With your permission, Mr. Deputy-Speaker, and that of the House, I beg to ask leave to present a Petition. In 10 days, 2,600 passengers and my constituents using Bus Route 52 have signed this Petition. It shows that this service is being so drastically cut as to cause hardship and serious concern, and charges the London Transport Executive with complete indifference.

" Wherefore your Petitioners pray that Her Majesty's Government be urged to institute an immediate inquiry as to the reasons why London Transport has allowed this route to deteriorate over the years to the extent that it is no longer capable of meeting the service requirements of the public.

And your Petitioners, as in duty bound, will ever humbly pray."

With your permission, Mr. Deputy-Speaker, and that of the House I should like to present a Petition on behalf of my constituents who are resident in the vicinity of the Archway Road and who are concerned and anxious over the proposals of the Minister of Transport for the widening of that road.

"Whereas a recent public inquiry has shown that traffic on the road is likely to increase by 40 per cent. in the next six to seven years, a further inquiry is to be held in respect of the extension of that road, and two firms of consultants have been engaged to advise on the problem.

Wherefore your Petitioners pray that the Minister of Transport's compulsory Purchase Order No. 53 be annulled, and, secondly, that there be no further expenditure of public money on the Archway Road project until the full case for it and all the relevant information be published by the Minister and an opportunity given for considered objections to be submitted by all interested parties.

And your Petitioners, as in duty bound, will ever humbly Pray."

I beg to move,

That this House, at its rising this day, do adjourn until Monday, 13th October.

I rise to support the Motion moved by the Leader of the House in his best speech of the Session, though for reasons which are perhaps distinct from those which he would have put forward.

I must comment on the circumstances on which the Motion has been moved, It is obvious that up to the last minute the Government had no idea whether they were going to try to get the House up today. It was only yesterday that we were told of this intention, and one has to go back many years to find a precedent for having this Motion moved on the day to which it relates. This is an indication of the muddle and mess into which our Parliamentary programme has been got by the Government's mismanagement. This is the main reason why it is essential that the House should rise for the Government to have an opportunity to sort out the confusion which they have created. It is also essential that the flow of foolish and misguided legislation should be, in every sense of the word, damned. It is equally essential that we should have no more of it.

It is only fair to the Government to say that they are asking the House to rise with a remarkable proportion of their legislative programme unfulfilled. The Parliament (No. 2) Bill is still before us at a rather early point in its Committee stage which might be of a prolonged nature. But we are to rise.

The Government have made even less progress with the Bill to reform the law relating to trade unions on the lines of the White Paper "In Place of Strife". We were told that the Prime Minister was prepared to stake the life of the Government on that Measure. The Chancellor of the Exchequer made it the main feature of his economic strategy in his Budget speech. We have not even seen that Bill. But we are being asked to rise.

Then there is the Government Bill—that is what it really is—to alter the divorce laws; part of the Government programme for a permissive society which so appeals to the Chancellor of the Exchequer—in which people will be allowed to do anything except to enjoy the fruits of their own labours. It is not through, but we are being asked to rise.

There is the Parliamentary Boundary Commission Bill, which we were told was of such urgency that it had to be Guillotined; that a constitutional Measure of that sort had to be pushed through quickly. Now we are to go away for two and a half months leaving that attempt to redeem the Government's electoral fortunes without making any progress with it.

All of these things have not been done, and I cannot recall a Session in which so little of the Government's planned business has been achieved by this stage. Indeed, these sittings might well be described as the Session that never was.

Because one must weigh the arguments both ways, there are, I admit, reasons why two things should be done before we rise, and they could be done today. It is, therefore, not inconsistent to support the Motion in the hope that the Government will do them.

The first is for the Home Secretary to carry out his statutory duty and lay the necessary Orders under Section 2 of the Boundary Commission Act, 1949, to carry out the recommendations of the four Boundary Commissions. As a result of the Motion before the House, no attempt is to be made to relieve the right hon. Gentleman of his statutory duty for a further two and a half months and it is intolerable that the Minister who, above all, should pay regard to the obligations of us all to observe the law, should fail to carry out those duties. I hope that the Leader of the House will say whatever the future of the Bill—which, if it had been passed, would have indemnified the Home Secretary from the consequences of his failure to carry out his statutory duties—that he agrees that in the circumstances the Home Secretary should carry out the law in accordance with its terms, and should not set the thoroughly bad example which would be set if a Minister of the Crown disregarded his statutory duties.

The second is that the Patronage Secretary should carry out his duty. I note that the right hon. Gentleman is seated beneath me speaking with the Opposition Chief Whip. The Patronage Secretary's geographical movements inspired panic in my heart. I thought, for a moment, that in the language of the football field, a transfer had been arranged between him and my right hon. Friend. I am pleased to see the right hon. Gentleman resuming his seat on the Government Front Bench, for I would not welcome such a transfer, even at the most economical price.

The Patronage Secretary should carry out his duty and move the writs for the pending by-elections. A considerable time has elapsed in respect of all of them and in the special circumstances of Swindon it is intolerable to leave a constituency with no effective Parliamentary representation for a year or more. It is wrong for the Government to say that because they realise that the majority of electors in a particular constituency want to be represented by a Conservative Member, they should not he allowed to be represented by any Member at all. This is the reason why in this case and in the others, the Patronage Secretary has not done his duty.

As we are on the verge of the Recess, I am in a peculiarly charitable mood. I support the Motion in the confident hope—I trust that hon. Members will acquit me of undue optimism—that the Home Secretary will do his legal duty and that the Patronage Secretary will do his moral duty; and they have several hours in which to do it.

If the Motion is carried, this will end these sittings and there is a slight end-of-term atmosphere in the House. Perhaps, in a way, it resembles the school end of term atmosphere with its farewell hymn.

"Lord dismis us with Thy blessing"

I am sure that the Patronage Secretary will echo the concluding words of that hymn:

"Those returning, those returning make more faithful than before".

I hope to respond in something of the mood of the right hon. Member for Kingston - upon - Thames (Mr. Boyd-Carpenter), who is a very attractive character. From 1945 to 1951 he was a considerable thorn in the flesh of the then Government. His memory has not carried him back to the boundary disputes of earlier days.

If we consider the past Session fairly, we must agree that we need have no regrets—I speak of hon. Members on both sides of the House—about the Parliament (No. 2) Bill and the fact that it was dropped. It was an extremely ambitious project, over which much of the mistake must lie with the Government, who some-show imagined that when they went into conversations with the other place, they were dealing with Liberals, Conservatives and Socialists.

Anyone who goes down the long corridor leading to the other place—in referring to "anyone" I mean anyone of any political complexion; there is even a Communist in the House of Lords—suffers another incarnation, as he dis- covers that the people there are not the sort of men they were or are likely ever to be again. I recall that many years ago, in connection with the Stokes Committee, one of the great constitutional crises of the time occurred when that Committee timidly suggested that when hon. Members of the Commons were entertaining lady guests they should be permitted to use the Peers Guest Room.

Things might have been different this Session had the Government seen their duty as clearly as I see it now. They should have brought in a short, sharp Bill designed to abolish the powers of the Lords to impose a delaying period on Measures, returned to us the control of Statutory Instruments and destroyed the hereditary principle. I am sure that that would have satisfied everybody. After all, that was allowed for in the Bill.

It was not necessary for this House to have inserted all the other matters in the Bill. The Lords could have done the rest and have arranged matters according to their own Standing Orders. In a curious way, we cold thereby have maintained both their self-respect and ours, for by limiting the Bill in the way I have suggested, we could have brought in legislation which would have appealed to all concerned.

When one considers the Boundary Commission issue, on which I have strong views, we cannot be accused of gerrymandering. One need only consider the Boundary Commission proposals for the county of Yorkshire. The County Borough of Ripon would be left with only about 40,000 constituents, and it would have been a Conservative borough.

Order. I hesitate to restrict the right hon. Gentleman, but he is rather getting into the merits of the issue instead of the Motion.

The right hon. Gentleman was dealing with the demerits—

Order. The right hon. Gentleman is correct, but the right hon. Member to whom he refers did not go into any detail on these issues.

This is rather like dealing with points of order, Mr. Deputy Speaker—the Chair does not know whether they are in or out of order until it has heard them.

I put against the example I have just given that of Rother Valley, with 77,000 voters, which is left unaltered. This is the pattern up and down the country. It is hard if we are to have a blanket condemnation of the Government's actions with regard to the Boundary Commission if people are not prepared to come down from the general to the particular. At any rate, the right hon. Gentleman will at least believe that I think I have a case.

The right hon. Gentleman also referred to "In Place of Strife". It does not matter much what the Government said at the time. In the end, what emerged was a reasonable solution that seems to be working rather better in a voluntary way than what was envisaged in the legal ideas. To that extent, we must be rather glad if we do away with the necessity for legislation.

It is a good thing that the Government have left this to the last day. They might have been provoked into rejecting their Lordships' Amendments, and the right hon. Gentleman would be kept away from his holiday place, leaving his suffering wife and children somewhere else while he must apply himself to his duties here. Putting their Lordships on ice until 13th October will give them time to cool down, to have further thoughts on the matter and cogitate about whether an unelected Chamber should presume to interfere with the affairs of an elected Chamber. It will bring many people to their senses—not least, I hope, the right hon. and learned Member for St. Marylebone (Mr. Hogg), who seems to be going round the bend on this issue.

Unlike the right hon. Member for Leeds, West (Mr. C. Pannell), I do not regard this as the end of term and the beginning of a holiday, when we go away with buckets and spades, and I do not share the view of my right hon. Friend the Member for Kingston-upon-Thames (Mr. Boyd-Carpenter) that the Motion should be supported, because I believe that we should not adjourn for the long period of 11 weeks without having been given the full cost of the Government's estimate of joining the European Common Market.

The Government have been indulging in a conspiracy of silence on this matter. The Prime Minister and other Ministers have refused to give the information—

When I was Minister of Agriculture, I produced a very detailed assessment of the effects.

I am very grateful to the right hon. Gentleman. If he will give us the revised costs during this debate, I would feel it necessary to support the Motion, and not to oppose it.

I have the greatest admiration for the Parliamentary skill and dexterity of the Prime Minister, but on 10th June this year he used words on this matter that have made it very difficult for hon. Members to use Question Time to elicit this information, of which the country is in great need. I believe that the device he used to try to evade an answer is quite contrary to the history of Parliament. Questions are being refused at the Table Office by Mr. Speaker because of the Prime Minister's reply. Therefore, our only remedy is to raise the matter in debate. The Prime Minister said:

"I see no reason in present circumstances to change the general estimates given to the House during the major three-day debate on the Common Market two years ago,…"

That was before the Government allowed our currency to be devalued, and before the Common Market agricultural policy cost had increased by nearly 100 per cent.

Order. The right hon. Gentleman cannot debate the merits of the issue on the Motion.

I was not trying to do that, Mr. Deputy Speaker. I was not debating, but quoting the Prime Minister, and if you hear the latter part of his reply you will realise its significance to the debate on today's Motion. He added:

"but certainly before any final decision is taken to enter into negotiations—and that depends not on us but on others—we would wish to inform the House and consider in those circumstances what further information should be sought."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 10th June, 1968; Vol. 784, c. 1225.]

It is wrong to pretend that the cost of entry, the estimates of which were given by the present Lord President of the Council and the Prime Minister on 8th May, 1967, are relevant today. Second, it is wrong, and unworthy of the Prime Minister, so to word his reply as to make it difficult for hon. Members to ask what is his present estimate of the cost of entry. This is keeping the nation in the dark, and one of the difficulties of this situation is that if we adjourn now for 11 weeks the nation will not know what the cost is to be. Paper after paper comes out with differing estimates. The Prime Minister said on 8th May, 1967, that the increased cost to the housewife would be between 10 and 14 per cent. In the Financial Times on 15th May this year, John Cherrington put that cost at £844 million, and only last week Mr. Guy de Jonquieres put the cost at an increase of—

Order. The right hon. Gentleman is going into far too much detail. He is beginning to debate the matter.

My case is that there is a conspiracy of silence, Mr. Deputy Speaker. You are in the position of protecting the rights of private Members, and I feel that I should be allowed to state the facts and not be kept silent.

Mr. Jonquieres put that cost at an increase of 53 per cent., by comparing household expenditure on food. It is not fair that the housewife of this country should not know from the Prime Minister and the Minister of Agriculture what their estimate of the cost is.

The Prime Minister has said that he is not changing his estimate of the cost to the balance of payments, which on 8th May, 1967, was from £175 million to £250 million. But in The Guardian in June Mr. Mark Arnold Forster put that cost at £593 million. Before we go away for a long holiday with our buckets and spades, our duty is to let our constituents know what would be the cost of entry into the Common Market.

