difference.

My hon. Friend the Member for Preston, South (Mr. Peter Mahon) touched on a matter of great delicacy when he interrupted the hon. Member for Inverness (Mr. Russell Johnston), who has been a great friend of mine for a long time. The only time when we fell out publicly—and he was wrong, of course—was on this very issue. It is not a question of an absolute position —there is a qualified position—and in explaining it not only will I seek to bury an old quarrel but, at the same time, seek to satisfy the movers of the new Clause, which I certainly do not support.

The Board is an independent body. It is on the same footing as B.O.T.A.C, the advisory committee to the President of the Board of Trade. The decisions of B.O.T.A.C. are not appealable. The President of the Board of Trade may or may not take its advice to give a grant or a loan, but he cannot give a loan in the face of the Advisory Committee's recommendation to him. In other words, although B.O.T.A.C. is an advisory body it is a very significant independent instrument of Government. That means that it can enjoy the confidence of its applicants. It can ask them for very detailed confidential information which might be prejudicial to their interests if their business rivals were to learn of it. It would deter people from asking the Board for assistance if they thought that their confidences were in any way to be breached.

That is not quite the position with regard to right of appeal, because there the person who has imparted his confidence is taking a chance on his appeal. It could be a private appeal, I admit, but that might not suffice, as the appeal might involve other interests. What we have decided, and we have been acting on the decision for some time, is that the Board is an independent body, freely able to decide these matters without any appeal to the Secretary of State, although only up to a certain limit. If larger sums of public money are involved, whether the assistance to be given is grant, loan or both, the taxpayer is very clearly concerned and the advice of the Department and of the Secretary of State is sought. The Secretary of State then gets to know everything about the case, and the matter is settled.

The hon. Member for Inverness and I fell out over an issue that did not involve that aspect but related to an international treaty which is presently being debated. The Board has to conform to whatever treaties Great Britain signs, and it has to conform to the requirement, too, that where a great deal of money is involved the Secretary of State can be consulted and, in some cases, even the Treasury.

But these are clearly defined activities. In general, we regard the Board as an independent body able to administer the day-to-day running of its own affairs, its final responsibility being in its annual report to the Secretary of State, which is debated in the House. That is not to say that we do not get letters from individual hon. Members on behalf of aggrieved parties—not only those denied loans but those who have objected to loans and grants being given to others. The Secretary of State makes inquiries, and replies, I think fully and courteously, to the hon. Members concerned. But he does not seek to breach the independence of the Board in relation to these matters.

The Board has its own management division. It is building up consultancy advice from businessmen outside in the confidentiality of its own confines. It seeks to do its best in an independent and fair way to protect the taxpayer and to promote the prosperity of the Highlands. I therefore ask the hon. Member not to press the new Clause.

Question put and negatived.

Clause 1

POWER OF BOARD TO ACQUIRE SHARES IN CERTAIN COMPANIES

I beg to move Amendment No. 5, in page 1, line 15, leave out ' the Treasury and'.

My interest in this Bill started when I was a member of the Estimates Committee and we had to look into the fishing industry in the Highlands and Islands. I was impressed with what I saw on the West Coast but nothing like so much as by what I saw in the City of Aberdeen. Having gone into the Cairngorms on a sporting skiing contest for this House, I wanted to satisfy myself about the right of sporting interests. I was concerned to find that 19 different authorities were interested in skiing. I want to be sure that smaller firms, while remaining master in their own affairs, but having had money lent to them, will not be taken over by the Board. It seems extraordinary that the words "the Treasury and" should be included.

This is not a very big operation, but I take it that it is meant to do good to smaller firms in the Highlands and Islands. Has everything to be referred back to the Treasury in Whitehall? Is this not exactly what the whole of the British people, in various ways, are in revolt against—control and exercise of authority at the centre? The Secretary of State for Scotland is the head of a Department. If he is not to have authority in this field we shall make ourselves entirely ridiculous.

I do not see why it should be referred back to the Treasury in London. As the sponsor of the Bill said, the Board is to be autonomous, so why should the Treasury be brought in? I dislike to see Private Members' Bills increasing power at the centre. I do not wish the sponsor ill for he is intending to do something to help smaller businesses, but I am worried about this proposal. I am afraid that the Treasury would take a much harsher view than would the Secretary of State for Scotland.

I want to ask only one question, which can be replied to by the hon. Member for Caithness and Sutherland (Mr. Maclennan). Why was it necessary in the first place to put in "the Treasury"? Surely the Secretary of State for Scotland is part of the Government and the Government act together, or one hopes that they do. That may sometimes appear doubtful, but what is the point of putting in "the Treasury" in this context? If there is no point in doing so, would it not be better to leave it out? I hope that the hon. Member who is promoting this very useful Bill will consider accepting the Amendment and leaving out "the Treasury".

Hon. Members who have spoken on this Amendment will be as well, if not better than, aware as I am that this point received a great deal of discussion during the passage of the 1965 Act. It occupied a considerable amount of time in most stages of that Bill's progress.

I again remind the House that the intention of my Bill is to simplify the powers of the Highlands and Islands Development Board to give assistance to needy firms or businesses in the Highlands operating for the benefit of the Highlands. It is not my intention to amend the parent Act of 1965 in any restrictive way or to introduce a fundamental change in the operation of the Board. If I accepted this Amendment it would have very wide consequences which would run counter to the principles embodied in the 1965 Act.

The hon. and gallant Member for Eye (Sir H. Harrison) will recall that Section 6 of the 1965 Act empowers the Board to carry on a business only with the approval of the Secretary of State for Scotland and the Treasury. The inclusion of the Treasury was fully debated in 1965. The powers in Clause 1 of the Bill give no extension of the powers conferred on the Board by Section 6. They are granted subject to precisely the same conditions.

It seems clear that the arguments which prevailed in 1965 that it is imperative in the general interest of the public purse being safeguarded along with Scottish interests, should prevail today. Consequently I must ask the House to reject the Amendment. I reinforce and accept the expression of irritation by the hon. and learned Member for Antrim, South (Sir Knox Cunningham) about the dead hand of the Treasury, as it is sometimes called, but in the operations of the Highlands and Islands Development Board this condition has not operated oppressively. In the two years of the Board's operation that safeguard for the public purse has not acted contrary to the interests of the Highlands and Islands.

My hon. Friend the Member for Caithness and Sutherland, the chief sponsor of the Bill has referred to the irritation expressed by the hon. and gallant Member for Eye (Sir H. Harrison). Year after year in Committee on such Bills I, too, have moved this type of Amendment, because there is always such a sense of needless waste of time in this reference back. With long delays and ever mounting costs. Everyone is irritated by this routine. If I thought that by voting the Amendment into the Bill it would have a wider impact than merely on this Measure and the original Act and other Measures, I would be anxious to press the hon. and gallant Member for Eye to lead us into the Lobby. The arguments in favour of the Amendment were strongly advanced in reply to another Amendment a little earlier by the Minister of State. He talked about the importance of the Board having a free hand. Another hon. Member said that not only must the Board be free to act, but that it must be seen to be free. Every one of the arguments adduced in support of giving the Board a free hand can be adduced in support of the Amendment.

Further, the argument that we would be strengthening the finality of decision of the Secretary of State on appeal is itself rather attractive to all Scottish Members. It has now apparently become attractive to English Members also, which is a good sign in these days.

There are two points about this. I, or anybody else requiring financial assistance for a project in the Highlands and Islands, can go direct either to the Board of Trade or to the Highlands and Islands Development Board. The Minister emphasised the independence, the very large measure of autonomy enjoyed by the Board of Trade agency—the Treasury agency, if you like. That is slightly different, because there is a much more direct relationship with the Government and the Treasury itself in that case than there is in the case of the agency created to help us in the Highlands and Islands—the Highlands and Islands Development Board. The Board, to which one can go instead of going to the Board of Trade for a similar type of assistance, is not in anything like the same relationship with the Treasury as is B.O.T.A.C. Nevertheless, it is open to applicants to apply either to the Board of Trade and have the matter vetted there or to go direct to the Highlands and Islands Development Board for the same facilities.

The more freedom of action that can be given, not only to the Secretary of State as the final arbiter, but to the Board itself as far as possible, the greater the sense will be of a certain amount of regional independence and autonomy. This is what everybody seems to want the Board to have, except when it comes to sums of money above a certain very high level. At that point of exceptionally large sums, there is an impact on Government policy and financial capacity. The Secretary of State himself is not final, and he has to go back to the Treasury. But in minor financial schemes reference back is highly irritating. The project is examined, not only in financial detail, but very often in technical detail if it involves technical considerations as well, for which the Treasury is not always the best equipped authority. And the whole process is often repeated. On the financial side, I would not argue with the use of the Treasury where very large sums are involved. On the technical side, it seems at times a little anomalous and unreal.

The Development Board's proposals from day to day should go even to the Secretary of State only exceptionally and only when very large sums of money are involved, involving considerations of public policy. Indeed once the global sums for Scottish needs have been allocated—I have argued this case many, many times here—for goodness' sake let us give the greatest possible freedom to the Scottish Office and its agencies for the distribution and use of the money which has been voted by Parliament, which should be paramount and final in this, instead of so many of these projects being referred back to the Treasury. It seems always wrong that schemes of relatively moderate amount go right back beyond the Secretary of State and, even, the House of Commons and its decisions on Supply, which is the oldest and most important, in many ways, of the functions of the House of Commons, to the Treasury, which was very much of an afterthought in Parliamentary terms and history compared with the rights of the House to allocate Supply as and when it sees fit.

I endorse all that my hon. Friend the Member for the Western Isles (Mr. Malcolm MacMillan) has said. This is a very unusual instrument of government. I do not think that there is any other part of Western Europe which has seen the introduction of an instrument of government like this. Perhaps the nearest parallel would be in Southern Italy. I cannot think of the actual constitution of the board there and its relationship with the Italian Parliament being on all-fours with ours.

As was made evident in our discussions on new Clause 2 concerning the right of appeal, on the question of accountability I am sure that the House of Commons would not wish in any way to erode the rights of the Committee on Public Accounts. The Accounting Officer here is the Secretary of the Department of Agriculture, acting through the Secretary of State. The Department would have to appear before the Committee and it would have to account, not only for large sums, but for every penny that is spent. I am sure that the hon. and gallant Member for Eye (Sir H. Harrison) would be the first to insist that a Member, and not neces-sairly a Scottish Member, has the right to ask why certain moneys were spent in certain ways by certain Departments, even though the Department concerned has a peculiar attachment in the form of a board of this type as one of its spending agencies.

A balance must be drawn between the interests and the rights of the House of Commons and the taxpayer generally, on the one hand, and the operations of the Board, on the other. This is a matter of practice that I hinted at on the new Clause in relation to the independence of the Board in respect of persons. Now I am arguing the same thing in relation to the independence of the Board in respect of moneys. It is fair and proper that it should be as free as it can be. However, in the last analysis as the hon. and gallant Gentleman, with his long experience as a supporter of the previous Government and as a very distinguished Whip, knows, there must be a balance. The theory of it must be preserved always, namely, that the Secretary of State and the Treasury are responsible for everything, even though they do not have a sight of all that is brought before the Board. This is perfectly true.

I confess to the House that much of the Board's work goes on without reference to the Secretary of State in Edinburgh, never mind the Treasury in London. Much of the work goes on in that way, and we have no reason to complain about that I readily confess, too, that a mistake is made by the Board now and then. We are rebuked for this in public. I only wish that the Board was praised for all the good things that it does, but that is not in the nature of life.