Parliament is supposed to be the watchdog of public expenditure. By their action, the Government have blindfolded and muzzled that watchdog. I shall have to vote against the Motion, unless I have a reassurance from the Lord President.

I rise to oppose the Motion in a speech which will be almost as short as that in which my right hon. Friend the Leader of the House moved it and which will deal with the merits of no question other than whether this House should now adjourn.

Like a number of hon. Members, I believe that we should not adjourn, whether taking up buckets and spades or anything else, for more than two months until at least we have had an explanation from the Government of the mystery of what the Foreign Secretary said in Brussels on 15th July and of the glaring discrepancy between the statements of the Prime Minister in this House and of the Foreign Secretary on various occasions outside on whether this country should join a federal state in Europe.

In spite of what the right hon. Member for Kingston-upon-Thames (Mr. Boyd-Carpenter) said, it seems to me that there are some muddles which should not be left to fester for 10 weeks while this House adjourns—

Does not the experience of the last 10 weeks suggest that more muddles fester more virulently when the Government are here putting through foolish legislation?

I am a good enough Parliamentarian to believe that on the whole we do more good than harm by sitting in this House—at any rate under this Government. It is just as undesirable that European opinion should be left in confusion about this issue: for nearly three months as it is that British opinion should be. If the House now adjourns without any explanation, a great deal of damage will be done.

It appears at the moment that the Prime Minister is following one policy on this crucial issue and that the Foreign Secretary is following a contradictory one for which he has no authority from this House, from the country or even from the Cabinet. In answering a supplementary question of mine on 4th February, the Prime Minister said that it was certainly not the Government's policy to take the United Kingdom into any sort of federal state in Europe or elsewhere. He repeated that assurance a few weeks later in another Answer to me. Indeed, he said only on Tuesday of this week that a federal Europe

"…does not fit in with the general opinion of this House or the country as an immediate proposition."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 22nd July, 1969; Vol. 787, c. 1498.]

Surely, then, before the House adjourns, we ought to have an early explanation of the Foreign Secretary's repeated statements to the contrary. He goes on saying these things. He signed an Anglo-Italian Declaration on 28th April in which he said advisedly that

… the European Communities should be sustained by an elected Parliament."

While that may be right or wrong, an elected Parliament is either a total sham, without power, or it involves federation and the loss of sovereignty by this House.

The Foreign Secretary has also joined M. Monnet's notorious Committee, which is not just a Committee for uniting Europe, whatever that may mean, but a Committee for

"the United States of Europe",

which means a federation. If the Prime Minister's declarations represent the policy of the Government, the Foreign Secretary should never have joined such a Committee; and, to avoid further misunderstanding throughout Europe, we ought to have an assurance before the House adjourns that he will resign from this curious body.

What seems to demand an even more immediate explanation before we are dismissed with your blessing, Mr. Deputy Speaker, is the Foreign Secretarys statements at this meeting on 15th July. We were informed this week by the Leader of the Liberal Party that the Foreign Secretary at that meeting

"… led ail those present to believe that the Government had no reservations"

on Professor Hallstein's plan for an integrated Europe—

Order. The right hon. Gentleman is really going into too much detail in this matter.

I always accept your guidance, Mr. Deputy Speaker, but I was going no further than to say that it is surprising that this House should learn of the Government's policy on a subject as important as the federation of Europe from a supplementary question asked by the Leader of the Liberal Party in this House. That at least seems to call for early elucidation from the Foreign Secretary before we adjourn. We really would like to know what he said on that occasion. It puts us in an extremely difficult position if we are asked to go away and keep quiet for 10 weeks without any explanations being given.

There are other matters which, in deference to your desire for brevity, I will not now outline but which ought to be cleared up before we disperse. One is the important question which the right hon. Member for Thirsk and Malton (Mr. Turton) has just raised about the cost to the balance of payments of entering the E.E.C. All that I would say about that is that I find it a little odd that the Government should tell us that it is impossible to calculate that cost when apparently in the next 10 weeks they intend to go on pushing ahead with our application.

For all those reasons, and in order not to strain your patience further since they are very similar to the reasons put forward by the right hon. Gentleman, I hope that we shall have some elucidation of these matters before the House adjourns.

My right hon. Friend the Member for Kingston-upon-Thames (Mr. Boyd-Carpenter) supported the Motion, as I understand it, on the general ground that more harm would be done if Parliament continued to sit and further legislation was introduced than if the Motion were carried and the House went into recess. With great respect to my right hon. Friend—and it is a very great and real respect, as he knows—on the whole it is not Parliament that does the harm. The Government do it. It is a proclaimed platitude in Whitehall that it is a happy day on which Parliament rises and the mandarins of Whitehall are able to pursue their course in a less fettered way.

I want to support what has been said by my right hon. Friend the Member for Thirsk and Malton (Mr. Turton) and the right hon. Member for Battersea, North (Mr. Jay). Obviously no one, however perfectionist, could argue that the House should wait to go into recess until there are no urgent problems requiring the attention of the Government. That would mean, at any rate in modern times, that we were unlikely ever to go into recess, which is hardly a practical proposition. However, the House is entitled to put forward the proposition that we should not be asked to go into recess at a time when the Government are in breach of their primary constitutional duty to practise the principle of Ministerial responsibility to Parliament and to keep Parliament fully informed of the matters which are exercising the Government, and in regard to which they are pursuing their administrative courses.

By reason of the two points raised by my right hon. Friend and the right hon. Gentleman, the Government are clearly in breach of their constitutional duty in that they are not keeping Parliament informed. When I say it in that way, I put it really by way of understatement in perhaps an unduly passive sense. Not only are they not keeping Parliament informed. The evidence is that they are actively engaged in seeking to obstruct Parliament from having the information which Parliament should have if the constitutional doctrine of Ministerial responsibility to Parliament is to be upheld.

The first of these matters is the one to which my right hon. Friend has adverted in regard to the economic cost of adhering to the Treaty of Rome in the circumstances of today. Of course it is an obstruction of the right of Parliament to knowledge to say that figures were given in 1967. Quite apart from the passage of time, which brings it own changes, there has been what the law calls a new intervening act since that time—indeed, two. First, there was devaluation, which clearly would affect all the figures given then, and, secondly, there is the crisis of the common agricultural system within the Six, which again invalidates the figures. I recommend those who have not done so to read the excellent letter by the right hon. Member for Battersea, North in the last issue of The Economist in which all these figures are set out.

Would it not be a good idea if my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Hertfordshire, East (Sir D. Walker-Smith) followed modern governmental practice and put them into HANSARD?

Order. Not on the Motion for the Adjournment of the House for the Summer Recess.

My right hon. Friend the Member for Kingston-upon-Thames is trying to be helpful and I am grateful. The course I was going to pro- pose, so as to give it still greater authority, as it deserves, was to request the Leader of the House to read into the record the letter of the right hon. Member for Battersea, North to The Economist in which all these matters are set forth. But even that is no substitute for a clear evaluation by the Government of this matter, and that should have been given to the House before this Motion was brought forward.

The other matter has been dealt with by the right hon. Member for Battersea, North and I need not, therefore, do more than refer to it very briefly, but I would be wanting in my duty if I did not testify to its importance. Yesterday, in company with some of my right hon. and hon. Friends, I put a Motion down on the question of the attendance of the Foreign Secretary at the proceedings of the Monnet Committee for a United Europe. The terms of that Motion set out accurately the nature of the breach of constitutional propriety which this involves.

I support what has teen said by the right hon. Member for Battersea, North, that it is right that the House should not be asked to go into recess until that constitutional impropriety has also been rectified, and rectified in the only way in which it can be, as I see it, by the immediate withdrawal of the Foreign Secretary from that Committee and the recognition that, according to the constitutional doctrine of this country and of this place, Ministers of the Crown within their Departmental responsibilities act and act only in their capacity as Ministers of the Crown and cannot pursue this ambivalent course of purporting to act in a personal capacity. From that, much doubt, uncertainty and detriment can arise. I therefore urge the Leader of the House to convey these sentiments forthwith to the Foreign Secretary, to remind him that there is still time 'twixt stirrup and the ground, and to ask him to withdraw in order that we need not oppose this Motion.

I oppose the Motion but for different reasons from those of the white tribalists who have been arguing about entry into the Common Market. I am very concerned about the increase in unemployment and this House should not adjourn for the Recess until we get certain assurances that the present rise in unemployment is going to be arrested, and not only arrested but that the trend is in the opposite direction.

It is important for us to recognise that over 500,000 permanently unemployed is a figure that the House ought not to accept. It would be quite wrong for us to adjourn for two months unless the Government can tell us definitely that the level of unemployment will be brought down. The question of whether we enter the Common Market, of whether my right hon. Friend the Foreign Secretary should or should not be on a certain committee, is, for me, to deal with certain speculative issues which have not an immediate bearing. But the question of the unemployed is with us here and now.

Certain areas which have had high unemployment over the years, and into which the Government have poured more money and assistance than any previous Government, still have levels of unemployment at 3·9 per cent., as Merseyside has, and higher. In those circumstances, it is clear that we must have an assurance from the Government before I support this Motion. I do not want to be accused in the country of leaving this House and not being prepared to raise this important matter over the next two months. I do not want people saying to me, "You are only too keen to get away but what about these economic problems?"

At the time of the Budget, many hon Members, on this side in particular, said that the squeeze going on would begin to have its effects in a serious way this autumn. I want to know from the Government whether the increased level of unemployment reflected in the figures given today is to continue and whether the figures are likely to go even higher.

I feel that I speak probably for the whole House when I say that I seek an assurance that something positive will be done during the recess period suggested in order to arrest this trend in unemployment. I want to see not merely financial aid to the development areas. I want to see us begin a reversion of our policy and an expansionist economy, which is something we have been asking for the last three or four years. I be- lieve that it is important that, when we have persistently high levels of unemployment—

Order. The hon. Gentleman has indicated forcibly his reasons for opposing the Motion but he is now going into the merits of the issue, which he cannot do on the Motion.

I am asking my right hon. Friend to give an assurance that not only will that trend be reversed, but that an expansionist policy will be pursued and that in some instances where there have been closures and so on in development areas the Government themselves will begin to introduce industries along the lines which we promised in our 1966 and 1964 election manifestoes so I seek those assurances before withdrawing my opposition to the Motion. If I can get those promises, I shall not oppose the Motion, but it is vital that the whole question of unemployment be positively considered and action taken by the Government.

The speeches we have heard this morning from my right hon. Friend the Member for Kingston-upon-Thames (Mr. Boyd-Carpenter) and the right hon. Member for Battersea, North (Mr. Jay) have shown that there are strong arguments for not adjourning now. We were all moved by the speech of the hon. Member for Liverpool, Walton (Mr. Heifer), who has become quite a Parliamentary performer in his time in the House and who is heard with great attention. He reinforced the argument for not adjourning at this time. However, despite those speeches, I feel that human beings can take only so much, and on this occasion I rise to support the Motion.

I am a fairly frequent attender on these benches and I have reached the conclusion that I cannot take any more from the Labour party without a break. The statement yesterday by the Foreign Secretary was saved from becoming an absolute Parliamentary obscenity only by the intervention of the hon. Member for Penistone (Mr. John Mendelson). If that sort of thing is to continue day after day, the House needs a rest.

For the first time since I have been in the House, I support this Motion. As my right hon. Friend said, we are coming to the end of a Session which will go down in history as the Session that never was. The Government withdrew or sidelined the Parliament (No. 2) Bill to make room for a great Bill on industrial reorganisation which they did not then bring in. They then began to tamper with the constitution. They have misled the House on many occasion. They are in default in their obvious duty about by-elections. At this moment they are clearly a Government without faith in themselves and without truth to the nation, and the less we have to do with them and the less we have to look at them for a time, the better it will be, and a break will do us all a world of good.

Like the hon. Member for Ormskirk (Sir D. Glover), I want a holiday, but I resist the Motion because I want the House to remain in Session for another week, because there are important matters which should be discussed in that time.

I listened with interest to what was said by the right hon. and learned Member for Hertfordshire, East (Sir D. Walker-Smith) and by my right hon. Friend the Member for Battersea, North (Mr. Jay) about the Common Market, and I know that the Leader of the House appreciates that there are a number of hon. Members on both sides of the House who have signed Motions about this subject, partisans on both sides of the argument, and I trust that in time we shall have a debate and a vote to decide our attitude to this matter.