Although the Amendment is tempting, to accept it would reopen all the issues which we debated in 1965. I counsel the House not to accept it. I have in my mind's eye a picture of the hon. and learned Member for Antrim, South (Sir Knox Cunningham) galloping along on two horses—new Clause 2 and the Amendment. He does this very successfully. As Jimmy Maxton once said, if a person cannot do that he should not be in the circus at all. I congratulate the hon. and learned Gentleman on wanting to be on both sides of the argument. I hope that he will not press his point too hard.

I have listened to what the sponsor and the Minister of State have said. We could continue this argument for a long time. I believe that there will have to be a great deal of rethinking about this in the House. In view of what has been said, I do not think that I should be able to carry the Amendment. I beg to ask leave to withdraw the Amendment.

Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.

1.57 p.m.

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

May I express to the House my satisfaction that so many hon. Members have seen fit to contribute to the debates during the passage of the Bill through the House. It has been a matter of some surprise, perhaps, that even at this late stage of the Bill's progress interest has been expressed by hon. Members from south of the Border and, indeed, from Northern Ireland, in the affairs of the Highlands and Islands. I have no doubt that this will be a matter of satisfaction throughout the Highlands and Islands.

I will not weary the House, as there are other important Measures to be considered, by repeating the general arguments in favour of the Bill. I believe that the Bill will go far to assist the Board in the general function it has been given of improving the economic condition of half of Scotland, that half for which it has the prime responsibility under the Government.

This Measure was conceived as a clarification and, indeed, in some minor respects, as an amplification of the powers which the Board was given by the 1965 Act. I welcome the debate which has thrown light on the operations of the Board in its grants and loans scheme and in the whole range of activities which it has promoted with such considerable and acknowledged success in the course of the last two years.

2.0 p.m.

I welcome the Bill and congratulate the hon. Member for Caithness and Sutherland (Mr. Maclennan) on presenting it and carrying it through. My interest is that my mother came from Ayrshire and I have some interest in the Highlands themselves, particularly Skye and the area around the Cuillin Mountains.

I hope that the Bill will help in that area, but I offer one word of warning. I hope that matters will not develop in such a way as to damage the great natural beauty of the area. I think of such a place as Loch Coruisk in the heart of the Black Cuillins. It would be disastrous if it did not remain as it is today.

I shall take up no more of the time of the House. I welcome the Bill and believe that it will be very helpful. I am glad that the Minister of State should think that I ride horses. In fact, I do not, but I shall try to learn, with his help.

2.1 p.m.

I welcome the Bill and compliment the hon. Member for Caithness and Sutherland (Mr. Maclennan) on introducing it. Liberals have a special interest in the Highlands and Islands Development Board, and we are always anxious to help it and make it a more effective instrument.

Certain people in my constituency have expressed concern about one or two aspects of the Board's work as it will be under the Bill. I refer, first, to the position of small businesses in the Highlands which have been carrying on for a long time without Government help. It is felt that they might suffer in competition with new businesses set up with substantial Government help. I understand that the Board welcomes the Bill. During the two and a half years of its existence, it has learnt a great deal about conditions in the Highlands, and I urge that it uses its discretion, always safeguarding the interests of smaller enterprises which have been carrying on there for a long time.

The other question is whether it would be possible to appeal to the Secretary of State when an application for a grant or loan is turned down. I believe that it would complicate matters if there were such an appeal. Notwithstanding the good work done by the Board, I, like my hon. Friends and other hon. Members in the Highlands, have a good many people coming to me after their requests have been turned down, and I should not like to have to adjudicate in that way. I would say, therefore, that the present set-up is right, with the Board having the last word in deciding whether an application should be granted.

2.4 p.m.

This is not a Bill which I can welcome or wish success to, for two reasons. There is no limit in the Bill on the funds which may be used. It is extraordinary that the House of Commons, however reduced in size today, can give carte blanche approval to the expenditure of apparently unlimited funds to further State holding in various enterprises in the Highlands and Islands. That is one reason why I do not support the Bill.

The Minister of State said that there were expert consultants available to the Highlands and Islands Development Board. I am glad to hear it. If the Bill goes through and the Board receives the wide powers it is seeking, it will have opportunity to acquire great blocks of equity shares. It may even, by mistake or design, acquire control of enterprises which need expert business knowledge if the Government management, directed through the Board, is to be successful.

Chiefly, I object to the Bill on principle. The Government have so knocked private industry about in the Highlands and Islands, as they have in the whole country, as to make many private enterprises almost semi-conscious by the successive burdens of new taxation which they have imposed, thus rendering them easily susceptible to State interference. For instance, in the Highlands and Islands grave concern has been caused by the Selective Employment Tax. It has hit the tourist trade, it has hit hotel businesses—

Order. It is not possible to discuss the: Selective Employment Tax on this Bill.

I beg your pardon, Mr. Deputy Speaker. I was merely pointing out that many industries, not only in Scotland but in the whole country, are in a difficult state now—

Order. I remind the hon. Gentleman that we are now on the Third Reading of the Bill, and Third Reading debates are limited to the contents of the Bill under discussion.

Yes, Mr. Deputy Speaker, but one of the reasons why the Board will find it easier to acquire many businesses in the Highlands and Islands is that— this applies particularly to hotels—they have been put in a very difficult position by the succession of harsh measures introduced in the last two Budgets, including the Selective Employment Tax, which have made it practically impossible to run a private industry or hotel business profitably in the Highland area or in many parts of Scotland.

Private industry has been softened up by the present Government so that the Highlands and Islands Development Board may move in. I do not relish that at all. The Bill gives apparently unlimited power of investment to the Board, and I fear that this pattern may well be the pattern for the eventual development of rural development boards which the Government have set up in different parts of England. For instance, in the Peak District of Derbyshire there is a rural development board feeling its way and still taking on new powers to acquire businesses and to buy up and carry on farms. I fear that the pattern of progress under this Bill in acquiring private enterprises which have been softened up by penal taxation may well be the pattern of development which we shall see continued in other parts of the country by the rural development boards.

I congratulate the hon. Gentleman the Member for Caithness and Sutherland (Mr. Maclennan) on introducing the Bill, though I disapprove of it for those reasons. If the Government would get off the back of private business and industry in Scotland, private enterprise would be able to fight its own battles.

2.8 p.m.

I understand that my hon. Friend the Member for Harborough (Mr. Farr) feels some concern about the matters of which he has spoken, but, if he had had the advantage of being present at all our discussions not only on this Bill but on the Bill in 1965, he would have found that we were able to go into many of the points on which he has fears and ensure that the position was safeguarded. I am sorry that he was not able to take part in all those discussions. If he had been present, he would, I think, have felt more reassured than he is today.

The Bill makes clear that the Board may help to promote industrial activity in the Highland area by the method set out in it. It seems that some circumstance could arise in which this would be the most appropriate way of helping an enterprise. The hon. Member for Caithness and Sutherland (Mr. Maclennan) has said in Committee that this was likely to happen infrequently.

The important point is how the power will be used. All the discussions we have had have concentrated on how the Board will operate this system in circumstances which could be foreseen. I am sure that hon. Members will be keeping a close eye on how the power is used. Certainly my hon. Friends will.

The hon. Gentleman has found that he has had very much longer stages to deal with than a private Member normally has when piloting a Bill through. I congratulate him on the way he has done so. He has been on duty for very long periods of time. As the Bill is now likely to be approved, I hope that he will feel gratified to know that we appreciate his helpfulness in explaining the many points we have raised at various stages.

2.11 p.m.

For over nine years, before 1964 and afterwards, I was denied the right to introduce a Private Member's Bill, although I entered every Ballot. Therefore, I think I am right to be a little jealous of my hon. Friend the Member for Caithness and Sutherland (Mr. Maclennan) who is introducing his second Private Member's Bill in barely 3½ years' membership of the House. His other Bill affected a great international industry, and this one is of great significance to his own constituency and the whole of Scotland. Indeed, we learn from the comments of the hon. Member for Harborough (Mr. Farr) that it is of significance for parts of England and Wales which may be affected by the inauguration of rural development boards. I shall look with interest at their emergence in the way he describes. I did not realise that they had such extensive powers.

I do not accept some of the hon. Gentleman's strictures on the Bill. He is wrong when he says that the Highlands and Islands Development Board has caused suffering to private enterprise. Every hon. Member from the Highlands area would testify that that is not true. On the contrary, it has helped many firms. Some have gone to the wall because the power in the Bill was not properly laid down in the original Act. The value of this amending Bill is that it gives a power to the Board that it wants and needs, and that private industry in the Highlands will welcome.

If I heard my hon. Friend aright, he was complaining about Government measures such as the Selective Employment Tax, which he complained had damaged industry in the area.

If the hon. Gentlemen is good enough to read Hansard tomorow, he will see what the hon. Gentleman said, particularly at the beginning of his speech, when he gave the fundamental objections he had to the Bill—though it is a measure of his generosity that he nevertheless congratulated my hon. Friend on the hard work he had put in to get the Bill so far. He did not like some of the principal activities provided for by this amending legislation, and he is entitled to his opinion.

The Bill is very much concerned with the generation of new business as well as sustaining old business in the Highlands. As I hope the House may debate some time, the Board can tell a very good story of achievement in relation to hotels, and an exemplary scheme for the development of hotels in Scotland is beginning which might well be copied elsewhere. We had the background in the White Paper, which is allied to what the Board is doing on the development of hotels. The hon. Member for Harborough should be delighted that the Board will be able to conduct its business even better with the knowledge that the concessions in Schedule 17 of the Finance Bill apply to a great number of hotels in the Highland area. Therefore, his primary objections to the Bill are perhaps not quite as solid as he might imagine. When the Annual Report of the Board is published very shortly he will be able to read the story of a great deal of achievement that will perhaps put at rest the fears he expressed. I am sure that he will not take his fears to the point of voting against the Bill in view of the hard work that has been put into getting it so far.

I congratulate my hon. Friend again. He has had a very, difficult furrow to hoe today and on the previous stages. He has given us fair warning that if another place can extend the scope of the Bill we might have another stage before we can see it safely onto the Statute Book. I hope that the good will we have had from so many hon. Members on both sides of the House will see us safely through to the end.

2.16 p.m.

If I introduce a slightly discordant note, it will not be so discordant as to prevent me congratulating the hon. Member for Caithness and Sutherland (Mr. Maclennan) on his good fortune in the ballot, and for introducing a Bill designed to help a part of Scotland with which he is concerned.

My anxiety about the Bill is one of general principle. It extends yet again the power of the State or its organs to participate in the equity capital—the risk capital and controlling capital—of private companies. We are reaching the point of becoming respectable by precedent. Hon. Members look back and say that this and that has been done on a number of previous occasions and ask if one is to deny the Highlands and Islands of Scotland the alleged advantage of the process which has taken place before. The difficulty is that this kind of process goes on and gradually develops consequences which are unforeseen by at least some of those who propose it in each particular case.

I am afraid that I am one of those Highlanders who have taken the road to England. Nevertheless, I derive from not all that far back from the Western Highlands of Scotland, those Highlands and Islands which the Bill is intended to benefit, and I belong very self-consciously to that part of the world, although I am now detached and certainly do not feel that my connections are sufficiently recent or contemporary to be confident enough to divide the House on the Bill. I have always regarded the Highlands and Islands of Scotland as the citadel of sturdy independence. When we wallow in the Welfare State, which is so debilitating, I like to think back to those fellow Scotsmen who in the last century preferred sometimes to die of starvation rather than take the charity and aid that was offered to them, because they believed so highly in the virtue of individual independence.

There is no getting away from the fact that this is a Bill to bring the assistance of the organised State, with all its evil implications, to the benefit of the individual. To some extent one must use the organisation of the State nowadays to prime the pump in particular cases, but, while the Highlands and Islands Development Board has done good work up to now, I regret the extension of its work by participation in the controlling capital of companies in a part of the Kingdom which has been least contaminated up to now by the paternalistic activities of the State.

As I say, I do not think I have the right to carry my opposition to the Bill to the point of a Division, because I have not the present-day connection with the Highlands that would entitle me to do that and it is very hard to judge from a distance in time and space how far one is entitled to impinge upon principles in the interests of priming the pump for an area which has not shown the rapid development that other parts of the United Kingdom have.

Nevertheless, I think it right on the occasion of the Third Reading of this Bill to say that I think we all too easily and quickly accept the progressive enlargement of the function of the State in the control of private enterprise companies. I know it will be said—it has been said on this and other Bills—that the State will merely be a shareholder— it might, I suppose, appoint a director, but he will just sit and watch—and basically private enterprise will run itself. I wonder. I am sure it will start like that, but I wonder whether it will go on and how far this process extends, how far one becomes accustomed to it, until in the end the vigour of private enterprise, on which the Highlands and Islands must in the end depend if they are to develop commercially, may be sapped by dependence upon aid. I have not often observed in other parts of the world to which British aid is directed that it has done much good. It ought to. Enough care is taken to ensure that the aid from the State, whether internal or external, is well used, but still it does not seem to do the trick.

This leads me to think that usually the right solution is rather assistance by way of exemption, or partial exemption, from taxes and other burdens, inducements to industrialists to go there, favourable conditions for a time when they are there. These things work better in practice than direct participation by Government money, which tends to produce units in an economy which are not viable without continued assistance. In fact, they get like the railways.

Those are the doubts that are in my mind. I thought it right to voice them. I shall not take any more of the time of the House, nor divide the House against the Bill.

2.23 p.m.

As a sponsor of the Bill, I should like again to thank my hon. Friend the Member for Caithness and Sutherland (Mr. Maclennan) for his enterprise in introducing it and for piloting it through as successfully and intelligently as he has done. At the beginning of the Committee proceedings he excused himself as being a relatively new Member in this field. On the other hand, I think that his competence in handling the Bill in Standing Committee and here has made that apology unnecessary.

The hon. and learned Member for Buckinghamshire, South (Mr. Ronald Bell) introducd a jarring note as an ex-Highlander. I emphasise the prefix "ex". He did not speak for the Highlanders. He says he is a Highlander thrice removed. If he were not, I should myself be taking active steps to remove him now. He did not speak for any voice or interest in the Highlands, not even for special private interests in the Highlands, or even private enterprise in general. Private enterprise in the Highlands, such as there is of it, has never had the encouragement to develop that it has today under the Act which is being amended by this Bill. Never has it had such encouragement. Never to a large extent has it ever existed before in some places under the stewardship, or lack of stewardship, of the Conservative Party.

The hon. Gentleman knows quite well that I have the same interests at least as he has.

I will not join the hon. and learned Gentleman in his act of gallantly dying by proxy on behalf of hundreds of thousands of Highlanders who have been waiting for years for private enterprise to develop the Highlands. They have been permitted to die through what he miscalls independence, which meant, in past bitter experience, dying of poverty, depopulation and the effects of prolonged unemployment. We have had enough of this naive nonsense, without the hon. and learned Gentleman sentimentalising it at this distance of time. He talked today about the Highlands as "part of England". Even his very geography was wrong. For him to claim any rights as a Highland spokesman is impertinent. He speaks for nobody in the Highlands even at three generations' distance. I am sorry that the hon. and learned Gentleman has not also altered his clan name. I am ashamed of him today as his clansman for that speech.

The Bill will do something that the Highlands and Islands Development Board wants to be done. It has asked for it officially. It is getting it now. Private enterprise has been putting pressure on the Board to help and the Board wants to make sure that the situation is clarified. The Board will be able to proceed now, I hope, with this clarification which the Bill provides to help many companies which I am sure are extremely anxious to find the Board aiding and underwriting them in various ways.

The hon. and learned Gentleman talked about the danger of the Government management and Government intervention. He was talking for nobody that I am aware of except a small hard core of reactionaries in the Highlands. He was not speaking for the ordinary people. I know of no firm in the Highlands which will not fully accept and quickly apply for any assistance by grant or loan which any other company throughout the country will apply for.

May I ask my hon. Friend, since his Bill is now agreed, to have a little mercy on some other Bills which are to follow?

I appreciate that point and shall meet it; but a Highlands Bill comes before us only once in many years. While I sympathise with my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Northampton (Mr. Paget), I think he should have addressed his appeal to the hon. Member for Inverness (Mr. Russell Johnston) and other Members of the Liberal Party, who took up a lot of time with speeches earlier.

The concluding remarks of the hon. and learned Member for Buckinghamshire, South represent nobody that I am aware of—Tory, Liberal or anybody else—in the Highlands. Everybody wants to help private enterprise in the Highlands so far as it is able now to develop with help under the Act and which it will increasingly get under the Bill introduced by my hon. Friend.

I give the Bill my blessing. I endorsed it from the start as a sponsor. More important, the people of the Highlands and Islands are indeed for it.

Question put and agreed to.

Bill accordingly read the Third time, and passed.

Friendly And Industrial And Provd3ent Societies Bill

As amended (in the Standing Com mittee), considered.

2.30 p.m.

On a point of order, Mr. Deputy Speaker. There are a number of Amendments in the names of myself and some of my hon. Friends. I am conscious of the fact that a great deal of today has been lost to our normal business by what preceded it this morning, and also that there is great anxiety on the part of hon. Members to get to the next Bill. In the circumstances, I am prepared not to move any of the Amendments that I had tabled.

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

I am deeply grateful to those who have helped with the passing of the Bill. In my years in this House, I have for the second time come up in the ballot. This time I was No. 22. Last time I was No. 16. I then introduced a Bill, upon which I felt very strongly, to assist spastics. I wished to empower the Minister to give them two-seater carriages. The Bill was steadily blocked by the Minister.

On this occasion, I asked for a Bill to which there would be no opposition and which would be helped. That has been the position almost up to the end, when a rather alarming cloud of opposition was borne in on a Sabbatarian wind. I am deeply happy and grateful that that cloud has since dispersed, and I express my gratitude to all those who have helped my Bill.

Question put and agreed to.

Bill accordingly read the Third time, and passed.

Caravan Sites Bill

As amended (in the Standing Committee), considered.

I have posted on the board, as is my wont, my selection of the Amendments.

Clause 1

APPLICATION OF PART I

2.32 p.m.

I beg to move Amendment No. 2, in page 1, line 12, after first 'his', to insert 'permanent'.

With this Amendment we can consider No. 3, in line 12, after second 'his', insert 'permanent'.

The object is to exclude any possibility of weekend or holiday use of caravans being included in this provision. We wish to make it clear that what is involved is permanent residence.

I am able to give the assurance which the hon. Member for Poole (Mr. Murton) wants. The Bill applies only to permanent residences and follows the phraseology used in the Rent Acts, so that it has respectable precedence. Section 3(l)(a) of the 1968 Act states:

"— the protected tenant of the dwelling-house shall, if and so long as he occupies the dwelling-house as his residence, be the statutory tenant of it;"

I think the hon. Gentleman would agree that it would be undesirable to suggest that we mean anything different in this Bill from what the Rent Acts have meant in the past. The courts know how to interpret this phrase and the best thing would be to leave out the word "permanent".

The hon. Member for Orpington (Mr. Lubbock) really cannot expect the courts to equate caravans with houses, since they are eminently different. What is sauce for the goose may not be sauce for the gander. The whole point about caravans is that, in so many cases, they are used for holiday purposes. They may be used for what one might call prolonged holiday or perhaps even for semi-retirement or for periods of half a year. Where is the line to be drawn? The fact that there is a precedent in one Statute does not imply that the courts will extend it to another area of legislation.

Acceptance of the Amendment would mean that there would be no doubt about what we mean. We know that the courts, when they consider an Act of Parliament, look at it in toto and decide what it means as a whole and what particular bits of it mean. Surely this Bill should make the task of the courts easier. Indeed, it should make the position of caravan dwellers and people running caravan sites easier if it is in language that both laymen and the courts understand. I hope that my hon. Friend the Member for Poole will proceed with the Amendment.

I support the Amendment. If, as the hon. Member for Orpington (Mr. Lubbock) says, it is his intention that only permanent residence should be concerned, it would modify any chance of misunderstanding if the Amendment were accepted. It would help the courts and make clear the intentions of the Bill.

By leave of the House—

I, too, support the Amendment and, without going into details, the hon. Member for Orpington (Mr. Lubbock) will know why. There are many sites which are of a temporary nature, with the licence granted only for a limited period. I use the word, "temporary" in the widest sense in this context. If "permanent" is inserted in the Bill, it will not be weakend but strengthened. Statutes must be clear and definite and I am afraid that this Bill is not clear and definite and could lead to a great deal of legal arguments in the courts about its meaning. The Amendment would strengthen the Bill. The purpose would not be changed and the Bill would certainly be improved.

By leave of the House, perhaps I can reply.

Order. The hon. Gentleman does not need the leave of the House to reply.

I am not a lawyer and it is hard for me to dispute with the hon. and learned Members for Surrey, East (Mr. Doughty) and Antrim, South (Sir Knox Cunningham). But I am advised that to put the word "permanent" in here would imply that we meant something different in the Bill from what was meant by the use of the word "residence" in the Rent Act and would make the task of the courts much more difficult in deciding what Parliament meant.

The question of holiday sites is already covered in the Bill. There is no question of their being brought in, because they are not protected sites. In the context of the Rent Acts, it has been held that a house occupied by a tenant only for the summer holidays is not protected as security. Therefore, if we use the same phraseology in this Bill as in the Rent Acts, we are much more likely to be on the right track and we should be giving the courts the phraseology which they have known how to interpret ever since Rent Acts first came on the Statute Book. I believe that the wording in the Bill is adequate and covers our intentions.

We are on a legal matter. Will the hon. Gentleman invite the Parliamentary Secretary to give the advice of his Department?

I should be glad to have confirmation of what I have said.

By permission of the House, perhaps I can say something more.

Order. We are not in Committee but on Report stage and I deprecate second speeches on Report.

I merely wished to make a further observation, Mr. Speaker.

That is what I deprecate.

In the case of houses and flats the site is itself permanent. The analogy given by the hon. Member for Orpington (Mr. Lubbock) is wrong.

I am put in a quandary. Hon. Members are aware of the difficulties which might arise should we include now an Amendment which could jeopardise this part of the Bill. No doubt the hon. Member for Orpington (Mr. Lubbock) had guidance and assistance with the drafting. For that reason, and in view of the assurance which the hon. Member for Orpington has given, I beg to ask leave to withdraw the Amendment.

Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.

Clause 3

PROTECTION OF OCCUPIERS AGAINST EVICTION AND HARASSMENT

I beg to move Amendment No. 4, in page 2, line 29, after 'contract, insert 'he does act'.

With this we are to take Amendment No. 5, in line 35, leave out from beginning to end of line 39.

The purpose of these Amendments is largely self-evident. We are here dealing with an offence which, with the Bill in its present form, would involve a fine of up to £100 on the first occasion and £500, with a possible six months' imprisonment, on a second or subsequent occasion. We want to be quite clear what it is that a person can be fined these heavy amounts and sent to prison for doing. I am particularly concerned about the words:

"… withholds services or facilities reasonably required …"

A man may own a caravan park and wish, for perfectly good reasons, to terminate the use of his land for that purpose. He may give the necessary notices and be left with one caravan on the site occupied by one family either unable or unwilling to move.