My concern is with a smaller matter, but I do not apologise for delaying the House for a few minutes, because most of our contributions on Motions of this kind are connected with matters which we regard as of urgent and national importance. I am concerned only about London, but London has a population of 8½ million, which is a large section of the community. Decisions are being taken about the commuting public in London in the next seven days which the House should remain in session to consider.

There is the possibility of an overtime ban on London buses being instituted within seven days. At 2 p.m. this afternoon at Transport House there is to be an important conference between trade unions, mainly the Transport and General Workers Union, to discuss what is to happen to the bus services in London in the next few days.

Hon. Members will remember that traffic conditions of London last Thursday and the previous Thursday on the occasions of Royal garden parties. I am now concerned with thousands of people going backwards and forwards to work during the ten weeks that we are in Recess. This is one of the subjects which Parliament should consider, and we should reach a decision before rising for the Recess.

When we do rise I shall be only too pleased to leave certain subjects behind me. The words of the old song were:

"My eyes are dim, I cannot see,

I have not brought my specs with me".

But this morning there is one subject which will affect my constituents, and although the facts which I shall give are drawn from the example of Willesden bus garage, they will be repeated all over the enormous area of London.

I pay tribute to the bus crews. If you were a conductor on a No. 52 bus instead of conducting the affairs of the House, Mr. Deputy Speaker, you would find that after a delay of one hour ten minutes between buses you would be put in the position of General Custer emulating Custer's Last Stand trying to hold back the irate passengers. You would have to take the consequences and not London Transport Executive. What has happened is that the bus workers—

If the House rejects the Motion, the hon. Member will have the opportunity next week to give the House the benefit of this information, but he may not do so on this Motion.

I am grateful to you for your guidance, Mr. Deputy Speaker. I intended shortly to explain that if decisions are not made in the next few days, the commuters using these bus services throughout London will find themselves in great difficulty. The House should not rise until these matters have been resolved.

Buses are being taken off right, left and centre. I may not go into detail. I cannot, for example, tell you that on bus route No. 52, 46 duties had 15 cuts and that—

Order. The hon. Member is now achieving what he believes to be impossible.

Many cuts are taking place. I submit that the answer to the problem lies in the improvement of the pay and conditions of the men concerned and that in the next seven days the House should consider these matters. On the No. 6 route from now on it will be "Never on a Saturday".

The London Transport Executive pays too much attention to the results from computers and not enough to what happens to commuters. Parliament could bring a little more common sense to these matters and have regard to the experience of the drivers and bus conductors concerned. Their knowledge should be used. Not only commuters but many others will be affected. It is important to production that people should be able to get to and from work, and a whole factory estate will be without a service unless the present decision is changed.

Bus crews have to survive eight hours in the intense London traffic congestion, although, according to official instructions, they can spread that over 12 hours and 40 minutes. It reflects great credit on the bus men that they think not only of themselves but of the travelling public.

The cancellation of one of the routes in my constituency will result in the elimination of hospital visiting, for it is the only bus route to serve both the Central Middlesex and the Willesden General Hospitals. The bus men are prepared to go without pay and to run the buses voluntarily to enable friends and relatives to visit the sick. When trade unionists make that kind of gesture, Parliament should have an opportunity to respond, and so should the London Transport Executive. I do not oppose the Motion in its entirety, but I ask that the House should not get up for another seven days.

I rise to speak as a member of the white tribalists—

Pink

The hon. Gentleman says "pink", I was about to say "black", but that would have got me into trouble under the Race Relations Act. If "white tribalist" means someone who is against going into the Common Market, may I point out that the white tribalists are for more representative of the opinion of the people of this country than the dwindling band of lilac tribalists who want this country to go into the Common Market.

I wish to follow what was said by the right hon. Member for Battersea, North (Mr. Jay). I shall not seek to go into the merits of the case or try to debate what I would have debated if we did not adjourn. I oppose the adjournment of the House without the Government making a further statement to Parliament—and I underline "to Parliament"—on the question of federalism and the Common Market. Perhaps the country will hear more about it at the great banquet which is to take place in the City of London on Tuesday night—a feast organised by the wealthy pro-Common Market interests, which, I understand, is to be blessed by the Archbishop of Canterbury. I trust that he blesses it in his personal capacity and will not in any way commit the Church to which I belong to going into the Common Market. It is not enough to hear these great orations after a good dinner and a good blessing. No supplementary questions can be asked there. We want this statement to be made not in the City but in Parliament next week.

This is a very important matter, and I should like to give one illustration because I feel that I should justify what I have said. The justification is the confusion over the question of federalism, and it should be cleared up before we adjourn. The Prime Minister said on 22nd July:

"I have said repeatedly that there is no immediate"—

mark the word "immediate"—

"proposal by us or by other Governments for any federal get-together or structure in Europe … It does not fit in with the general opinion of this House or the country as an immediate proposition."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 22nd July. 1969; Vol. 787, c. 1498]

What alarms the country is the right hon. Gentleman's reference to this not being an "immediate proposition". The implication is that it might be a proposition pretty soon after the immediate.

I refer to what Dr. Luns, the Dutch Foreign Secretary, said when he spoke at the Press luncheon about a fortnight ago. He warned Britain that its application for membership of the Common Market would receive the full backing of the Dutch Government only if there were a firm British commitment to the idea of a federal Europe. There we have it—the Prime Minister saying that there is no immediate intention, the Dutch Government saying that they will support our application only if we commit ourselves to a federal Europe. This matter must he cleared up before the House adjourns. That is why I oppose the Motion.

The Leader of the Liberal Party tore the veil aside from the confidential meeting of the Monnet Committee when he confirmed what many of us had already heard; namely, that the Foreign Secretary had admitted under pressure at this meeting that the British Government had no objection to a federal solution. That is the anxiety. I believe that Dr. Luns was quite right. The Common Market, if it is to mean anything, must be federal.

Order. The hon. Gentleman is now debating the merits of the issue on which he would like to address the House next week.

I accept that I erred, Mr. Deputy Speaker.

I return to the point which the Leader of the Liberal Party made in an intervention on 2nd July. He said that it was no good the Government speaking with two voices—one voice to Europe and one voice to Britain. We should not adjourn until the Government have cleared up this essential point.

The six European countries of the Common Market must understand that the British people would not tolerate federation for a minute. I wish that the politicians of the six Common Market countries would meet the people rather than the politicians of Britain. They must realise that the British people are not interested in going in—

Order. The hon. Gentleman is well away from the Motion to adjourn.

I was about to adjourn myself, Mr. Deputy Speaker. Only 33 per cent. of the people of this country wish Britain to go into the Common Market.

rose—

I conclude on that note, Mr. Deputy Speaker.

I am not sure whether I should start by apologising for breaking up what seems to be a debate on whether Britain should go into the Common Market, but I wish to refer to another subject. I should like to explain why, in my view, it is an important subject and why we should have a statement on it before we adjourn.

I refer to the question of relief food supplies going into Biafra. The Leader of the House will know that last week I asked whether it would be possible for the Foreign Secretary to make a statement on the situation before we adjourn. I am very concerned that my right hon. Friend has not made a statement. The House may be in a holiday mood, but the situation in Biafra is far from being in a holiday mood. It is as grave as possible. There is a desperate need there for food and medical supplies. I should like the British Government to find a compromise solution for the air flights which have not been taking place from neutral territory to Biafra for some weeks. In fact, the Red Cross supplies have been cut off since 10th June.

If my right hon. Friend had made a statement, a number of us would have urged that a British Minister should visit Biafra as well as Nigeria, first, to consider the possibility of achieving agreement on air flights and, secondly, in using our good offices to try to end this terrible, bloody civil war. I find it difficult to understand why my right hon. Friend has not made a statement to the House.

Some people believe that this is a foreign civil war in which we have no direct responsibility and, therefore, ask why we should raise the matter on the Floor of the House. No one suggests that we ourselves can end the civil war. Nigeria is an independent country, and only the two sides in it can decide when the war must end, either through fighting or, we hope, through negotiation. However, we have some moral responsibility because of our supply of arms to one side.

Order. The hon. Gentleman is going into the merits of the issue.

I appreciate that the terms of the Motion make it virtually impossible to debate the matter. Nevertheless, I submit that the situation is grave and that Britain has a moral responsibility because we continue to supply arms to one side.

I see from a report in The Times today that 51 tons of medicine—

Order. The hon. Gentleman is proceeding further along the road of debating the issue.

I appreciate the position, Mr. Deputy Speaker.

I conclude by saying that I hope that, even now, my right hon. Friend the Foreign Secretary will make a statement. But, since it appears that the Motion will be accepted and that we shall go into recess, I urge the Government of the need to achieve a solution to the problem of the air flights. The people of Biafra are desperately in need of food and medicine and the British Government should do everything possible to get the two sides agree to food and medicine going into Biafra.

:I oppose the Motion on two grounds. There are two issues which I believe are of such significance that it is impossible for the House to adjourn without their being clarified.

The first relates to my constituency. In a recent issue of The Guardian, the Director of the Chemical Defence Experiment Research Establishment at Porton Down, Mr. G. N. Gadsby, was quoted as saying that quantities of nerve gas are transported by road from Nangekuke in Cornwall, in the constituency of the hon. Member for Falmouth and Camborne (Dr. John Dunwoody), to Porton for experimental purposes. We all know of the recent tragic accident at Okinawa and the decision of the President of the United States that nerve gas shall not be transported by road. It is inevitable that if this statement is correct —and I have no reason to doubt it—the nerve gas must pass through my constituency, and if there should be an accident there might be a considerable loss of life similar to that which occurred in Okinawa.

My hon. Friend the Member for Orpington (Mr. Lubbock) has already written to the Secretary of State for Defence and asked for an assurance that this practice will be discontinued. But I would not be doing my duty to my constituents if I did not oppose the Motion until such time as the House has been assured that the undertaking requested by my hon. Friend is put into practice. My constituents are deeply alarmed, and only today I have had messages from many of them. Therefore, it is a matter of considerable concern to me and to everyone involved that the matter should be dealt with immediately. I cannot support the Motion until there has been a clear and unequivocal statement at least similar to the undertaking given by the President of the United States.

It is worth mentioning in support of my argument that Mr. Gadsby is also quoted as saying—

Order. The hon. Gentleman is not adducing an argument for or against the Motion. Perhaps he would relate his remarks a little more directly to the Motion.

I am obliged for your guidance, Mr. Deputy Speaker, but I oppose the Motion on the ground that this matter gravely affects my constituents, and it is very pertinent to my opposition to the Motion that Mr. Gadsby has said that the nerve gas is not carried through holiday traffic—

Order. The hon. Gentleman is pursuing the argument which he would pursue if the House rejected the Motion, and therefore I ask him to apply his remarks more specifically to the Motion.

On a point of order, I have been listening to the debate since it started, and this is about the sixth time that that kind of direction has been given from the Chair, Mr. Deputy Speaker. Could you give the House some guidance on this matter? It seems to me that that type of direction is totally illogical and an utter non sequitur in this debate. I am not questioning it, but the hon. Gentleman is adducing an argument to try to persuade me and other hon. Members that because of urgent, pressing and necessary matters we should not go into recess. How on earth can he try to persuade us that they are urgent, pressing and necessary without telling us the merits of the argument?

Order. The Chair's Ruling on this type of debate has always been that Members may adduce reasons why the House should not adjourn without debating the merits of the position which the hon. Gentleman concerned is trying to put to the House. That is the Ruling which I am trying to apply this morning.

Further to that point of order. It is most important that we have a ruling that is rigorously and uniformly applied, in our debates on this matter. In our debates this morning some right hon. and hon. Members have adduced information in support of their arguments, and the hon. Member is simply seeking to emulate them. This is quite different from seeking to argue a detailed case for or against the Motion, and I ask you to bear that in mind, Mr. Deputy Speaker.

Order. The Chair always tries to deal with Members very leniently in debates of this type and to act as fairly as possible between Members. It is not an easy position, and I am sure that the hon. Gentleman will bear with the Chair in trying to rule fairly.

Your Ruling places me in difficulty, Mr. Deputy Speaker, because as you have stated that I cannot quote from an important comment by the Director in question which indicates the severity of the risk involved, I cannot present to the House a clear case why it should not adjourn. But I am bound by your Ruling.

Order. I did not precisely stop the hon. Gentleman from finishing his quotation. I was trying to ask him to come to a rapid conclusion on the details of the case he is submitting, for otherwise it becomes a very wide debate.

I am very grateful to you, Mr. Deputy Speaker, because that assists me. Strong prima facie evidence of the risk is shown in the statement by Mr. Gadsby that the nerve gas is not carried through holiday traffic where this can be avoided. He is thus admitting that there is the very risk that I am so anxious should be avoided and on which I want an assurance before the House adjourns.