If he is compelled to provide services which may be economic if there are 50 or 100 caravans, he might be involved in an enormous loss if he has to continue to provide them for only one caravan. That is to impose an obligation to provide services at what may be a heavy loss virtually in perpetuity, because the Bill contains power for the courts to renew the tenant's occupancy annually time after time. The imposition of such an obligation and these penalties for failure to meet it is serious, and it is a state of affairs which the House ought not to support.

The hon. Gentleman's Amendment says that any act which is done with an intent to cause the occupier to abandon occupation of the caravan, or to remove it from the site, shall be an offence. The phraseology which the hon. Gentleman proposes to leave out limits the kinds of acts for which a landlord would commit an offence. The Amendments have the very opposite effect from the hon. Gentleman's intention. He would make it more difficult for the person in the position which he has described ever to obtain possession, because the owner of the site would not even be able to seek to persuade the occupant to leave, because that would be an act with intent to cause the occupier to abandon occupation of the caravan.

2.45 p.m.

Now that I have explained what the import of the Amendments would be, I hope that the hon. Gentleman will not press them. To help him further, may I say that the phraseology of lines 35 to 39, which he seeks to leave out, is exactly the same as that of Section 30(3) of the Rent Act, 1965? As he may know if he has read the OFFICIAL REPORT of the proceedings of the Standing Committee, the Bill is closely modelled on the provisions for protection from eviction in the Rent Acts, and it is best to keep words which the courts have experience of interpreting rather than to make the subsection as wide as it would be if the Amendment were accepted.

I am worried about the Clause and about the Amendments. The hon. Member for Orpington (Mr. Lubbock) keeps referring to the Rent Acts and saying that the phraseology of the two Measures is the same. Unfortunately, the subjects which we are here discussing and those covered by the Rent Acts are different. Apart from demolition orders and things of that sort, nobody suggests that houses and flats can be thinned out to one or two on a site. Nobody suggests that a house can be put on wheels and towed away by a car and treated as a trailer. We are therefore dealing with different subjects.

I have no wish to prevent the hon. Gentleman from getting a Third Reading for his Bill, but his constant references to the similarities between the Bill and the Rent Acts demonstrate a fundamental flaw. If the Rent Acts dealt with mobile houses or mobile flats, he would be able to say that, as we were dealing with exactly the same sort of thing, the phraseology of the two Measures should be the same, but houses and flats are not mobile. No landlord can say that almost every flat on his land has not only been emptied, but removed, and that he is is now left with only one or two tenants for whom he has to provide full services. Such a provision is unnecessarily harsh on any landlord. I hope that the hon. Member for Orpington will realise that and will deal with these two separate matters separately and will not treat a mobile caravan in the same way as an immobile house or flat.

I seek assistance from the Joint Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Housing and Local Government. It seems dangerous to take certain provision from an Act which deals with permanent houses and permanent flats and apply them in a different context. I appreciate what the hon. Member for Orpington said, but I should like the Parliamentary Secretary to tell the House whether the hon. Gentleman is correct, or whether it would be found that the Amendment was helpful because caravans are movable property.

I support my hon. Friend the Member for Wimble- don (Sir C. Black). Throughout the Committee stage, the hon. Member for Orpington (Mr. Lubbock) was at pains to point out the similarity between these ephemeral homes and bricks and mortar, which can stand for 100 or 200 years. I take issue with the hon. Member for Orpington on this matter and I hope that the House will accept not only the Amendment, but the other Amendments, in the general realisation throughout the Bill that—

We are dealing only with this Amendment at the moment.

I was hoping to avoid having to speak again in the same context. The spirit of the Amendment, and it may be of other matters, is that a caravan is a dwelling for only a limited number of years and should not be given such security and such background to security as is suitable for a permanent home.

The Joint Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Housing and Local Government

(Mr. Arthur Skeffington)

I am very ready to accede to the request of the hon. and learned Gentleman so far as I can be of any assistance to the House, though those hon. Members who served on the Committee will know that the hon. Member for Orpington (Mr. Lubbock) was able there to deal with these points himself.

I think that where the House may have misled itself is this. The reason why the Clause of the Bill is parallel to the Section in the Rent Act is not the reason of the dwelling itself. That is not the parallel. The parallel is the illegal action which it is attempting to stop. The Clause deals with three types of offences, what will, under the Bill, become unlawful actions, trying to evict a caravan dweller from a site or caravan on which an agreement is still current; similar actions to evict him after any such agreement has come to an end but without proper legal proceedings; and, to achieve the same end, the bringing of all sorts of pressures I think the House regards, whether applied to caravan dwellers or anybody else, as repugnant.

Of course, there may be every right to obtain possession, but that is provided for by Statute elsewhere. This is a limited Bill, and I assure the House that it is only a holding Bill in relation to this type of case. It is because this type of offence is similar to the type of offence contemplated in the Rent Act that the wording is the same. These are actions which, I hope, will become illegal through the passing of the Bill, but they are certainly repugnant.

Amendment negatived.

I beg to move, Amendment No. 7, in page 3, line 9, to leave out '£100' and to insert '£50'.

With this Amendment we take also Amendment No. 8 in page 3, line 10, leave out '£500' and insert '£100'; and Amendment No. 9, in line 10, leave out 'or to both'.

The purpose of the three Amendments is to reduce the penalties which can be imposed for the offences under this part of the Bill. I am aware of the fact that these are penalties which are to be found in the rent restriction Acts and I think the reason why these penalties are imposed was given in the argument which the hon. Member for Orpington (Mr. Lubbock) developed just now. These penalties appear to me to be very savage in the circumstances. I think they are far heavier than they ought to be. I do not accept the view that we have got to accept for this Bill the provisions of the rent restriction Acts. Circumstances affecting the licensing of an occupied caravan may be entirely different from the. circumstances of the permanent tenancy of a permanent residence. Therefore, it is not enough to say that we should accept these penalties because they are similar to the penalties prescribed in the rent restriction Acts.

I hope I am not going to annoy the hon. Member for Wimbledon (Sir C. Black) if I have to repeat once again in what I have said before, that these provisions are parallel to those in the Rent Act. That is the very reason why I put them in. To have a different penalty for an offence committed under Clause 3 of the Bill, for what would be exactly the same offence as that defined in the Rent Act, 1965, would, in my view, be highly undesirable. I am afraid it is a questior. of philosophy, on which we may have to disagree, because I think the offences set out in paragraphs (a), (b) and (c) are equally to be deplored whether they affect occupiers of caravans or occupiers of permanent dwellings.

I have always taken that view, ever since the Protection from Eviction Bill, 1964. I have spoken on it many times in this House and I do not want to repeat all the arguments I advanced at the time of that Bill or at the time of the Rent Bill, but the point is that people who live in caravans ought to be treated on exactly the same basis as those who live in permanent houses, particularly in being protected from harassment and fear. It is a matter of philosophy. Hon. Members may agree or disagree with it, but once we accept this principle then we could not possibly provide that there should be different penalties for offences under this Clause. I am very sorry to have to say this to the hon. Gentleman, but I could not possibly accept his Amendment.

The hon. Member for Orpington (Mr. Lubbock) has put his finger on the whole point. He said it depends on the philosophy we adopt and from which we start. If we accept his philosophy, then we can go the whole road with him, but there is very good reason not to accept that philosophy.

If caravan dwellers were on all fours with tenants of houses and flats, then if the Joint Parliamentary Secretary will think back to the early years of the beginning of this century, when rent legislation was first introduced, and when, after all, we had had caravans for a long time already, that legislation would have included caravans. The fact is that the rent legislation of the First World War, the rent legislation in the Second World War, and the rent legislation in the years since the Second World War has not embodied the philosophy that caravans are the same as houses or flats and has not embodied the philosophy that caravan dwellers are in the same position as dwellers in houses or flats.

So I think that the hon. Member for Orpington has very carefully constructed an entirely false philosophy with which to beguile us. It sounds so easy, but it is an entirely false philosophy. Having endeavoured to get the House to swallow the Bill at Second Reading, he thinks we have now got to swallow all this without protest, but merely because this Bill was given a Second Reading in no way implied acceptance of this philosophy. It implied the acceptance of provisions relating to residential occupiers, and that they should have some protection, but it did not imply that they should have identical protection with that accorded to dwellers in houses or flats. That is how I think the hon. Gentleman has been misled—by the difficulty of constructing penalties suitable as protection for caravan dwellers. He has been misled by that difficulty and beguiled by it into merely lifting in toto Sections from Acts which were devised for entirely other purposes. I am sorry to have to say to the hon. Gentleman that I think if he had been more painstaking from the beginning to get his philosophy right then he would not have got us into these difficulties now.

Of this group of Amendments the one I am keenest about, and the one on which I hope we may have a vote, is Amendment No. 9, and for this reason, that I think it is deplorable, against the background of the nation today, that people should be sent to prison for any offence of this sort, and still more deplorable that, as in this particular case, they should be not only sent to prison but should suffer a very substantial fine as well. Therefore, the removal of the words "or to both" is the most important phraseology. An attempt was made in Committee to remove the prison sentence, which failed, so any new Amendments to that effect would probably not have been selected.

The concept of prison on top of a substantial fine alarms me. No sentence imposed would probably ever be carried out, since, if they were first offenders, these people would receive suspended sentences which would be totally inoperative. Therefore, this is unnecessary verbiage. I hope that, if the hon. Gentleman will not accept the Amendment, my hon. Friends will vote for it.

I should inform the House that I am prepared to allow a Division on one of these Amendments. Whether it should be the third is a matter for those who support them.

3.0 p.m.

I support the Amendments, particularly No. 9. The hon. Member for Orpington (Mr. Lubbock) referred again to following the Rent Act penalties. But he must have overlooked the fact that those Acts deal with something different, with the lease, which includes occupation of the dwellings. For caravans, only the site and not the caravan itself is leased. The caravan is the property of the occupier.

If the occupier won a Premium Bond or backed the Derby winner and bought a new caravan, would that also be protected? In an offence of harassment, it is turning someone not out of a caravan but off the site which is important. That is one of the fundamental differences between the Landlord and Tenant Acts and the Rent Acts, and the hon. Gentleman must realise it.

When an offence attracts a possible penalty of six months, the accused is entitled to trial at quarter sessions. I must declare an interest, in that I might have to try such cases. His legal advisers might tell the man that the court may consider his a bad case and that he should go for trial by jury, as he would be able to do, and the sessions courts would be cluttered up with dealing with these cases, some of which would take a considerable time.

I do not think that the hon. Gentleman can have realised that, but, now that he does, I ask him to consider Amendment No. 9 with greater care. My hon. Friend the Member for Maidstone (Mr. John Wells) said that sentences in these cases would be suspended. But this would be true only for first offences. If the accused had committed a previous offence, even of a different nature, for which he had been sentenced to six months or less—

I meant a suspended prison sentence for a first offence.

Yes, people may have had a previous sentence for a different offence, which would make them liable to imprisonment for this offence. Penalties of this kind go further than the promoter intended. I ask him to consider this penalty Clause to see whether he cannot accept, particularly, Amendment No. 9.

In view of what has been said, Mr. Speaker, I am prepared to accept Amendment No. 9.

I think that the House will be grateful to the hon. Member.

I ask leave to withdraw Amendment No. 7, Mr. Speaker.

Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.

Amendment made: No. 9, in page 3, line 10, leave out ' or to both '.—[ Sir C. Black.]

Clause 4

PROVISION FOR SUSPENSION OF EVICTION ORDERS

I beg to move Amendment No. 10, in page 3, line 29, leave out 'twelve' and insert 'three'.

I suggest that, for the convenience of the House, we take with it Amendment No. 11, to leave out 'twelve' and insert 'six'.

The intention of the Amendment is to reduce the 12-month period of suspension of eviction orders as proposed in the Clause to a period of 3 months only. In our view, 12 months is too long. If the court has made a decision that an eviction order should be enforced, it should be possible for the persons concerned to be able to find alternative accommodation within three months and, therefore, a longer period would not appear to be necessary.

I wish merely to give my support to the Amendment. Twelve months is much too long, and I think that three months is a better period. I warmly welcome the Amendment.

The Amendment would result in the courts being even more busy than they are. We had complaints in Committee about the additional work which would be created for the courts in dealing with possession orders under the Bill. On reflection, perhaps the hon. Member for Poole (Mr. Murton) would agree that from, that point of view, a shorter period would be undesirable. In any event, would the House think that, where a man is occupying a caravan as his home, he should be forced to come back to the court every three months or six months to seek an extension of the stay of execution? That would create almost as much insecurity of feeling on the part of a caravan resident as that which he suffers already.

It would be better to stick to 12 months. I hate to say it yet again, but it is the period set out in the Protection from Eviction Act, 1964, Section 2(1) of which provides:

"… the court may suspend the execution of the order for such period, not exceeding twelve months from the date of the order, as the court thinks reasonable."

That has worked satisfactorily, and I hope that the House will agree to it in this case.

The Act to which the hon. Member for Orpington (Mr. Lubbock) refers does not work wholly satisfactorily. In fact, the reverse is the case from the point of view of some very good landlords who find their properties deteriorating and the comfort and amenities of neighbours severely affected for a protracted period. It is quite unnecessary to import the twelve-month provision from that Act into the Bill.

A caravan is not a permanent dwelling. The whole situation is different, the time scale is different, and what may be reasonable for a house is not reasonable in the case of a caravan site. One has only to think of the comparative lack of privacy of a caravan dweller vis-à-vis his neighbours to understand the extremely harmful effect on a whole site of someone being allowed to stay in what may seem to be perpetuity to his neighbours by a suspension of up to twelve months. It will not be in the interests of either caravan site owners or caravan dwellers that suspensions should be anything like as long as twelve months.

Order. I would remind the House that we have a mass of Amendments to get through if we want the Bill.

I hope that the House will take heed of what has been said by the hon. Member for Orpington (Mr. Lubbock). Although I disagree frequently with him, I think that what he said on this point was very wise. I beg hon. Members to support the hon. Gentleman.

Amendment negatived.

I beg to move Amendment No. 12, in page 3, line 36, to leave out subsection (3).

Perhaps this Amendment will indicate clearly the difference in philosophy, as it has been described, between the sponsors of the Bill and some of us who, on some aspects of it, are its critics. The Clause creates machinery whereby the occupier of a caravan may be able to reside in it practically in perpetuity. In an earlier Amendment we accepted a maximum period of 12 months as reasonable in the circumstances, although some of my hon. Friends and I would have preferred a shorter period. It seems to me wholly wrong to set up machinery, as in this subsection, which can create a tenancy virtually in perpetuity in respect of a caravan as distinct from a permanent house or flat.

An important point which we must not overlook is that if the subsection remains in the Bill, and if it is understood by caravan owners that once an occupier is in occupation he may be in occupation virtually in perpetuity, the number of people willing to let caravans will fall dramatically. At the moment a caravan owner can let the caravan for a period and know that he can recover possession at the end of that period. If he is saddled with a tenant virtually in perpetuity, with all the trouble of contesting court proceedings every 12 months to decide whether the tenant can stay, does anybody seriously imagine that people who let caravans now will be willing to let them in future? If we leave the subsection in the Bill, we shall enormously reduce the number of caravans available for letting.

I thoroughly support the Amendment. Although the Bill talks about the occupation of caravans, we are dealing with caravan sites. The caravan is the property of the owner. There is a complete distinction between the Bill and the Rent Acts. Once a person is told, on legal advice, that he can go to court within a period of 12 months and ask for time to find alternative accommodation, there will be little encouragement for caravan owners to let their caravans.

I do not ask for the whole Clause to be taken out, and there is no Amendment down to that effect. The subsection provides that the period of suspension shall not be extended

"for more than 12 months at a time".

That means ad infinitum. That is the thoroughly objectionable part of the Clause.

The Parliamentary Secretary gave an assurance on Second Reading that it was the Government's intention to introduce permanent legislation as soon as Parliamentary time was available.

I should not want the House to be misled. This was an undertaking given by the Leader of the House. There is no question but that legislation is prepared and that as time affords in the coming Session it will be introduced.

Therefore, we have to make provision meanwhile for the period of the suspension to be extended until the legislation which the Government have promised comes into force, just as it was foreshadowed that the Rent Act, 1965, would supersede the Protection from Eviction Act, 1964, and that once the Rent Act was on the Statute Book the other Act would be unnecessary. Since, in an uncertain world, we cannot be absolutely certain just when Parliamentary time will be found for such legislation, we have to anticipate the need for extensions that could be applied by the courts at their discretion.

3.15 p.m.

I must point out a most undesirable consequence to site operators were the subsection to be deleted. If a caravan resident is given 12 months' security of tenure and then abuses it and decides to make a thorough nuisance of himself on the site and play merry hell with all the neighbours, the site operator would not be able, without the subsection, to appeal to the courts to reduce the period of suspension. The deletion would be most objectionable to site operators, who would lose their protection against the undesirable person who, by craft or by some other means, has obtained a 12 months' suspension of the order and proceeds to abuse it.

We are coming to the very nub of the matter. I first began to be very interested in the problem of caravan dwellers when Lord Brooke, then Mr. Henry Brooke, was at the Ministry of Housing and I represented another constituency. The interesting thing is, and this subsection throws light on it, that provision of bricks-and-mortar accommodation under private enterprise auspices has been extremely tardy and inadequate to meet demand. It is generally agreed, and one of the Government's recent White Papers underlined it, that one of the reasons for this position is the unsatisfactory state of landlord and tenant law. We are now trying to import into the caravan world exactly those provisions which have dried up the supply of brick-and-mortar accommodation, and for that reason the subsection is extremely undesirable.

It has also come out in our exchanges this afternoon that, in any case, the Government have their own Bill which will come along, we are told, very soon. Would it be a great tragedy—

I intervene because I thought that it might be implied from the demeanour of some hon. Gentlemen opposite that the Government did not intend to deal as soon as possible with the whole problem, going very much further than a Bill in relation to caravans. Actions in relation to harassment and so on can be dealt with in a parallel way, but other legislation to deal with caravan circumstances is quite different. We are grateful to the hon. Member for Orpington (Mr. Lubbock) for undertaking this holding action, but it is the Government's intention as soon as possible to introduce permanent legislation. I did not say that there was any question of its being done this Session: it will be done as soon as possible in the Session to come.

Division No. 166.]	AYES	[3.20 p.m.
Biggs-Davision, John	Doughty, Charles	Maddan, Martin
Black, Sir Cyril	Drayson, G. B.	Maginnis, John E.
Clark, Henry	Farr, John
Cunningham, Sir Knox	Gurden, Harold	TELLERS FOR THE AYES:
Currie, G. B. H.	Jennings, J. C. (Burton)	Mr. Michael Alison and Mr. John Wells.

NOES
Abse, Leo	Fletcher, Raymond (likeston)	Kenyon, Clifford
Archer, Peter	Ford, Ben	Kerr Russell (Feltham)
Bagier, Gordon A. T.	Fraser,Rt.Hn.Hugh(St'fford & Stone)	Lipton, Marcus
Butler, Mrs. Joyce (Wood Green)	Freeson, Reginald	Lloyd, Ian (P'tsm'th, Langstone)
Campbell, Gordon	Garrett, W. E.	Lomas, Kenneth
Crossman, Rt. Hn. Richard	Ginsburg, David	Luard, Evan
Delargy, Hugh	Gray, Dr. Hugh (Yarmouth)	Lubbock, Eric
Dickens, James	Gregory, Arnold	Mabon, Dr. J. Dickson
Driberg, Tom	Hamilton, William (Fife, W.)	Macdonald, A. H.
Dunwoody, Dr. John (F'th & C'b'e)	Hamling, William	Mackenzie,Alasdair(Ross&Crom'ty)
Eadie, Alex	Heald, Rt. Hn. Sir Lionel	Mahon, Peter (Preston, S.)
Edwards, Robert (Bilston)	Heffer, Eric S.	Mallalieu,J.P.W.(Huddersfield,E.)
English, Michael	Jay, Rt. Hn. Douglas	Mellish, Rt. Hn. Robert
Ewing, Mrs. Winifred	Jenkins, Hugh (Putney)	Mendelson, J. J.
Faulds, Andrew	Johnston, Russell (Inverness)	Mikardo, Ian

rose—

Order. We cannot have an intervention in an intervention.

I accept entirely what the Parliamentary Secretary says, but the proceedings on the Bill, not only today but in Committee, show that there is a great deal to be considered. I am not at all certain that the hypotheses of the holding Bill may not militate against best solutions later when the Government's Bill comes forward.

We have had a promise from the Minister that the Government will bring in legislation this Session—

Hon. Members: No.

Are we to place any more reliance on this promise than on other promises, which have been broken?

Order. We are getting a little wide of the Amendment. We are trying to decide whether subsection (3) should stand.

I must correct what has just been said. What the hon. Member for Antrim, South (Sir Knox Cunningham) said just now is not what I said. I did not say that it would be this Session—that is the one thing I did not say.

Question put, That the Amendment be made: —

The Committee divided: Ayes 12, Noes 69.

Molloy, William	Pavitt, Laurence	Taverne, Dick
Morris, Alfred (Wythenshawe)	Rees, Merlyn	Vickers, Dame Joan
Moyle, Roland	Ridley, Hn. Nicholas	Weitzman, David
Ogden, Eric	Robinson, W. O. J. (Walth'stow, E.)	Williams, Alan Lee (Hornchurch)
Oram, Albert E.	Roebuck, Roy	Wilson, William (Coventry, S.)
Orme, Stanley	Ryan, John	Winnick, David
Paget, R. T.	Shaw, Arnold (Ilford, S.)
Pardoe, John	Skeffington, Arthur	TELLERS FOR THE NOES:
Parker, John (Dagenham)	Stonehouse, John	Mr. Albert Murray and Mr. James Wellbeloved.

Clause 5

SUPPLEMENTARY

I beg to move Amendment No. 15, in page 4, line 37, leave out subsection (2).

I can state my objection to this subsection in a sentence. It is retrospective legislation. On that ground, I ask the promoter to agree to its removal.

This subsection is more or less identical with Section 2(2) of the Protection from Eviction Act 1964.

Amendment negatived.

Clause 6

DUTY OF LOCAL AUTHORITIES TO PROVIDE SITES FOR GIPSIES

I beg to move Amendment No. 17, in page 5, line 19, leave out 'fifteen' and insert 'fifty'.

With this Amendment the House can discuss also the following Amendments: Amendment No. 18, in line 19, after 'caravans' insert' and tents'.

Amendment No. 30, in page 7, line 6, after ' caravans 'insert' and tents'.

Amendment No. 32, in line 13, after 'caravans ' insert ' and tents '.

Amendment No. 36, in line 36, after 'caravan' insert 'and tent'.

Amendment No. 39, in page 8, line 2, at end insert 'or tent'.