I support the speeches of the right hon. Members for Battersea, North (Mr. Jay) and Thirsk and Malton (Mr. Turton) and other hon. Members who have spken about our possible entry into Europe. I do not believe that the House can adjourn without our constituents knowing the present estimates, which I am confident the Government must have made, of the cost of Britain's entry. Before the House rises my constituents will want to know what the rise in the cost-of-living will be. The housewives will want to know what the increase will be in their weekly expenses for providing the ordinary necessities of life for their families. My farmer constituents will want to know the effect on their business activities and financial interests. Many people throughout the country are desperately anxious to know what the effect on the balance of payments will be of entering the Common Market.

These issues have been raised again and again in the House during the present Session, and the Government have refused to give adequate answers. I acquit the Lord President. When he was Minister of Agriculture he did not shield the facts from the House. He behaved in the honourable way that we associate with all aspects of his conduct in the House. Therefore, I find it deplorable that we should be asked to rise without at least a similar statement from his successor as Minister of Agriculture.

The arguments advanced by other right hon. and hon. Members on this matter cannot be improved on, and I support them all. It is clear that while the House is in Recess negotiations for entry into Europe will continue. The Government are suffering from a disease that we might call Euro-mania, and unless we know the facts, unless we know the cost and the consequences, it is wrong for the House to go into Recess and for those negotiations to continue while we lack knowedge which our constituents demand shall be given to them.

I shall be brief, and I hope that my remarks will come within the rule of order.

I strongly support the plea of my right hon. Friend the Member for Battersea, North (Mr. Jay) which was echoed by some right hon. and hon. Gentlemen opposite, about the need for a full statement from the Government during the Recess on the economic implications for this country of joining the European Economic Community. I recall that when my right hon. Friend the Leader of the House was Minister of Agriculture, he provided this information through his Department. We all hope that there will be a revised forecast of the cost to our balance of payments, for example, of the direct consequences of entry into the European Economic Community. There are also the substantial additional consequential costs of a successful British application.

Many of us on this side also share the concern expressed by my right hon. Friend the Member for Battersea, North about the drift of the present Government into a federal Europe and about the rather ambiguous position of my right hon. Friend the Foreign and Commonwealth Secretary concerning the so-called Monnet Committee. As my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, Walton (Mr. Heffer) said, few of us on this side are white tribalists in regard to the European question, but we want to ensure that if this country enters into any negotiations with other Powers we do so only after a full consideration of all the consequences This should be the common aim of all those who are either for or against entry into the European Economic Community.

My second point, on which there will be no disagreement between my hon. Friend the Member for Walton and myself, is on the question of unemployment. It is highly unsatisfactory that we are starting a long Parliamentary Recess with the level of unemployment high and rising. My right hon. Friend the Chancellor of the Exchequer, in the course of an interesting speech at Abingdon last Saturday, discussed what he thought were the hallmarks of a civilised society. I remind him and my right hon. Friend the Leader of the House that a fundamental hallmark of a civilised society is, in the eyes of many of us on this side, the retention and maintenance of full employment. We shall certainly want an assurance from my right hon. Friend when he winds up the debate that the Government will exert their best endeavours to ensure that full employment is given a much higher priority in the economic policy of the Government than it has had hitherto.

I turn now to make a brief reference to the question of by-elections. The right hon. Member for Kingston-upon-Thames (Mr. Boyd-Carpenter) referred—

Will my hon. Friend take it from me that the accusation of white tribalism does not apply to him? Would he not, however, agree that there are some people who oppose entry to the Common Market purely because they are tribalists?

Order. I do not think that the hon. Member should pursue that tempting question.

As you know, Mr. Deputy Speaker, I am more accustomed to the clan system than the tribe system and it might be best if I leave the matter at that.

On the question of by-elections, we on this side need no advice from the right hon. Member for Kingston-upon-Thames or any member of the Opposition about the way to uphold democracy. Having said that, however, I must make the point that a number of us on this side are concerned about what seems to us to be the excessive delay in holding some of the current by-elections. I refer particularly to the by-elections at Newcastle-under-Lyme and Swindon. It is no answer to say, as my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister said recently in response to a Parliamentary Question, that the Tory Party, when in power, delayed holding by-elections at Ludlow and Orpington in the early 1960s. Our social values should be higher than theirs. The British people expect that of the Tory Party when they are in power but they have a right to expect higher political standards from us

. I very much hope that when my right hon. Friend replies to the debate, he will indicate that the Government intend seriously to consider the introduction of legislation in the next Parliamentary Session to lay it down that by-elections should be held within a fixed statutory period after a seat falls vacant.

Finally, I wish to draw attention to the need for a further explanation from my right hon. Friend the Leader of the House of his remarkable reply yesterday to my hon. Friend the Member for Willesden, West (Mr. Pavitt) concerning Members' facilities and services in this House. I mention this in no parochial manner. It is not simply a question of the extension of basic services to Members of the House. Those services are essential if we are to develop and extend democracy. I want, however, to ask my right hon. Friend to be somewhat less ambiguous than he was in the course of his reply on two important points. The first is the recommendation of the Services Committee dealing with the provision of secretarial services to Members.

My right hon. Friend said—and we welcome this fact—that the Government

"agree in principle with the Committee's recommendation in paragraphs 4 and 5 of the Report on the provision of secretarial assistance for Members."

But my right hon. Friend then went on to say:

"I propose to enter into early discussions on what would be the most efficient and acceptable way of providing Members with secretarial help that they need, bearing in mind the varying requirements of individual Members and the importance of avoiding unnecessary public expense."

I hope that my right hon. Friend will not be unduly influenced by the Treasury in the course of those negotiations, because this House will stand for no impertinence from that quarter. It would be quite preposterous if the Treasury mandarins, with their vast secretariat, were to dictate to us that we could not afford additional secretarial assistance and services for Members. The total cost of this might be £750,000 per annum but this must be set against the fact that we are legislating for a country which has a gross national product of almost £35,000 million a year.

Moreover, my right hon. Friend went on yesterday to say that he would con- suit "representative Members" on this question. I wonder who they are. I hope that I will not be thought to be too immodest if I suggest to my right hon. Friend that he might consult some of us who have been active in this matter in recent months.

Next, I draw attention to the passage in his speech in why my right hon. Friend dealt with the vexed question of the increased allowance for motor car usage. We have to ask my right hon. Friend for more specific information about what the Government propose for Members with constituencies outside the London area.

I also refer to that part of my right hon. Friend's reply dealing with Members' salaries. I am puzzled and perplexed by the indication given by my right hon. Friend in his reply that

"The Government consider it … appropriate for the whole question of the level of Members' salaries to be referred to the National Board for Prices and Incomes during the next Parliament."—[OFFICIAL, REPORT, 24th July, 1969; Vol. 787, c. 475–6.]

What on earth is that supposed to mean? If it means that the Government are tying the hands of their successors in this matter, well and good, but I very much doubt whether that is the case and whether the Government have the power to lay it down that the next Government must proceed to refer this matter to the Prices and Incomes Board. I put it to my right hon. Friend that in his reply he must answer the point, which many of us have made to him privately and publicly in the recent past, that the Government should refer this matter to the Prices and Incomes Board in the lifetime of the present Parliament for report and implementation after the next General Election.

With those few succinct observations, I close by saying that the length of this Parliamentary Recess—10 weeks—is excessive. I hope that the House of Commons will soon find time for a debate on a recent Report by the Select Committee on Procedure which recommended shorter recesses and revised sitting times for our debates.

It is not often that I have cause to disagree with my right hon. Friend the Member for Kingston-upon-Thames (Mr. Boyd-Carpenter) or with my hon. Friend the Member for Ormskirk (Sir D. Glover), but in their support of the Motion I have to part company from them. They suported it on the ground that we have had enough of the foolish and bad legislation for one Session and we should wish to get away from it. In my view, we should stay here until some of those injustices have been put right.

The prospect of right hon. and hon. Members opposite lying in the sun chortling at their so-called achievements in the past Session—or, indeed, doing so in their constituencies—are thoughts which somewhat appal me. I ask myself, what will they be taking pleasure about? Will they be taking pleasure and satisfaction out of the rigging of the next Election? If so I would suggest that they spend their time reflecting on some of the speeches in another place which will certainly give them cause for contemplation.

I wonder whether they will be feeling pleased with themselves about the further burdens they have heaped on industry, and getting satisfaction and the relish which they seem to enjoy as they constantly strangle the goose that lays the golden eggs. I hope that they will reflect that many of the services and things which we all seek are dependent upon the creation of wealth and upon the opportunities and incentives which are extended to industry. While this House is in recess, those who are concerned with industry and commerce will be struggling with the additional burdens placed upon them and will be endeavouring to interpret the meaning of some of the new legislation, in the Finance Act and so on.

I wish to turn to one particular point. It concerns the hospital services in my own constituency. I have been waiting for a reply to questions to the Secretary of State with regard to this and to a letter that I have sent him. I had hoped that these would have been received in time to have afforded opportunity of debate before the House adjourned. This point is a matter of considerable gravity. There is a hospital rehabilitation unit in the Hillcrest Hospital, Leicester, in which 78 of the beds have been closed because of lack of funds for the provision of nurses. Hon. Members, certainly hon. Members with medical experience, will know how essential it is that elderly people recovering from serious illnesses, strokes and the like, go immediately into a rehabilitation unit in order to avoid becoming bedridden for life. Now we have 78 beds closed in one hospital because of lack of funds.

I find it impossible for me to support this Motion for the Adjournment when matters, which may seem small in the concept of the whole economy, but which are large in the minds of those affected by them, the sick and their families, and which, I believe, will register deeply with hon. Members on both sides, remain unresolved.

I find myself in a state of unusual indecision about this Motion. On the one hand, of course, I take account of the compelling and persuasive speech of my right hon. Friend the Leader of the House in moving the Motion! Moreover, one or two other points occur to me about whether it is proper that we should go away for the Recess. We have seen in the last month or two one or two difficult matters on which hon. Members have views which should be expressed. We have seen my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister being engaged in measures to get the balance of payments into surplus after the dreadful mess we were left in by right hon. and hon. Members opposite.

On the other hand, my researches show that the House will be getting up for the Summer Recess at the earliest time this century, and it may be that we ought to take that into consideration while considering this Motion. There are many private Members who have many things to discuss. Notwithstanding the fact that this benevolent Government have provided more time for private Members than any Government since before the last war, private Members are entitled to think that we should stay here longer to discuss many of these urgent matters.

Of course, some of us have compassion for the Leader of the Opposition in going into recess since that will, perhaps, be good for him because it will save him from being pummelled twice weekly by my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister. That also will weigh with us to some extent.

However, I do not accept the suggestion of some hon. Members opposite that hon. Members are going on holiday. It may be true of some hon. Members opposite, but hon. Members on this side take very few holidays. I myself look forward to reading the daily Press and reading contributions from my hon. Friend the Member for Lewisham, West (Mr. Dickens) and my hon. Friend the Member for Reading (Mr. John Lee) and my hon. Friend the Member for Billericay (Mr. Moorman), and my hon. Friends on this side will be pursuing their Parliamentary activities elsewhere. There is a good deal of reading which hon. Members have to do. I myself have a pile of copies of the Concrete Quarterly, which are sent to me, and I hope to find time to give to that journal and others the attention which they deserve.

The Concrete Quarterly—I am being serious about this—is one of the most interesting periodicals sent to hon. Members, and is well worth reading.

I assure the hon. Member, who has an obvious interest in these matters, that I have put on one side my copies of that journal in order to give it the attention which it deserves.

The right hon. Gentleman the Member for Kingston-upon-Thames (Mr. Boyd-Carpenter) thought we ought to be dismissed with the blessing of the Lord. For myself, I certainly do not think we should be dismissed till we have dismissed the House of Lords. I am certainly prepared to wait till that very necessary surgical operation has been performed. The right hon. Gentleman also gave a number of other theological reasons. Since I became a Member of the House I no longer believe with the certainty I did before that I shall go to heaven, but of this I am sure, that if eventually I do go to heaven I shall find that it is a chamber, somewhat like this, with green benches, and one side will be the communion of saints presided over by a Freudian father figure who will be very slow to chide the hon. Member for Harrow, East and will be quick to praise him. So I am in no great hurry to leave the chamber.

Another reason why l think we should wait a little before we get up is that we ought to consider the procedure of debate on the Consolidated Fund. Although my right hon. Friend the Leader of the House is always very considerate of hon. Members who want to raise matters for debate I think the complexity of Government business since the war has led to debate on the Consolidated Fund being an inadequate way of checking the Executive to see they are carrying out their duties properly. Before the war very few hon. Members wanted to speak on it, but since then the House has become much more industrious—certainly in this Parliament, because the electors were wise enough to elect so many of my hon. Friends who are very diligent in the performance of their duty.

As my right hon. Friend the Leader of the House knows, the debates which we had this week on the Consolidated Fund were very few compared with the number of hon. Members who wanted to speak and the vast number of subjects which they wanted to raise. I think there were 45 subjects on Mr. Speaker's list as a result of what is euphemistically called the ballot but which one brought up in the Noncomformist tradition might call a squalid raffle. The result of this was that so many subjects which hon. Members wanted to debate were not reached, and for those which were reached, or for some of them, the time for debate was inadequate.

I refer in particular to the debate on the Press. Because of the defect in the system of the list, a number of hon. Members who wanted to take part in that debate were unable to do so, and I certainly do not want the House to get up without having an opportunity to hear on this subject from my hon. Friend the Member for Billericay who has made close and detailed study of this matter. I know that that will not commend itself to hon. Members opposite because when the question of the possible closure of the Sun was raised hon. Members opposite tittered as though it were amusing that another great organ of democracy should go out because of the operation of the capitalist system. But many of my hon. Friends want to go into a great deal of detail about this unfortunate and increasing trend for newspapers to go out of existence, because we are. concerned about democracy and the desirability that there should be sufficient media to convey all points of view, not only the points of view of hon. Members on this side, but the points of view of many people who are, perhaps, unrepresented in this House.

So I would urge upon my right lion. Friend the Leader of the House that he should perhaps suggest that we should not proceed with this Motion till we have had an opportunity to discuss that matter.

As my right hon. Friend knows, his predecessor promised there would be a full scale debate on this important subject. When this was put to the present Leader of the House recently, he said that we could not debate it on the Consolidated Fund. The debate on the Consolidated Fund was not adequate, and we should have an opportunity to discuss this matter in much more detail.

I have two or three further reasons why I think that the House should not rise. I think that there should be an opportunity to discuss the situation in Greece as it relates to our N.A.T.O. commitments. Not a week goese by without our learning that high military officers in Greece have been dismissed. There is now virtually no field officer in the Greek Army who was in his post two years ago, and this makes the rÔle of Greece as an ally in N.A.T.O. a very doubtful proposition. There should be an opportunity to debate that.

I also support the view of many hon. and right hon. Members that we should go into the question of the Common Market. Mention has been made of white tribalism, but many hon. Members feel that perhaps the Common Market countries are guilty of white tribalism. We should discuss what will be the position of the people of Mauritius and the other sugar islands should we enter the Common Market, and of people who are not in a very developed state and who suffer from starvation or malnutrition. We want to know what is likely to happen to them if, during the recess, the Government should make a move in that direction.

The House should also have an opportunity for debating the taxation policies of right hon. Gentlemen opposite. We want to know their views on value-added tax. We should also provide a special opportunity for the right hon. Member for Wolverhampton, South-West (Mr. Powell) to come to the House to give us his views on immigration so that we can examine him about his recent statement in the country to the effect that he would have contributed to one of our debates on immigration had we had one. There have been many opportunities, but, since he has not accepted those opportunities, it may be that he could be given a further opportunity.

It will be seen that I am in a state of considerable indecision about this. I shall look forward to the answer of the Leader of the House, and, if he can satisfy me, I shall be happy to go away, not to play with buckets and spades, but to read the Concrete Quarterly.

I wish to oppose the Motion for four reasons, three of which have already been mentioned, so I shall be brief, as I think I normally am.

The first is the cost of joining E.E.C., which has been mentioned by several of my right hon. and hon. Friends. It is absurd for any Government even to consider joining without knowing the cost. It is like a non-swimmer jumping into a pool without knowing the depth of it.

My second reason concerns the Foreign Secretary's flirtation with federal Europeans, this mysterious visit in a personal capacity. I do not see how the Foreign Secretary, or any other Minister, can go to a meeting in a personal capacity when he is a member of the Government. I suggest, if anybody had to go, that a back bencher should have been sent on that operation. I hope that the Foreign Secretary during the Recess, which presumably we shall have despite opposition from some hon. Members, will take a long holiday from Europe, and will become less "Foreign" and more "Commonwealth". After all, he is the Foreign and Commonwealth Secretary, and I hope that he will make a tour of leading Commonwealth countries. I stand to be corrected, but I think I am right in saying that, since he has been both Foreign and Commonwealth Secretary he has not visited any Commonwealth country. It would be a good thing if he visited Canada, Australia, New Zealand and other Commonwealth countries to learn the reactions of those countries to Britain's application to join the Common Market. Until we have had some reassurance on that point, the House should not adjourn.

My third point is one which was mentioned by the hon. Member for Willesden, West (Mr. Pavitt) and concerns the inconvenience to people living in North-West London which is likely to be caused by a threatened overtime ban on the bus services. South Londoners may suffer from the iodiosyncracies of Southern Region from time to time, but in North-West London we suffer from a greater shortage of bus staff than in any other part of Greater London. I hope that the Minister concerned will look into that next week urgently, to see if he can help the long-suffering commuters by bus in that area.

My last point, which has not been mentioned, concerns the continuing refusal of the Government to implement the Littlewood Report dealing with experiments on living animals, a matter which is of great concern to all hon. Members.

It is nearly four and a half years since the report was presented to the House and, despite repeated questions by hon. Members on all sides of the House, we have had no news of when the report will be implemented either in part or in whole. Yesterday's Order Paper contained the usual Motion, in the name of the Under-Secretary of State for Home Affairs, for the Annual Return of experiments on living animals for 1968. I inquired whether it was in the Vote Office last night. It was not. I suppose that it cannot be printed until it has been approved by the House.

In 1967 there were 4,750,000 experiments. I shall be very surprised, but very glad, if the figure does not top 5 million for 1968; yet nothing is done. I know that the Leader of the House has a great concern about this, since as Minister of Agriculture he was keenly interested. I hope that he will inquire into this and give an assurance, if not before the House adjourns, at least before it is prorogued in October, about when the report is to be implemented. Far too long has gone by since it was presented, and nothing has been done.

I did not intend to partici- pate in the debate, but, rather to my surprise, when I was sitting in the Chamber earlier, the hon. Member for Bodmin (Mr. Bessell) raised as a reason for the House not rising the operation—

On a point of order. My hon. Friend said that he did not intend to take part in this debate. Many hon. Members have been sitting in the Chamber with the intention of taking part in the debate since the beginning. They have been listening with great interest to other speeches and have been rising in their places hoping to be called. I think, Mr. Deputy Speaker, you should bear these matters in mind when calling hon. Members.

Further to that point of order. Would you not agree, Mr. Deputy Speaker, that if something enters the minds of hon. Members who are listening to a debate we should say so to you. If we come to see you privately we stand a good chance of being called—that seems to be what has happened.

I would plead on behalf of the hon. Member for Falmouth and Cambourne (Dr. Dunwoody) that I referred in my speech to a matter which affects his constituency.

Surely an hon. Member should interrupt at the time of the speech? Some hon. Members have been in the Chamber since the debate began. Furthermore, we shall all catch a pretty bad cold, because the Chamber is rather cold on this side.

It is for the Chair to decide which hon. Member he will call. I call Dr. Dunwoody.

To my surprise, I heard the hon. Member for Bodmin raising the question of the operation of a defence establishment in my constituency as a reason why the House should not adjourn., He raised this in an emotional and exaggerated way. I reject the suggestion which he made and support the Motion before the House.

We have had a traditional debate during which right hon. and hon. Members raised many subjects. I have taken notes and I will try to cover the main points that have been raised. [Interruption.] I hope that my hon. Friend the Member for Harrow, East (Mr. Roebuck) will allow me to proceed; he is always courteous. I am trying to help him. I wish to reply to some important points which he raised.

The right hon. Member for Kingston-upon-Thames (Mr. Boyd-Carpenter) said that this was the end of term. I am afraid I do not accept this sort of atmosphere. Probably I went to a different school from the one he went to, although I was a schoolmaster. I believe that a schoolboy atmosphere in this House is wrong. We must not give the impression to our constituents, or to the country at large, that because we are going into recess Members of Parliament do not work and Ministers do not do their jobs. The mentality of talking about buckets and spades is very wrong. Many hon. Members never get a holiday, and I certainly have not had one for two or three years. I hope to take one this Recess.

The House should support the Motion which I moved a little earlier. I will not get involved in the argument of the right hon. Gentleman on the timing. I have confirmed that there are precedents for having a debate on the Motion on the Adjournment on the same day as the Adjournment. Before the war it was the usual practice, but there have been precedents since then. It is not unusual and there is no attempt to be discourteous to the House.

The right hon. Gentleman made an effective speech from his point of view on the Parliament (No. 2) Bill, although he himself tried to frustrate the Government legislation in that regard, and I am sorry that he did. But in the end he well knows the reasons that the Government did not proceed with the Bill.

I should be out of order if I sought to debate the merits of industrial relations. I thought the final outcome of the proposals put forward by the Government, which led to the trade union movement, through the Trades Union Congress, doing something positive, was a tremendous advance. He would agree from his long experience that, in the end, in industrial relations it is not legislation that counts, but harmonious relations between employers and employees. The advance by the trade union movement was a positive one.

Directly on this very point, would not the Leader of the House agree that we should have a statement from his right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Employment and Productivity on the unofficial strikes which are now taking place in the country?

I appreciate the hon. Gentleman's point that my right hon. Friend the First Secretary of State for Employment and Productivity should intervene in this matter, but the T.U.C. have taken action in one matter and this is to be welcomed. Without wishing to anticipate the Queen's Speech, I would tell the House that my right hon. Friend still has to bring in a major Bill dealing with industrial relations.

I disagree with the right hon. Member for Kingston-upon-Thames that the Divorce Bill was a Government Bill. He knows full well that that is not the case. It is true that the Government provided time. Hon. Members on both sides supported or opposed the Bill. It was not a party Measure, it was on a free vote, and it is quite wrong of the right hon. Gentleman to say that it was a Government Measure.

Could the Leader of the House cite any genuine Private Member's Bill for which the Government not only have provided time—the House knows that this has been done on other occasions—but have provided such enormous amounts of time as a complete all-night sitting?

I could not answer that fully without much research. I felt that it was right for Parliament to come to a decision on the matter since there had been long arguments and discussions. It was very wrong of the right hon. Gentleman to say that it was a Government Bill.

He then asked me to press the Home Secretary to lay Orders in regard to the House of Commons (Redistribution of Seats) (No. 2) Bill and spoke about the legal duty. My right hon. Friend will do nothing that is illegal. We have already put forward Amendments. Indeed, this Session of Parliament will continue in October, and matters which have been raised by hon. Members on that Bill and in relation to the House of Lords will be dealt with then.

The right hon. Gentleman asked me to try to impress on the Patronage Secretary that he should move Writs. That is a matter for my right hon. Friend. This point was raised with me yesterday.

My right hon. Friend the Member for Leeds, West (Mr. C. Pannell) took up the argument about House of Lords reform. I will not go into that matter since it would be wrong of me to do so. He also dealt with the document "In Place of Strife", which was published by my right hon. Friend the First Secretary of State. In the end, all the negotiations on that document led to a reasonable solution, because the T.U.C. reacted in a positive way. My right hon. Friend asked not only that the Commons but also the Lords, should reflect on the matter during the Recess.

The right hon. Gentleman the Member for Thirsk and Malton (Mr. Turton) raised the important matter of Britain's approach to the Community and the information which should be given to the House. He also mentioned the attendance of my right hon. Friend the Foreign and Commonwealth Secretary at the Monnet Committee and the whole issue of federalism. This matter was taken up by many hon. Members, including the right hon. and learned Member for Hertfordshire, East (Sir D. Walker-Smith), the hon. Member for Bodmin (Mr. Bessell), my hon. Friend the Member for Harrow, East and my hon. Friend the Member for Lewisham, West (Mr. Dickens). I accept that this is an important matter and I will only say that, in view of the strength of opinion shown in the House, I will undoubtedly make representations to my right hon. Friend.

I will try to reply to the more specific points. The hon. Member for Wembley, South (Sir R. Russell) was wrong to say that the Foreign Secretary had not visited any Commonwealth countries. I recall that fairly recently he visited India, and during the Recess he will be going to Canada. One therefore should not spoil arguments by getting the facts wrong.

Of course, I did not realise that. I am very glad he is going to Canada.

I am grateful for that apology.

Since quite clearly the Government cannot give the House this information before 13th October, would the Leader of the House press the Prime Minister to publish a White Paper during the Recess revising the figures he gave on 8th May, 1967?