Amendment 42, in page 16, after 'caravans' insert 'and tents'.

Amendment 44, in line 21, after 'caravans' insert 'or tents'.

Amendment 46, in line 30, after 'caravan' insert 'or tent'.

These Amendments relate, in one case, to the replacing of the provision relating to 15 caravans on a site by 50 and, in all the other cases, adding "and tents "to" caravans".

3.30 p.m.

I take, first, the Amendments to insert "and tents". By Clause 16, the term "caravan" is given the same meaning as in the Caravan Sites and Control of Development Act 1960. By Section 29 of that Act, the interpretation section, a caravan is defined as,

"any structure designed or adapted for human habitation which is capable of being moved from one place to another (whether by being towed or by being transported on a motor vehicle or trailer) and any motor vehicle so designed or adapted, but does not include—
(a) railway rolling stock …, or
(b) any tent; "

If a site is limited to a certain number of caravans only, there will be a totally unrealistic appreciation of the manner in which many itinerants house themselves and of their numbers. Many an itinerant family, such as those one sees in the Midlands, may possess one caravan, or even no caravan at all, and yet set themselves down at the roadside in a secluded part of the county with their one caravan and round it clustered five or six tents within which various closely related branches of the family are housed.

If the words "and tents" are not included in this context it will be impossible for the Minister or the county council to have any idea of the number of families living on a caravan site. If my Amendment to replace the figure 15 by 50 is not accepted and my Amendment to add the words "and tents" is not accepted, no county council can be happy in the knowledge that there will be only 15 families on a site simply because the licence specifies only 15. Although the maximum number on a site is 15 caravans, there will be many more families than that occupying it, and if the site is occupied by 30 or 35 families, they will have to endure a good deal of unhygienic living conditions.

The limit of 15 caravans is nowhere near sufficient. In some of the larger counties with a county authority responsible for the provision of a site, there will be unnecessary proliferation of sites if the limit is kept at 15. It is desirable to have a certain amount of concentration of itinerant families, and only by having numbers greater than 15 on a site shall we achieve the necessary measure of supervision and control which I believe will be to their benefit.

Order. I would remind the House that if it wants the Bill there are only 25 minutes left.

We discussed the position of the county boroughs in Committee and agreed to insert Amendments which laid the duty on them, but it was felt by the Committee, and I hope it will be felt by the House, that this should not be an open-ended provision. We decided that the limitation we put on the obligations of the county borough should be extended to the London boroughs. As the Bill was drafted, there was no limit, although the Minister had declared his intention of asking them to provide one site in each of these boroughs.

If the county boroughs and London boroughs were required to provide 50 caravans there would be the strongest possible objection from the local authority associations and from my borough, which considers that it already has a fair share of this problem.

At the time of the March, 1965, survey by the Ministry of Housing and Local Government there were only 29 gipsy families living in tents in the whole of England and Wales. What the hon. Gentleman says about gipsies having tents which they take with them and use as part of the family's dwelling accommodation may be true but the sites are properly supervised by the local authorities and it will be a matter for them to decide what associated equipment the gipsies may bring with them and whether tents should be included. We should not tell the local authorities how they are to conduct and manage the sites under the Bill. In Bromley we find that the site has been very well established and properly supervised, and we do not get any difficulties with accommodation of the type the hon. Gentleman mentions.

Amendment negatived.

I beg to move Amendment No. 21, in page 5, line 30, at end insert:

(3) The Minister may give directions exempting from subsection (1) any local authority in the case of which he is satisfied, after such inquiries as appear to him to be appropriate, that adequate measures have been taken or are being taken to provide accommodation for gypsies residing in their area.

The Hampshire County Council, one of the pioneering county councils in providing better than camp site accommodation for gipsies, for some reason best known to itself saw fit to write to members of the Standing Committee as late as 20th May pressing its point of view. Its letter is the origin of the Amendment and the two others I have tabled, Amendment No. 29, in page 7, leave out lines 1 to 8 and insert:

(1) Every local authority to which subsection (1) of section 6 of this Act applies shall, as soon as may be after the commencement of this Part of this Act, give notice to the Minister—

(a) describing the number and location of sites proposed to be provided by them pursuant to that section and the number of caravans for which accommodation thereon is designed; or

(b) describing the number and location of sites already provided by them or any other local authority in their area under other statutory powers and which are used or are available for use by gypsies and the numbers of caravans for which accommodation there on is designed; or

(c) describing such other measures as have been taken by them or any other local authority in their area to provide adequate accommodation for gypsies.

(2) Every local authority as aforesaid, in giving notice to the Minister under the fore going subsection, shall describe the arrangements provided by them or proposed by them for securing the provision of adequate facilities for the education, health, welfare and employment of gypsies in their area.

(3) Before giving notice under subsection (1) of this section every local authority as aforesaid shall consult with such housing authorities as may appear to them to be appropriate and after such consultations shall, in giving notice to the Minister, describe the arrangements to be made by such authorities for the provision for gypsies wishing to adopt a settled way of life of permanent housing accommodation.

(4)Where any site has been provided under proposals submitted to the Minister under paragraph (a) of subsection (1) of this section, the local authorty shall give notice to that effect to the Minister.

and Amendment No. 33, in page 7, line 13 after ' directions', insert:

'or to any housing authority requiring them to provide such number of houses and in such areas as may be specified in the directions for the permanent accommodation of gypsies wishing to adopt a settled way of life'.

If county councils want to provide better than site accommodation, they should be allowed to do so. I shall read the letter because it enables me to state the case far more swiftly. It says:

"Hampshire have been pioneers in this country in the field of rehabilitating gypsies and travellers, with the aim of integrating them into the community. In 1962 a survey carried out by the County Welfare Officer showed that there were 157 gypsy families in the county, 105 of whom expressed a desire to be permanently rehoused. Previous attempts to rehousing these families in local authority housing had (with the notable exception of the New Forest Rural District Council) usually been unsuccessful because the change of environment from a primitive camp site to a council house had been too sudden. Spurned by their new neighbours, gypsy families had become ' problem families ' or 'bad tenants' so that there was a natural reluctance by housing authorities to antagonise their existing tenants, and those on the housing waiting list, by providing housing for gypsies.

"The County Council decided, therefore, to provide intermediate accommodation for gypsies with the following aims:
(i) to provide the family with a home with basic amenities;
(ii) to help the breadwinner settle in stable employment;
(iii) to establish the children in local schools;
(iv) to improve the family's standard of living;
(v) to establish the family as accepted members of the local community."

Four centres were therefore established.

The letter continues.:

"Each centre consisted of up to twelve bungalows, with a resident warden and resident social worker …"

They are described in notes which the council sent to us. The letter continues:

"The centres were provided by the County Council under the powers of Section 21 of the National Assistance Act, 1948, in accordance with proposals approved by the Minister of Health. The total capital cost of the centres is £75,732 and the annual running cost of the four centres is £30,000. There are, at present, 42 families living in the centres and 11 families have been rehoused from the centres in local authority housing. The County Welfare Officer estimates that in 5–7 years all the families "—

Order. The hon. Gentleman cannot go into too much detail about the proposal.

I was seeking by reading the letter, Mr. Speaker, to get through the work more speedily than if I paraphrased it. But I am very nearly at the conclusion of the letter. With your leave, I will just finish the two brief paragraphs.

The letter goes on:

"The two key factors in the success of these measures are the provision of intensive social work support by the Welfare Authority and the provision of local authority housing when the families are ready to graduate from the intermediate accommodation. The County Council consider that the provision of accommodation for gypsies, whether in caravan sites or residential centres, is only the first step in the process of enabling the gypsy to return to the community. The provision of accommodation must, therefore, be seen in this light and plans prepared to secure that social needs are also met. Part II of the Bill is, in the County Council's view, totally inadequate in this respect."

It is for this reason that I move this Amendment seeking to excuse county councils from providing these inadequate steps where they have already provided better steps, such as has already been done in Hampshire. The Hampshire experiment has the wholehearted support of the County Councils Association, which wrote to hon. Members on 21st May. I know not why it left it so late. The hon. Member for Orpington (Mr. Lubbock) announced his Bill on 29th November. I should have thought that these august bodies might have got hold of him a little sooner. However, I hope that the House will give favourable consideration to my point of view.

If I am correct in my view that the Amendment is in favour of helping gipsies—perhaps the Minister could help us on this point— I should certainly like to support it.

I find that where there are gipsies the inhabitants often consider them nuisances, and that the gipsies are chivvied here and there. Proper arrangements should be made for them. If the Amendment will assist in that way, I shall support it. I find this a complex and difficult Amendment to understand. I did not have the advantage of being on the Standing Committee, and I should appreciate it if the Minister could give me some guidance and assistance.

I am glad to help the House in any way I can. The Ministry well knows the Hampshire project, and is sympathetic to its approach and to the efforts of other authorities.

There are two further points that I wish to make. It would still be necessary to make provisions for the normal type of habitation and site which the more nomadic members of this community undoubtedly prefer. To accept the Amendment would lead to considerable uncertainty and delay. In other words, it might well increase the gap where there are in some cases reluctant authorities which do not want to provide anything. That is not at all the case with Hampshire, but it could be the case with one or two authorities—every hon. Member knows this—which have not been active.

I can assure the hon. Member that if the Amendment is not approved the Minister is bound to take into account what is already being done before he issues any directions under Clause 9(2), and I give an undertaking that this would always be done where adequate provision was already being made.

In view of the Minister's assurance, I beg to ask leave to withdraw the Amendment.

Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.

Clause 8

LOCATION OF SITES IN COUNTIES

3.45 p.m.

I beg to move Amendment No. 24, in page 6, line 24, to leave out 'or appropriate'.

I fear that, unless these words are removed, the Bill will enable county authorities to acquire land compulsorily for this purpose and I should not like to see such power included.

I understand that, if we deleted these words, we should be stopping a local authority from using land which is already in its possession. To delete them would be rather negative.

Amendment negatived.

I beg to move, Amendment No. 25, in page 6, line 28, at end to insert:

'and shall take into account representations made by anyone living or engaged in a remunerative occupation within a radius of one mile and for this purpose shall cause the proposal to be suitably advertised by Press and other media'.

The purpose is to see that all people affected by a proposal to establish a site for the purposes of the Bill are properly consulted. It does not appear to me that the hon. Member for Orpington (Mr. Lubbock) has given much concern to the objection of anyone, even if they live within a stone's throw of such sites, unless they represent the council of a county district. As the Bill stands, even a parish council is not entitled to object. A rural district council is, but many other people are or could be affected. People with genuine grounds of objection should be allowed to make representations to the county authority.

My Amendment suggests that those living within a radius of one mile or anyone in a remunerative occupation within the same radius should at least be consulted and asked to let the council have their views on the proposition before a decision is taken.

The hon. Member for Orpington (Mr. Lubbock) has asked me, as one of the sponsors of the Bill, to give him assistance in replying. The Amendment is unnecessary. Already in the Bill, in Clause 8(1) and Clause 9(1), there are provisions for objections to be raised but, more particularly, there is nothing in the Bill to override the normal town planning procedure. If anyone desires to establish a caravan site, whether for gipsies or anyone else, they will have to go through the normal town planning control. There is, therefore, ample opportunity for people to register objections under the town planning law. The object of the Amendments is already met.

I fear that I must disagree with the hon. Gentleman. Some years ago, I sought to bring in a private Member's Bill under the ten minute rule procedure to protect such people because, in and near my constituency, the Kent County Council has been extremely active in setting up these sites. This has caused grave hardship in special circumstances and we have seen the rigidity which the Minister's Department interprets the terms of compensation. There is absolutely no give or take. A man may have a building site on which he intends to put up private housing and find overnight that the adjacent property has been designated as a gipsy camp site area, and he then suffers from terrible "blight" and gets no compensation and very little opportunity even to make representations. I believe that even the Amendment is far too weak and I would prefer definite provisions for compensation. This comparatively mild wording is the very least we should have, and I hope that the Amendment will be accepted.

Amendment negatived.

Clause 9

POWERS OF MINISTER

I beg to move Amendment No. 29, in page 7, leave out lines 1 to 8 and insert:

(1) Every local authority to which subsection (1) of section 6 of this Act applies shall, as soon as may be after the commencement of this Part of this Act, give notice to the Minister—

(a) describing the number and location of sites proposed to be provided by them pursuant to that section and the number of caravans for which accommodation thereon is designed; or

(b) describing the number and location of sites already provided by them or any other local authority in their area under other statutory powers and which are used or are available for use by gypsies and the numbers of caravans for which accommodation thereon is designed; or

(c) describing such other measures as have been taken by them or any other local authority in their area to provide adequate accommodation for gypsies.

(2) Every local authority as aforesaid, in giving notice to the Minister under the foregoing subsection, shall describe the arrangements provided by them or proposed by them for securing the provision of adequate facilities for the education, health, welfare and employment of gypsies in their area.

(3) Before giving notice under subsection (1) of this section every local authority as aforesaid shall consult with such housing authorities as may appear to them to be appropriate and after such consultations shall, in giving notice to the Minister, describe the arrangements to be made by such authorities for the provision of gypsies wishing to adopt a settled way of life of permanent housing accommodation.

(4) Where any site has been provided under proposals submitted to the Minister under paragraph (a) of subsection (1) of this section,

the local authority shall give notice to that effect to the Minister.

This is parallel to the previous Amendment which I moved, and I hope that it will be accepted.

I have been asked to reply.

The Amendment is based upon a fallacy, because the object of the Bill is to note that gipsies live a nomadic way of life, and it seeks to ensure that proper provision shall be made so that that way of life is not offensive to other people. The Amendment goes a step further and seeks to impose a change in their way of life. It assumes that they ought necessarily to be integrated in the community. But the Amendment would require local authorities to make special provision and, in a sense gipsies, would be given priority over other sections of the community. That would arouse considerable resentment, not least among people on housing waiting lists and queueing for other social services by local authorities. While it may be right that gipsies should be integrated into the rest of the community, it is a long-term process and we ought not to rush into it.

Amendment negatived.

Clause 11

REMOVAL OF UNLAWFUL ENCAMPMENTS

I beg to move Amendment No. 43, in page 8, line 20, at end insert ' owner and'. I have at last succeeded in convincing the hon. Member for Orpington (Mr. Lubbock) of the wisdom of an Amendment.

I accept the Amendment.

Amendment agreed to.

Further Amendments made: No. 45, in page 8, line 23 after 'the', insert 'owner and'.

No. 47, in line 35, after 'the', insert 'owner and'.

No. 49, in line 37, leave out' his name' and insert 'their names'.

No. 50, in line 38, leave out 'address' and insert 'addresses'.—[ Mr. Farr.]

Clause 12

DESIGNATION OF AREAS

I beg to move Amendment No. 52 in page 9, line 3, after first ' borough ' insert ' a county district'.

I consider that a district council should be given the same power to apply to the Minister for an order designating an area where unauthorised camping shall not take place as is to be given to the other local authorities mentioned in the Bill.

Amendment negatived.

Question proposed, That the Bill be now read the Third time.

3.56 p.m.

I welcome substantially the gipsy provisions of the Bill. Part II of the Bill I think is excellent and will be widely welcomed. Of Part I of the Bill I do not think in such a generous way.

The hon. Member for Orpington (Mr. Lubbock) is doing the Labour Party's work for it and doing it in a half-hearted and inadequate manner. The Labour Government should have brought forward their own Measure to do this, if they wanted to do it. Instead of relying upon a private Member's time—of an Opposition Member—they should have brought forward their own Measure. The point I am seeking to make is simply this, that Part I brings in further restrictions upon ephemeral grounds, as I said before, and which I very much deplore.

Part II, I think, is widely welcomed. It is a pity that the hon. Member has put together in a ragbag various phrases from other legislation, but in general the provisions are acceptable. The point which has agitated many of my constituents—and it affects many of us in Kent, because our county council has been a pioneer in this matter—is that adjacent county councils, adjacent authorities, have not been so good as our own. Our county council has done a good job—

Hear, hear.

—and the fact that it has done so has brought gipsies in from other areas. I therefore welcome Part II of the Bill, and I hope that those adjacent county councils will now be compelled to follow the example of such an authority as Kent—and Hampshire. I am sorry the hon. Member was not able to accept Hampshire. I hope even now that he will be able to get a friend of his in another place to consider this.

I hope the House will support the second Part, much as I deplore the first Part.

Question put and agreed to.

Bill accordingly read the Third time, and passed.

Sale Of Venison (Scotland) (No 2) Bill

As amended (in the Standing Committee, considered.

3.59 p.m.

On a point of order. I have on the Order Paper, order No. 29, a Bill, the Live Hare Coursing (Abolition) Bill, for Second Reading. On previous occasions when the Bill has been reached it has been objected to. The point I am raising is that we have had a discussion on this Bill in this Parliament. Therefore, I am wondering whether it is in order, and whether it is not an abuse of Parliament procedure, for hon. Members to have the right merely to say "Object" to the Bill—

The hon. Member is talking out another Bill.

Order. I am being addressed on a point of order.

For the hon. Member's information, I asked Mr. Deputy Speaker beforehand if I had the right to raise this matter at this time—

Order. Perhaps the hon. Gentleman would conclude his point of order.

I would like your guidance, Mr. Deputy Speaker, as to whether it is now correct for any hon. Member continually to object to this Bill under the rules of our procedure. In my estimation, they are not in order and have not been in order for the past few weeks.

The answer to the point of order is quite simple. We have not yet reached the hon. Member's Bill. When we come to it, he will be able to move its Second Reading and the rules of the House make it clear that it will be open to any hon. Member to object to it if he wishes to oppose it.

Further to that point of order. This raises a most important constitutional issue. I have now been in a number of Parliaments when, under this procedure, one or two hon. Members have specialised in coming in at ten minutes to Four and shouting "Object"—without being identified, without the country knowing who is objecting—to a number of Bills with which they had no concern and in which they had never expressed any interest. The constitutional argument which is advanced in justification and defence of this procedure is that the House could not be expected to give a Second Reading—that is, approval in principle—to a Bill which it had never debated. But my hon. Friend's Bill—

Order. At this stage, I can have only points of order. The hon. Member now appears to be raising what he considers a matter of constitutional importance relating to our procedure. This is not the occasion to raise that matter, which is a matter of debate. All that I can do is observe the rules of order which the House has laid down. Since the hon. Member has asked my advice, I must tell him, beyond any doubt at all, that, under the present rules of order, it is open to any hon. Member to object at Four o'clock to any Bill proposed for Second Reading.

May I draw your attention, Mr. Deputy Speaker, to an important precedent when a debate on this matter was allowed at Four o'clock by one of your predecessors. What I was going to say briefly was that my hon. Friend's Live Hare Coursing (Abolition) Bill, which is down as No. 29 on the Order Paper, is quite different from those Bills which have never been debated in the House. It has been debated for three hours.

Therefore, the constitutional justification of any unidentified hon. Member to be entitled to shout "Object" does not exist. We should know who he is; we should have the name of any hon. Member who does shout "Object." The country should know who is objecting—

Order. I cannot allow the hon. Gentleman to pursue this matter. It is not a point of order—

It is a point of order.

It is a matter which he may well find other opportunities to raise. When the point of order was put to me, I was on the point of putting the Question, as I was duty bound to do, That the Sale of Venison (Scotland) (No. 2) Bill be now read the Third time.

Question, That the Bill be read the Third time, put and agreed to.

Further to that point of order. A relevant point on which I would seek an explanation from you, Mr. Deputy Speaker, or from Mr. Speaker, is that the Standing Order concerned permits discussion on unopposed business after Four o'clock. This sort of discussion has taken place in the past. It does not permit opposed business to take place after that hour. But, Sir, I would like your explanation of why the mere shouting of "Object" by an hon. Member who has not been called by the Chair is regarded. Normally, interruptions which are not made in order are not so regarded—

Order. The answer is that Standing Orders provide that only unopposed business can be taken at 4 o'clock. Unopposed business can be taken. If any hon. Gentleman shouts "Object", it is an indication to the Chair that that business is opposed and, therefore, does not fall to be taken by the House after 4 o'clock. Standing Orders are quite specific about it. If hon. Members want to propose that the Standing Orders should be changed, they have opportunities of doing that, but this is not the time to do it.

My point is that, if an hon. Member stands up, is called by the Chair and then opposes a Bill, that is clear to the House, to the country at large, and becomes opposed business. In that event, Mr. Deputy Speaker, you would be quite right not to take it at that hour. But if an hon. Member merely makes an utterance whilst sitting in his place, you are preventing discussion by hon. Members not opposed to the legislation—

Order. It has been the custom of this House for many years past that the way in which any hon. Member can indicate that a proposed Measure is opposed is by shouting "Object'" from his place without rising to his feet. That has been the custom for many years. If it is desired to change the custom of the House or the Standing Orders, hon. Members have opportunities of doing that, but I must rule that this is not the occasion for doing it.

Further to that point of order, Mr. Deputy Speaker. With respect, before the Bill which is numbered 29 on the Order Paper is reached, this is the only occasion when the point can be pressed. Once "Object" has been shouted, there can be no further discussion o:i it. Therefore, I would press my question, because we have not yet received an answer from the Chair. How can a Bill which has been debated, unlike the others, fall under Standing Orders? Under Standing Orders, it is only Bills which have not been debated which can be objected to in this way.

The hon. Gentleman is mistaken. It is nothing to do with whether or not Bills have been debated. It is only Bills in respect of which any hon. Member shouts "Object" that I am entitled under Standing Orders to deal with at 4 o'clock. Now we must proceed.

Sunday Entertainments Bill

Order read for resuming adjourned debate on Amendment proposed [3rd May] on consideration of Bill, as amended (in the Standing Committee).

Hon. Members: Object.

Order for Second Reading read.

Hon. Members: Object.

Why?

What day? No instruction.

Highways (Straying Animals) Bill

Order for Second Reading read.

Hon. Members: Object.

What day? No instruction.

On a point of order. When somebody tries to cheat like that, will you, Mr. Deputy Speaker, instruct HANSARD not to put in his remarks?

I cannot give any such instruction.

Further to that point of order. Is it in order for any hon. Member, even if he happens by accident to be learned, to accuse another hon. Member of cheating?

Yes, when he does so.

I understand the hon. and learned Member for Northampton (Mr. Paget) to make a general observation.

Further to that point of order. It was not a general observation: it was a particular observation. The hon. Member was cheating, and he knew that he was cheating.

Further to that point of order. Since the term "cheating" has now been authorised, is it permissible for me to point of that week after week Sabbatarian saboteurs have been cheating on another Bill?

Further to that point of Order. May I say that everybody is cheating me out of an Adjournment debate?

If you comply with the request of the hon. Member for Brixton (Mr. Lipton), Mr. Deputy Speaker, will you also arrange to have recorded the name of the Government Whip who has been objecting?