I will certainly make representations on the matter, but I think the House should be aware that the Prime Minister on 8th July, when dealing with the problem of whether it would be a disservice to give the House figures at that time, suggested that there were difficulties, and that one must understand them, if we were to have a meaningful figure, in view of the fact that the Common Market has to make its own fresh arrangements. One only has to look at what is happening in agriculture and its financing in the Community. There is nothing specific there, and there have been difficulties.

It is sometimes difficult to estimate what will be the effect if we join the Community and accept the C.A.P. It is true that when Minister of Agriculture, I was able to produce f figures in a White Paper. I remember winding up a debate one evening and giving some interesting figures, which I repeated in the country, about the effect of the C.A.P. on the cost of living and its implications for British farmers.

It would be now extremely difficult to make that sort of estimate in view of the difficulties in the Six in regard to C.A.P. That is why the Prime Minister said what he said, and the circumstances and assumptions on which any estimates could be based are changing all the time. That is the difficulty. As the Prime Minister said to the right hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland (Mr. Grimond), all information available will be given as soon as it is meaningful to do so. My right hon. Friend has said that. I shall convey the views of right hon. and hon. Members to my right hon. Friend, and stress the importance of this to the economy.

We agree that there are certain difficulties arising out of the problems which the Common Market itself has with its agricultural policy. I am sure the right hon. Gentleman will agree that our application is based on the siuation as it is at the moment, not as it might be in the future. We are, therefore, entitled to know now the consequences of the application being successful. This is what right hon. and hon. Members are pressing for.

I know that, and I accept what the hon. Gentleman says, but I gave the reply which was given by the Prime Minister, and I shall make the necessary representations.

On the other matter of federalism, I can only repeat what my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister said the other day, when he was quite specific, and this matter has been commented on on other occasions. I do not know whether what was said by the Leader of the Liberal Party was right, because this was a confidential meeting. I do not intend to be dragged into an argument because the Leader of the Liberal Party has broken a confidence.

My right hon. Friend the Member for Battersea, North (Mr. Jay) also dealt with this. He asked about figures, and really endorsed what was said by the right hon. Gentleman the Father of the House in his own inimitable way. The right hon. and learned Member for Hertfordshire, East also stressed this. I cannot go beyond what I have said. I have given my reply, which, in the circumstances, is the only reply that I can give.

My hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, Walton (Mr. Heffer) was a bit provocative at the beginning of his speech, when he talked about tribalism. I shall not follow this up, because I think that my hon. Friend would wish me to answer—

rose—

I was pulling my hon. Friend's leg.

It was a joke.

I know it was.

My hon. Friend ought to allow me to develop his argument by saying that I think he was right to stress the importance of the Government's dealing with the whole question of unemployment. My hon. Friend was strongly supported by my hon. Friend the Member for Lewisham, West. I was asked whether I could give a categorical assurance that the Government would regard this as an urgent matter. My hon. Friend mentioned the problems of the development areas and the regions. I have an interest here not only as Leader of the House and a member of the Government, but as the Member of Parliament for a region which has suffered considerably due to the closure of collieries, and, therefore, I have sympathy for what my hon. Friend said.

It is the Government's policy to attack this problem vigorously with all the measures possible, and I assure my hon. Friend that even during the Recess I shall continue to press my colleagues who have responsibility for dealing with these areas. We do not underestimate the problems. If my hon. Friend accepts that assurance, I hope that he will support the Motion.

The hon. Member for Ormskirk (Sir D. Glover) said that he supported me because he could not take any more Government activity or legislation.—[HoN. MEMBERS: "He has gone."] I admire the hon. Gentleman. As he has left the Chamber, I wish him a very happy Recess.

My hon. Friend the Member for Willesden, West (Mr. Pavitt) raised the question of the bus problem in London, and it was stressed, also, by the hon. Member for Wembley, South. My hon. Friend will not expect me to interfere with, or make pronouncements about, this, because, as he said, a joint conference is being held with the unions concerned. I assure him that the Department of my right hon. Friend the First Secretary of State will look carefully at this problem. There are difficulties, such as the question of overtime, and so on. It would be wrong of me to pontificate on this matter, but I hope that my hon. Friend will accept that we are aware of the problem.

The hon. Member for Banbury (Mr. Marten) stressed the question of the Common Market, which was raised by other hon. Members. I mention this because from time to time he has pressed me for time to discuss a Motion.

My hon. Friend the Member for Croydon, South (Mr. Winnick) mentioned Biafra. Only yesterday he had a Question to the Prime Minister on this subject. We have debated this issue on many occasions. It would we wrong for me to argue the question on Nigeria, and who is responsible for relief not getting through to certain areas. The Foreign Secretary and the Government watch this continually. We have always recognised that there is a problem. I do not wish to debate the matter, but we shall continue to keep my hon. Friend informed about it.

The hon. Member for Bodmin raised the question of nerve gas being transported through parts of Cornwall and Devon, through his constituency. He said that his hon. Friend the Member for Orpington (Mr. Lubbock) had written to the Secretary of State for Defence about this. He said, too, that there was a prima facie case to be answered. I shall not give a reply now, but I assure him that immediately after this debate I shall contact my right hon. Friend to see what reply is being sent to the hon. Member for Orpington, and then write to the hon. Gentleman. The hon. Gentleman also raised the European problem, and I have answered that.

My hon. Friend the Member for Lewisham, West also raised the question of the E.E.C., and rightly talked about the balance of payments issue, the C.A.P., and why more information should be provided. He also stressed the problem of unemployment, and then raised a matter for which I have a direct responsibility, namely, the Report of the Services Committee on services and facilities for Members. The hon. Member for Bristol, West (Mr. Robert Cooke), who did not take part in the debate, has raised this matter with me. He is a member of the Services Committee, and has played an important part in producing a positive report.

I hope that my hon. Friend will not be pessimistic. It is right that we should discuss this. When I talk about responsibility, I include my hon. Friend because he has given evidence to the Committee and has taken a great interest in this matter. I hope my hon. Friend will appreciate that I am anxious to get something positive, and that there are details to be worked out.

My right hon. Friend can rest assured that he will have the full support of hon. Members in not standing for any impertinence from the Treasury on this matter.

My hon. Friend has made his point. In his speech he made the point very succinctly when he was talking about facilities for Members. The report is available, and I hope that many hon. Members will read it. I shall try to act on it as quickly as possible.

The hon. Member for Leicester, South-West (Mr. Tom Boardman) raised a problem affecting the health department in his constituency. I shall make representations to my right hon. Friend on this matter. I am sure that he will treat it sympathetically, and will no doubt communicate with the hon. Gentleman.

My hon. Friend the Member for Harrow, East, in a rumbustious and lively speech, which I enjoyed, raised many matters apart from the Common Market. He referred to two important matters which were not touched on by other hon. Members. The first was the question of Greece. This is a matter for the Foreign Secretary, who will, no doubt, note my hon. Friend's views. The second is the possibility of a debate on the Press. I can truthfully say now, "Not next week". My hon. Friend always agrees with me when I make that statement. The fact is that a debate on the Press could be rather academic.

I have tried to reply to all the points which were raised, but there is one matter of some importance to which I ought to refer. I give the normal assurance of being willing to make representations to Mr. Speaker that the House should be recalled under Standing Order No. 117 if circumstances require it.

Will my right hon. Friend include in those circumstances any further development in Rhodesia with regard to the setting-up of a republic there? Will he assure us that we shall be recalled to discuss that?

I shall net give an assurance on any specific subject. If we think that there is an emergency, and that it is right to have Parliament recalled under Standing Order No. 117, as we have done previously, it will be for the Government to decide, and it will be done. I give that assurance.

So it only remains for me to wish all right hon. and hon. Members a very happy summer holiday.

rose in his place and claimed to move, That the Question be now put.

On a point of order. Is it not a fact that if we had continued the previous debate this would not have detracted from the amount of time available for the Adjournment debates which have been selected by Mr. Speaker? In that case, is it not most unusual for the Patronage Secretary to move the Closure when so many right hon. and hon. Members on both sides of the House have urgent and pressing reasons why we should or should not go into recess?

Order. I should not allow debate on a decision that has been taken by the Chair.

I am not trying to debate it, Mr. Deputy Speaker, but am asking whether or not we would have curtailed the Adjournment debates by continuing to debate the Motion. If we would not, was it not unusual for the Patronage Secretary to move the Closure after a very short period—

No.

The right hon. Gentleman has already spoken, and wasted the time of the House. Was not it rather unusual for the Patronage Secretary to move the Closure, Mr. Deputy Speaker?

I cannot discuss the conduct of the Patronage Secretary. I can only answer the point of fact that the hon. Gentleman has raised. It is correct that the remainder of the proceedings will be timed, and that continuing the debate on the Motion would not have detracted from the time given to hon. Members, although it might well have kept them here much longer.

I have to notify the House in accordance with the Royal Assent Act, 1967, that the Queen has signified Her Royal Assent to the following Acts:

1. Appropriation Act, 1969.

2. Finance Act, 1969.

3. Housing Act, 1969.

4. Housing (Scotland) Act, 1969.

5. Transport (London) Act, 1969.

6. Overseas Resources Development Act, 1969.

7. Employer's Liability (Defective Equipment) Act, 1969.

8. Sharing of Church Buildings Act, 1969.

9. Age of Majority (Scotland) Act. 1969.

10. Medical Act, 1969.

11. National Mod (Scotland) Act, 1969.

12. Architects Registration (Amendment) Act, 1969.

13. Air Corporations Act, 1969.

14. National Insurance Act, 1969.

15. Iron and Steel Act, 1969.

16. Family Law Reform Act, 1969.

17. Nurses Act, 1969.

18. Post Office Act, 1969.

19. Education (Scotland) Act, 1969.

20. Trustee Savings Banks Act, 1969.

21. Development of Tourism Act, 1969.

22. Ministry of Housing and Local Government Provisional Order Confirmation (King's Lynn) Act, 1969.

23. Clyde Port Authority Order Confirmation Act, 1969.

24. Dundee Corporation Order Confirmation Act, 1969.

25. East Green, Aberdeen Order Confirmation Act, 1969.

26. Forth Ports Authority Order Confirmation Act, 1969.

27. Whitgift Charities Act, 1969.

28. Lever Park Act, 1969.

29. Portsmouth Corporation Act, 1969.

30. York Corporation Act, 1969.

31. City of London (Various Powers) Act, 1969.

32. Witham Navigation Company Act, 1969.

33. Greater London Council (Money) Act, 1969.

34. Saint Saviour, Paddington Act 1969.

35. British Railways Act, 1969.

36. Kidderminster Corporation Act, 1969.

37. Saint Stephen, Clapham Park Act, 1969.

38. Bedford Corporation Act, 1969.

39. Cardiff Corporation Act, 1969.

40. Bradford Corporation Act, 1969.

41. Essex River and South Essex Water Act, 1969.

42. London Transport Act, 1969.

43. North East Lincolnshire Water Act, 1969.

44. Greater London Council (Various Powers) Act, 1969.

• And to the following Measures, passed under the provision of the Church of England Assembly (Powers) Act, 1919:

45. Clergy Pensions (Amendment) Measure, 1969.

46. Synodical Government Measure, 1969.

My purpose in seeking to debate the Channel Tunnel is mainly exploratory. It follows that my speech will be mainly interrogatory. It may be, however, that, try as I will, I shall be unable altogether to disguise the profound scepticism that I feel for the project. But I shall not waste more time than necessary in simply expressing misgivings.

The fact is—and this is my main indictment of the Ministry of Transport—that one is simply not in a position to express an informed view about the project. In common with everyone outside the Ministry, I am in blank ignorance of the current factors for and against a Channel Tunnel. We have had no reliable data from Government since 1963, when, if memory which is getting a little dim serves me correctly, I assisted the Minister of the day to launch the then joint study. That shows how long ago it was.

If the Minister says in reply to this debate, in effect, "We have not yet got the material that we must have on which to base a final decision, but we propose to acquire it and publish it before a decision is reached", I shall have no quarrel with him. But if he has information to aid present judgment, as I think the French have, he must explain why it is not being made publicly available here.

What we must not have is the withholding of relevant material until the last moment, when we are confronted with a fait accompli. This is a major national strategic decision involving an enormous network of transport a long way from the tunnel, and in reaching that decision a great many people should be very fully informed. It is partly to avoid that risk that I raise the matter today before we separate for 10 weeks or so.

I admit to a local interest. The tunnel, if it comes, will have a profound impact on the region that I and some of my hon. Friends represent. It is already casting a long shadow. What has already been promulgated by the Ministry and the county council about the terminals has had the affect of blighting considerable areas in East Kent.

To clarify this position was to have been one point of the debate, but I concede that the announcement earlier this week in reply to a Question by my hon. Friend the Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Mr. Costain) has been a contribution to making the position clearer. As I see it, six possible sites for the terminal have been reduced to four, so the area of doubt has been limited.

But a local interest is by no means my sole interest in the project, although it has compelled me to make a rather closer study of the matter than most hon. Members have the time or the disposition to do. I am neither an engineer nor an economist, but I have acquired enough material from both sources to raise many questions in my mind. On the engineering side, I have some evidence that it may be by no means easy going. There may be hazards—costly, delaying and even dangerous. On the economic side, there is even more cause for anxiety.

I fear most that we may be tempted to decide in favour of the project on two main grounds. The first is that at this juncture it would be a helpful gesture towards Europe. It would be a helpful gesture towards France especially, which stands to gain a great deal more than we do partly because of the rich haul of the ports to the North of France. The second is that we might decide in favour of the project because the effect of a tunnel translating a lot of European-bound freight to rail would be wholly in accord with the intentions of the Transport Act. An indirect effect of the tunnel, of course, would be to transfer a great deal from road to rail.

Within this context, I do not quarrel with either consideration. But experience suggests that decisions on major projects like this, reached with strong underlying political or international motives, often turn out to be economic disasters. It is on those grounds that I base the critical questions to which I now turn.

As I understand it, the interim studies already completed offer a picture which is different in detail from but not much less favourable in general than the picture presented in 1963. I hope that the hon. Gentleman will say a word about that. It is reckoned that in the early years about half the tunnel's revenue will come from ferrying cars and other passenger vehicles, about half from rail passengers and about a third from rail freight. It is further reckoned that the services can be provided at about two-thirds of the sea charges and still make a profit. If I am incorrect about that, perhaps the hon. Gentleman will comment on it.

Apparently, these interim conclusions are to be reinforced by a final period of study, which I take to mean a feasibility study. That is likely to start in October. That seems to be very important, because I believe that I am right in saying that it may occupy about two years. If it will, will the Anglo-French decision be deferred until the full study is completed—in other words, until October 1971? There is obviously a point of importance here since it means that the Anglo-French decision could well fall to a Government other than the present one. Therefore, I ask the hon. Gentleman to be as specific as he can about the duration of the study and its relationship to the final decision which must be taken.

If I am correct, no start on the construction is possible until towards the end of 1971, with the finish, given five years' work, at the end of 1976. If that calculation is correct, various factors that we are now considering and that must be related to the tunnel have to be projected forward no less than seven years, assuming that all goes to plan. That strikes me as being a very important consideration.

What precisely does this final study aim to do? As I understand it, it will take two years. I am hostile to the project, so that in my opinion the longer it takes the better. But two years requires a word of explanation and, since we have been conducting inquiries into the project for some time, it postulates a puzzling lack of urgency. Am I to understand that there will be no final decision until the end of this period? If not, will preliminary engineering works start before that point, assuming that engineering works are required in connection with the studies? In effect, if the study is to be protracted, it will prolong the uncertainty in this part of England for a considerable period.

If I am right about the study, what will it aim to prove? Perhaps I might venture a few suggestions of my own as to what it ought to try to show. The first of them concerns inflation, which is now rising in terms of this sort of work by about 7½per cent. a year and must be taken as read. I know that the Minister takes exception to my published estimate that the final cost of the project will be nearer £600 million than £300 million. I note with interest that I am now publicly supported by a Mr. Douglas Young, art economist working on the project at the National Economic Development Office. He is reported in The Times of 21st July as saying:

"… if past experience of large projects is any guide the final cost of the tunnel and associated works is likely to be £500 million to £600 million rather than the recent official estimate of £240 million."

I do not expect the hon. Gentleman to comment on that, but it is pretty close to what I said some time ago and got into trouble with the Minister for saying.

Will the study include a forecast of port development, the progress of containerisation and the progress of roll-on, roll-off methods by 1976? That is the time scale. Incidentally, are these developments, broadly speaking, to be encouraged or discouraged? One of my anxieties is that once we are committed to a Government prestige project of this kind, other enterprises which may be revivals are apt to find permission for projected developments difficult to obtain.

My third suggestion concerns air freight, and this is a personal view. In my opinion, air freight is one of the biggest factors involved here. The advent of the jumbo-jet spells a huge advance in moving low-bulk high-cost freight, which to some extent is already going by air. By 1976 this will be a major factor. Will the study take that into account?

My final suggestion involves consumer choice. What do car users want? What will road haulage costs be by 1976 compared with rail costs? Is that a matter which the study will consider?

If I am right, what the Minister is undertaking to study must, if it is to be reliable, take us no less than 13 years—from the last published estimates in 1963 to 1976—in an era of intensive transport revolution. Is that intended? if so, I cannot quarrell with such intentions. I am asking for more information. However, the time now taken has curious implications for the project.

What will the study cost, and are the Government covered by the financial outlay which will be involved?

Can the hon. Gentleman say a word about the state of play with the consortia? At one time there were three consortia entering bids against each other. Then they were encouraged to become one. Where has all this got to?

I end by mentioning the two strongest reservations that I have about the idea. Both must be met by any further study which is to be made and published. First, it is intended to replace a diversity and a flexibility of sea and air routes which now carry about £1,500 million worth of trade to Europe annually by a single tube which is jointly held with the French. I have no wish to speak foolishly or irresponsibly about this, but it has to be judged against the background of the last six years. I find it curious that we should be joining with the one country which has done more than any other to keep us out of Europe. However, I will not dwell on that. It is simply a matter for consideration by others who will be concerned with the final answer.

My second reservation is that we shall expose what will become a vital line to the hazards of modern industrial disruption. In terms of freight, this line to Europe will become a jugular artery. It would be very unfortunate if it came to be considered like the Suez Canal. One of the most disturbing aspects of modern technology is the power it places in the hands of a few to inflict disaster on a scheme. In my view, we are not getting modern technology in return for this risk, but an outmoded form of technology. This concentration of power in the hands of a few represents grave implications.

If the Government are confident that they can meet these problems and provide the answers to them, I wish them all the luck in the world. However, some of us may be forgiven for having considerable doubt about this project. I express my doubt not from the parish pump standpoint but from the point of view of the broadest national interest. My view is shared by many who are much less prejudiced and far more qualified and informed than I am.

In view of the pregnant appearance which this project is beginning to have and its exceptionally long period of gestation, I have thought it right to raise these doubts before we Recess, to ask questions and to give the Minister a chance to answer them, if he can.

rose—

Order. I am grateful to the right hon. Member for Ashford (Mr. Deedes) for the restraint he showed in keeping his speech brief. I remind the House that only one hour has been allowed for this debate. If hon. Members exercise restraint and are brief, all hon. Members who wish to speak on the subject will have an opportunity of doing so.

I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for Ashford (Mr. Deedes) on his luck in the draw and I assure you, Mr. Deputy Speaker, that I shall be as brief as possible.

When I was fortunate to secure an Adjournment debate on 20th May, 1968, my right hon. Friend the Member for Ashford and my hon. Friend the Member for Canterbury (Mr. Crouch) came to my support. The main purpose of that debate was to ask the Minister of Transport to conduct a preliminary inquiry, regardless of whether or not the tunnel proceeded, in an effort to stop the overall blight on land in my constituency. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Ashford pointed out, this week the Minister has given the results of that inquiry, in which all concerned had an opportunity to express their views.

The results of the inquiry have, unfortunately, added to the imponderables rather than eliminating all of them. Regretfully, in my view, the Minister has decided to leave the option open to the freight yards. I would have thought that the freight yard option problem was one of the simplest to solve. Unfortunately, however, we do not know whether the main freight yard will be in Ashford or in my constituency.

It seems that in our consideration of the tunnel project we have chosen the pram but not made up our minds whether to have a baby. In other words, we have chosen the possible site, but have not decided whether to have a tunnel. Since we are discussing a problem which affects the very heart of my constituency, I have, naturally, taken a vivid interest in the matter for the last 15 years. In the earlier stages I was extremely enthusiastic over the idea of a tunnel, and I made no doubt of my view. My right hon. Friend the Member for Ashford was equally unenthusiastic about it.

During the intervening years technology has advanced at a tremendously fast rate. Indeed, its advance has been so fast that we may not need a tunnel at all. Goods may soon be sent via the moon. With the passage of each year the' need for a tunnel must be questioned more and more, particularly since we cannot get adequate information from the Ministry.

Because of this lack of information, I cheekily used my constituency paper Right, which has a circulation of 12,000, meaning that about 20,000 people read it, to conduct my own Gallup poll. I set out what, with my limited knowledge, I thought to be the advantages and disadvantages to be derived from a Channel Tunnel from both the national and local points of view. I will not weary the House by spelling out the results of the replies I received, except to say that from 12,000 copies we received 10 per cent. replies. For an amateur Gallup poll costing nothing and with no prizes to be won at the end, that was not bad.

Of the replies I received, 88 per cent. were against the tunnel, with 12 per cent. in favour. I had deliberately set out what I thought to be the national and local advantages and disadvantages because I wanted my inquiry not to be a parish pump affair. I did not want my constituents to consider the matter from a narrow point of view. I was surprised to find that about 3 per cent. of those who replied were in favour of the project nationally, but were against it locally.

After my local inquiry was conducted I was invited—my hon. Friend the Member for Truro (Mr. Geoffrey Wilson) came along—to a conference in Lille to see what Europe thought about the idea of a Channel tunnel. The conference was held by the Chamber of Commerce of Lille and Pas de Calais, which had a fantastic amount of information on the subject.

The French were extremely enthusiastic about the tunnel idea. They explained how North France was at the delta of the Rhine and how the axis of communication would be completely altered by the tunnel. Calais and Boulogne were enthusiastic, so much so that the French Government had given them the latest up-to-date information. Boulogne had built a new port, rejoicing in the fact that the tunnel would result in much more trade using the area. I was amazed to hear about the larger percentage of exports going from Boulogne Port to the rest of France than from Boulogne to England. I was equally amazed to see the import figures into Boulogne, for they were ten times higher than the import figures into South Africa from Britain.

These various steps had been taken by Boulogne and Calais because they had been given all the necessary information by their Government. Regardless of whether a tunnel would be built, they were able to take counter-measures and, basing their measures on a decision about the tunnel being taken either way, they were and are on a good wicket.

We were given some interesting figures which, for some reason, have still not been published in Britain. For example, we were told that Channel crossing foot passengers were increasing at the rate of 1·5 per cent. a year, that Paris-London air traffic, which, in 1967, totalled 1,235,000 passengers, was increasing by 9 per cent. a year and that the tonnage of merchandise being carried was increasing by 4 per cent. a year. The most startling figure of all was the fact that motor car traffic was increasing by 14 per cent. a year.

This brings me to the crux of the problem. Regardless of whether or not a tunnel is built, if vehicle traffic is to rise at the rate of 14 per cent. a year, action must be taken because the road system of Kent is already inadequate. A number of my constituents are genuinely worried about this. I cannot reassure them because I do not have the information. In other words, if the tunnel is not built the Kent road system will worsen because of the rise in traffic, and if it is built it will deteriorate more rapidly because of the extra demand that will be placed on it.

In my innocence I had thought that a tunnel would be built to encourage the use of the railways. I had understood that the Government—they have never come out into the open about this—would encourage traffic to use the railways and discourage road transport. The previous Minister of Transport was, we understood, in favour of the tunnel, because it would do more harm to the private lorry industry than even the last Transport Act, and the damage that that has done is difficult to assess.

Why cannot we have a White Paper setting out the full national and local advantages and disadvantages to be derived from a Channel Tunnel? My amateurish affair produced incredible results, but a thorough inquiry should be conducted on a national basis. We should be told if a tunnel would help our export trade and would warrant its cost. Can we be told the cost of transporting goods through it? The promoters say that it will save between 30 and 50 per cent. If that is so, it is a strong argument for going ahead.

Before disruption of this area takes place, we must be sure of the facts. If the facts are produced then it is the business of the House to decide what is to be done and to ensure that, if any person is to give up his property for the building of the tunnel, he should be adequately compensated. We must ensure that all proper consideration is given to all the factors involved before we give the "go ahead".

I am against the Channel Tunnel, but I hope that the Joint Parliamentary Secretary will bear in mind that the constant indecision by the Ministry produces a blight not only on buildings and development and people's intentions and values in the area of Kent affected, but on road development in East Kent, which is one of the most crowded areas in England—as was acknowledged by the right hon. Gentleman the Prime Minister in answer to a supplementary question from me a few days ago.