It is undesirable that any hon. Member should take the opportunity of trying to get inserted in HANSARD matters would would not normally be inserted. It is much better that we should proceed until the Standing Orders have been changed by resolution of the House and the customs of the House in relation to them have been changed. It has been the practice for many years, ever since I have been a Member, that objection is; repeatedly taken to a number of Bills at Four o'clock on Friday afternoons. Members have done so from a sedentary position. If it is desired that the Standing Orders and the custom of the House should be changed, it can be done in an orderly way. But this is not the time for ventilating that matter. To continue to do so is merely an abuse of the procedure of the House.

On a point of order. With due respect, the practice of the House is that Members stand up and are counted and recorded. I suggest that that practice be carried out on every occasion. No Member should be ashamed of any action or vote in the House.

The hon. Gentleman is entitled to express that opinion, but it is contrary to the custom of the House as it exists, which I have no power to change. We should proceed.

Further to the point of order. May I ask for an assurance that the HANSARD record of the proceedings of the last few minutes will not be censored by anybody?

Despite the increase to 800,000 of women using the pill, the current figure of the use of protectives has soared far above the figure estimated by the Economist Intelligence Unit in 1964. Today, no fewer than 100 million male contraceptives are being sold each year in Britain. The millions of men who, in chemists or in barber shops buy the well-known rubber brands of Durex, Prentifs, Prefax or Ona protectives are given the illusion of choice, but the truth is that these brands, and many others, like Arloid and Lloyds Grade are, although it is shyly omitted from all the packets, manufactured by this one firm, the London Rubber Company. This company manufactures 95 Per cent. of the male contraceptive devices sold, and similarly dominates the female rubber contraceptive industry.

Loving is certainly no less a part of family life than eating. No community would tolerate a monopoly making intolerable profits out of absurdly high-priced bread. Why should we tolerate such profit being made out of family life? A country which appears to want abortion free and easy and its contraceptives expensive certainly has its priorities curiously awry. That contraceptives are unnecessarily expensive as a consequence of lack of competition in the industry I have no doubt.

The net raw material content of male contraceptives is about 200 grammes weight per gross. With rubber latex at present prices and making a very generous allowance for mixing losses and reject production, the material content of a single contraceptive costs less than one-tenth of a penny. Other materials, dusting chalk and silicone lubricant, are used in only infinitesimal quantities per contraceptive. Packaging materials, heat-sealed foil, envelopes and boxing are a slightly larger item than raw material and the combined rubber and packaging content of a contraceptive is about a farthing. Manufacturing, testing and foil packaging machinery are largely automatic, but the machines require minding and there are direct labour operations at the latex mixing and final packaging stages. A halfpenny each would fully cover the wage costs, making a total of three farthings each.

Then we have to consider heat, power, plant depreciation and general factory overheads which are legitimately chargeable. They no doubt would cost as much as the wage bill on operations of this sort. Nevertheless, that means that the direct production costs could be no more than l¼d. each. If we take into account administration costs, selling, distribution and advertising and the giving of uplift of 50 Per cent. on direct production costs to cover such expenses, an uplift which many might think excessive, it would still leave the unit cost at less than 2d.

Therefore, every amount by which the London Rubber Company sells to the retail trade over and above that 2d. is demonstrably profit. Since it is selling at a retail trade rate of 4½d. to more than 7d. each, it is clear that over a wide range of the products the company is making a profit of over 200 per cent.

I believe it is not unfair to describe this monopoly company as war profiteers. It is probably the more offensive because of that. The history here was that before September, 1939, the United Kingdom market was supplied by several producers and many importers, but as a result of the war, when of course imports ceased, it was supported by Government contracts. "Durex ", the name now belonging to the London Rubber Company, progressively became the only one known.

Given this situation, at the end of the war the company was able to develop a powerful system of distribution to retail chemists. Only one brand was known since a huge quantity was supplied to the Services in envelopes bearing the name "Durex ". This acted as a code word for the product thus avoiding embarrassment to the customer during the post-war years. It was therefore possible to fix a price out of which generous margins could be taken by the distributors while still leaving the manufacturing company with handsome profits.

High profits traditionally attract new entrants in to a market, and of course competitors normally appear. The fact is that these conditions do not exist. If anybody else entered the field, his brand would be unknown and he would start with almost all the media for advertising and publicity closed to him, in view of the practice of newspapers not to carry advertising of such products and in view of the rules governing television.

In the meantime, the sales representatives of this company clearly from time to time have been instructed to collect any competitors' free samples and display material and to give equivalent products—their company's products—in exchange. This has meant that the distributor was happy about this, because he was in effect obtaining free supplies of the brand that he would almost invariably be asked for. So it has come about that it has not been possible since the war for any competitor whatsoever to solve these problems. So it has come about, too, that this company can make these profits.

I am aware that the Family Planning Association is disquieted by the present situation and would welcome a situation in which it could have genuine choice to buy, perhaps centrally, for its 770 clinics —a choice which would free the Association from the possibility of ever submitting to dictated terms. The local authorities, too, now that they are being encouraged to open clinics and supply contraceptives at reasonable cost, should be able to buy other than under the domination of a monopoly. Why should the general taxpayer be exploited, too, because the Army Medical Equipment Depot, which purchases 1·7 million contraceptives each year, is clearly unable to shop around in its purchasing?

What is most disquieting is that reputable companies with the capacity and will to compete are frightened from so doing, because they know how in the past this monopolist company has taken over or crushed all its competitors. The tactics which the monopoly is prepared to resort to are notorious. Its utterly irresponsible behaviour was revealed as a consequence of investigation in 1965 by some highly intelligent journalists, when it was discovered that this company clandestinely created and endowed a unit known as the Genetic Study Group with the object of disseminating to medical officers of health, the Women's Institutes, and Member of Parliament, misleading and alarming propaganda concerning contraceptive pills.

With the aid of doubtful public relations practitioners, attempts were made fraudulently to induce medical officers of health to act as patrons to this unit. The unit was created, promoted and activated by this company to mislead and alarm women and so dissuade from using contraceptive pills and use, instead, the rubber products the company produces. It was a disgraceful episode which was ended by newspaper reports and by Questions I put in the House at that time. Then, when the unit was wound up, the company's only comment was, "It was only a very small affair anyway". That sort of conduct and comment can in no way allay the alarm at the contemptuous way with which the company treated the public.

I am not surprised that a company which can act in that way can cause fear to potential competitors and dissuade them from entering the field. I am aware that legislation precludes any undertaking from being given in advance that a takeover bid by one company of another would be vetoed by the Board of Trade, but I hope that my hon. Friend the Minister of State will make it clear to any competitors wishing to enter the field that the Board of Trade will exert the utmost vigilance, and give serious consideration to the possible detriment to the public interest which might arise from any takeover or merger bids being made yet again by this monopoly.

I am aware, too, that now that the Ministry of Health, under the Family Planning Act which we have passed, will become involved in the purchasing of contraceptives, in addition to the Ministry of Defence being involved, devices could, if necessary, be deployed, and undoubtedly will be deployed, by hon. Members to interest the Comptroller-General and the Public Accounts Committee in prices being paid to this monopoly. Indeed, when the new powers assumed by the Prices and Incomes Bill become law, a reference aimed at reducing prices would not be amiss. In the long run, I have no doubt that that reference to the Monopolies Commission is required in the public interest. The statutory conditions for a reference could clearly be satisfied.

I realise that the Commission has a heavy load on hand, but I hope that the Minister will confirm today that, when future references are being considered, this industry will have a high priority. Apart from any other factor, a reference might well be a means of pushing this monopoly, far more than it has been until recently, into the export market instead of lolling about in the present captive home market. But, more important, a reference would reveal a situation showing that the family life of this country has an unnecessary incubus upon it because of the activities of a monopolistic concern of this kind.

4.30 p.m.

My hon. Friend the Member for Pontypool (Mr. Abse) has argued with feeling and with cogency about certain possible monopoly aspects of the contraceptive industry. He did not attempt to establish a case regarding chemical contraceptives or oral contraceptives. There are several firms—11, I believe—producing the oral contraceptive, and the Family Planning Association would, I think, agree that there is intense competition in chemical contraceptives. I am unable to say whether there is anything like a monopoly situation in female rubber contraceptives because the facts of that branch of the industry are still not established, but it is clear from what my hon. Friend has said, and from our own investigations, that, as regards male rubber contraceptives, the minimum statutory requirements for reference to the Monopolies Commission do apply.

The London Rubber Company, to which my hon. Friend has been alluding, has not one-third of the sales; it has, so far as we can establish, about 95 per cent. However, the fact that the level of control of sales comes within the minimum statutory requirements for a reference to the Monopolies Commission does not necessarily mean that an industry would be automatically referred to the Commission. In the Board of Trade we have to consider, for example, the degree of competition from alternative products. We have to examine the economic and social importance of the industry. Certainly, on the social aspect of the matter, there is no question of the importance of this industry. Also, as in so many things, we have to consider priorities. We do not wish, and we do not propose, to overload the Monopolies Commission.

None the less, my hon. Friend has put on record a considerable case and has established the need for a most careful watch on this sector of the industry. He made some powerful points about price, which might well become of interest to the Prices and Incomes Board. Also, he wished me to sound a warning note about the effects on this industry of takeover bids or mergers with competitors. He knows that I am not able at this moment to assert that, if a particular merger were to take place, it would be referred. I do not propose to make any such assertion, nor at the moment to give my hon. Friend an assurance that a reference will be made in present circumstances to the Monopolies Commission of the position in the industry. But I assure him, as did my predecessor and my right hon. Friend the previous President of the Board of Trade, that we shall take the most serious note of the points he has raised.

If by any chance it seemed as though there was an attempt to establish a total monopoly position in the industry by take-overs or mergers, we should go into it very thoroughly to see whether there was a need for a reference. I give my hon. Friend that assurance and hope that it will, for the time being, satisfy him. I congratulate him on raising this matter in the House.

Question put and agreed to.

Adjoined accordingly at twenty-four minutes to Five o'clock.

Volume 765: debated on Friday 24 May 1968

House Of Commons

Prayers

Banks (Credit Restriction)

Business Of The House

Complaint Of Privilege

Orders Of The Day

Highlands And Islands Development (Scotland) Bill

New Clause 1

New Clause

Clause 1

Friendly And Industrial And Provd3ent Societies Bill

Caravan Sites Bill

Clause 1

Clause 3

Clause 4

Clause 5

Clause 6

Clause 8

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Sale Of Venison (Scotland) (No 2) Bill

Sunday Entertainments Bill

Parliamentary Commissioner Act 1967 (Amendment) Bill

Exchange Of Young Persons Bill

Feuduties, Multures And Long Leases (Scotland) Bill

Cruelty To Animals Act 1876 (Amendment) Bill

Local Authorities (Goods And Services) Bill

Clients' Money (Accounts) Bill

Anti-Discrimination Bill

Development Of Play-Groups Bill

Highways (Straying Animals) Bill

Crimes Of Absolute Prohibition (Defence) Bill

Abolition Of Fidelity Bonding Bill

Age Level Of Employment Bill

Motorways Corporation Bill

Wild Plants Protection Bill

Shops (Sunday Trading) (No 2) Bill Lords

Stag-Hunting With Hounds (Abolition) Bill

National Insurance Act 1965 (Amendment) Bill

Export Of Animals For Research Bill

Design Copyright Bill

General Rate Act 1967 (Amendment) Bill

Council Tenants' Charter Bill

Customary Holidays Bill

Live Hare Coursing (Abolition) Bill

Land Compensation Bill

Representation Of The People Act 1949 (Amendment) Bill

Prevention Of Crime (Scotland) Bill

Shops Bill

Gaming Establishments Bill

Contraceptive Industry