The idea of a Channel Tunnel is not new. It is 160 years old. In 1868, a Channel Tunnel Committee was formed. The idea had been thought of 60 years before that and it was blessed by Stephenson, welcomed by Brunel and thought to be possible by Hawkshaw, who built the Severn Tunnel. Of course, these gentlemen welcomed it. It was an idea of their times, of the 1860s. We live in different times now—the days of Cockerill, Concorde and container ships. In my opinion, the tunnel has no reality today.

A very dear friend of mine died recently—the great consultant engineer Sir Owen Williams, a man distinguished by great achievements in this country, not least the planning and the building of the M1. I discussed with this old and distinguished engineer the question of the Channel Tunnel and he gave me his views clearly and robustly. He thought that it would be a strategic mistake and, from the engineering point of view, would be a bottleneck for all our traffic to the Continent because we would be creating a magnet for the majority of our traffic and trade to pass through. He pointed out that it would also attract more trade, traffic and tourists to and through Greater London, already the greatest concentration of building, industrial development and population in the country. He thought that, in the context of the country as a whole, it would be a strategic mistake of the greatest order.

I contend that our planning should be to spread our dense population and industrial activity more evenly across the country rather than take any steps which might concentrate it into one area. I believe that this tunnel, this idea of 160 years ago, this dream in a politician's eye and sometimes that of the older engineers, would act as a dangerous diversion from the planning which we should be doing for the rest of this century and for the next.

Nor do I think that this diversion would be primarily to Britain's advantage. At present, our heaviest traffic and the greatest development in the export trade to Europe is to Europe across not the Channel, but the North Sea to Belgium, Holland and Germany. That is the growth area, and it is that route which best serves the industrial Midlands and the North, with no problem about taking such traffic across Greater London.

With the building of a Channel tunnel, this traffic would be diverted into France, inevitably, and France would become the main beneficiary of the tunnel. No wonder the French are so keen on it, as they demonstrated at their recent conference in Lille. I remind the House of the figures published by the Ministry in 1967, forecasting possible Channel tunnel traffic starting in 1975. They are very revealing. They do not Drove to me that the tunnel is really such a viable and interesting economic proposition.

The forecast of the number of passengers thought to be crossing the Channel by all routes in 1975 is about 8½million, of which about 3½ million would, it is thought, use the tunnel. The figures also look forward to the year 2005 with an estimate that the total number of passengers crossing the Channel by all routes then will be about 14 million. The tunnel is forecast to have attracted by then only another 1 million people, to a total of about 4½ million.

Is the tunnel, then, to attract most of the goods traffic? Not according to the Ministry forecast. It is estimated that 11 million tons of goods will cross from Britain to France overall in 1975 and that the tunnel's share would be about 4½ million tons. For the year 2005, it is estimated that the total weight will be 38 million tons, of which the tunnel would carry less than half—about 15 million tons.

But where the figures are revealing, as my hon. Friend the Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Mr. Costain) has said, is that the tunnel is seen to be the magnet for the cars, because it is there that the tunnel is envisaged as capturing the great majority of traffic. This will surely be a disaster for Kent. The whole of Kent would be affected by the decision to build a tunnel. It would have vast side effects across the whole country, particularly in Kent. We would be creating the biggest traffic jam throughout Britain, throughout the year, day and night. We would be creating an enormous goods yard, far bigger than anything hinted at so far. It would be on a vast scale, as one realises by thinking now not only of what would happen in 1975 but of all the development thereafter if the tunnel should come about.

The way into Europe is not an underground matter. It is by political and economic planning that we decide whether Britain takes part in a European community. The tunnel project is an extravagant sideshow and a diversion from the real considerations. It would be a planning mistake, an economic joke, and I hope that such a joke will not be supported by the Government and Government money, even though it is proposed at the moment that the construction costs will not come from the Government. I say strongly and sincerely that this is not a case where the Government should give any guarantee. We do not want to see another project like the QE2.

I hope that in his examinations which are to take place the Parliamentary Secretary will find out whether the British Railways Board favours the idea of a concentration of traffic in one area. What we should be doing about the future is not concentrating in one area to the neglect of others, but developing our ports and our opportunities for exports and communications for export through airports and through seaports by creating new areas around our coasts at the best strategic points. By concentrating in this area we should not be choosing the best strategic point but neglecting the opportunity for properly developing a much wider and more diverse series of opportunities for export.

I hope that the House will not too readily accept the scepticism of the Kentish Members, my right hon. Friend the Member for Ashford (Mr. Deedes) and my hon. Friend the Member for Canterbury (Mr. Crouch), This is an emotive subject I suspect that the Kentish Members, not-withstanding denials, are influenced by their constituency interests and by the -anxieties of people in Kent.

What the Kentish people fear is a gross exaggeration of anything that is likely to happen. It is contrary to the whole history of the development of transport for any new form of transport completely to supplant a previous form. What usually happens is that the newer form is added to the previous form, which continues for limited use. There are not the slightest grounds for the suggestion that the Channel Tunnel would divert all traffic from one form of transport and away from all the other forms of transport.

It is a mistake to believe that a large amount of road building in Kent would be inevitable. I do not believe that there would be much industrial development in Kent. There is industrial development around a port because the highest charges in transport are transfer charges, and a consignee will try to get his factory or his warehouse as near the point of transhipment as he can. But traffic on a liner train going through a tunnel would not have to unload at the point where the tunnel emerged. It could easily go another 50 or 100 miles without any great increase in costs.

Much of the opposition to the Channel Tunnel is due to the conflict of two political trends which are spreading round the world like an influenza epidemic. On the surface, in the Iron Curtain countries, in the newly-emerging countries and in the old democracies the trend is towards local independence in smaller and smaller units and the demand for people to manage their own affairs—Czechoslovakia, Biafra, Britanny, Quebec, and there are Scottish, Welsh and even Cornish nationalists. Much of the opposition to the runnel comes from the belief that "wogs begin at Calais"—some of my constituents think that "wogs" begin at Plymouth. Below that feeling there is a political trend towards wider economic unity in larger areas, and hence we have moved towards the Common Market, the Communists' trade pacts and talk of an Atlantic Community, and so on.

Nothing impressed me more at the conference in Lille than the fact that there were many businessmen and university professors from France, Germany, Belgium and Holland, all of whom not only substantially agreed about the Channel Tunnel but believed that North-West Europe stretched from the Ruhr to the Channel and was projected over into industrial England. They regard it as one unit and believe that it will inevitably be continued into England.

I am sure that my hon. Friend does not want to mislead the House. Having been at the conference, he will recall that they talked about the sunny South of France and the awful North, because the North is industrialised and the rest is kept for holidays.

One of the delegates pointed out to me that Acton and Slough were nearer Lille than was the Ruhr and that Manchester was nearer Lille than was Hamburg. They were thinking of industrial co-operation between England and what they called North-West Europe. What is more, one of the Dutch representatives was contemplating that there would be some diversion of ocean traffic from Rotterdam which would be transferred to London and thence by rail to Europe if there were a Channel Tunnel, but he still thought it worth while to have the Tunnel.

Quite apart from any political arrangements about the Common Market or anything else, there will be a great increase in the flow of goods and passengers over the Channel which existing facilities will not be able to meet. It is not a question of the tunnel or other facilities; we will need all the facilities we can get. By 1966, the volume of cross-Channel traffic had already reached the upper estimate of the 1963 report mentioned by my right hon. Friend the Member for Ashford, which it had predicted for the year 1985 and it is still growing. The 1963 report also envisaged a levelling off of general goods traffic from that date, but it is still increasing.

Much too much stress has been placed on the Channel as a motor-rail ferry service of accompanied cars between the Tunnel terminals. It was originally suggested that that traffic would amount to one third of the total and that two thirds would be concerned with goods and passengers. I expect it to be less than one third. Roll-on roll-off traffic will not all go through these terminals. We all know from the popularity of the long-distance service between London and Scotland and London and Cornwall that many people find it convenient to put their cars on the train and go on a long journey that way, particularly overnight. I envisage a motor-rail service through the tunnel starting in say Edinburgh and finishing at Paris, or starting at Manchester and finishing at Lyons, and much road traffic would not start or stop at the tunnel terminals at all, but would go through to other destinations.

For this reason, I do not agree that a vast amount of road-building in Kent would be needed because of the traffic coming through the Channel Tunnel.

rose—

Before the hon. Member intervenes, I remind the House that this debate must conclude at 2.15 p.m. and that the Minister still has to reply and that there may be an Opposition Front Bench spokesman.

I am drawing my remarks to a close.

The car-owning population in this country is increasing rapidly. Last Wednesday, some of us went to the Road Research Laboratory, where it was pointed out that there were 5½million private cars in 1966 and that it was projected that this number would be 17½ million by 1975 and 31 million by 2,000. Professor Proudlove put the figure a good deal higher than that when he talked to us a day or two ago. He said that traffic would double every six years until 2,000. If this is so, there is plenty of traffic for all facilities.

The Channel tunnel company has repeatedly indicated that is believes construction could be financed by British and Foreign private capital without imposing any burden on public funds, because it has confidence that the tunnel would pay its way. The guarantee referred to would only be required to meet the requirements of American law and thus bring in American capital which would not otherwise be invested in this country. If this is true, the choice is not between the tunnel or other developments, but other developments on the tunnel plus other developments. In such a case it would be foolish not to take this opportunity to have these additional facilities.

The hon. Member for Truro (Mr. Geoffrey Wilson) said that this was an emotive subject. The speeches we have heard, while they have not been emotional, have shown clearly the divergence of views on this topic. It would be best, if because of the many aspects of the project, I review, rapidly of necessity, the whole subject.

In covering that much ground, I may not have time to do full justice to all the interesting points raised by hon. Members during the debate. If there prove to be significant omissions of this kind I will, of course, be glad to give more detailed replies on individual points to hon. Members who write to me.

I will begin with the nature of the project and the basis on which it is being pursued. These two things are well known to those closest to the project, but may not be sufficiently clear to those who are not. Basically, the Channel Tunnel is a simple continuous loop of railway stretching roughly 35 miles between points near Folkestone and Calais, with links to the two main railway networks. These links would allow through freight, motor-rail and passenger trains, including night sleepers, linking the main centres in this country and in Continental Europe and helping to relieve congestion on the roads.

The loop itself would, in effect, be a high-speed, high-capacity roll-on/roll-off ferry for road vehicles of all types. The ferry trains would be enclosed and there would be room for people to get out of their cars and stretch their legs. There would be special ferry trains for large commercial vehicles.

At peaks, there would be a car ferry train every four or five minutes and a ferry capacity of well over 3,000 cars per hour in each direction—though we do not expect demand to reach that level on many days before the end of the century. The 35-mile journey in the ferry train would take 35 minutes—a block speed of 60 m.p.h. The terminals would use the latest techniques available and passage through them would be quick and easy.

Initially, we expect about half the tunnel revenue to come from the accompanied passenger vehicles, about a third from freight and the rest from through rail passenger services, but with the passage of time freight could become an even more important factor than the ferry.

That, briefly, is the project. Why has it been pursued and developed by the British and French Governments in preference to other forms of fixed link? There are three main reasons. First, the alternative fixed links, whether road tunnels, bridges, or combinations of the two, would cost a great deal more than the rail Tunnel without attracting proportionately more traffic. So they do not offer such good prospects of economic return, still less of proving commercially competitve with existing means of transport.

Secondly, there are serious problems of ventilation with road tunnels of the necessary length and traffic capacity. Thirdly, we could not obstruct international waters with a bridge or a bridge tunnel without obtaining international agreement and even then there would be both local and international problems of marine regulation and safety in the Channel.

The only practical choice, as we see it, lies between the rail tunnel, on the one hand, and continued use and development of the existing means of transport by sea and air, on the other. I will come back later to the question of how we hope to make this choice. First, however, I will turn to the organisation for pursuing the project, and the place of Parliament in that organisation.

There are two major factors influencing the organisation for this project. First, the project is Anglo-French. This means that all major decisions must be taken jointly and announced jointly by the British and French Governments. This is obvious. What may be less immediately obvious to hon. Members is the practical restriction which this fact of collaboration imposes upon the impromptu or ad hoc release of information or opinions by either side.

Frequently, we are accused of not saying enough: sometimes one side is accused of saying less than the other side. Both sides, in practice, do their best to make useful information available within an agreed framework and, equally, on both sides of the Channel. In fact, hon. Members would find that the British Government have kept the House better informed than the French have the National Assembly.

Of course, if a British official reads an academic paper on the subject to a learned society, his French colleagues may not read the same paper on the same day in France, and vice versa: the two Administrations are in very close collaboration, but they do not and should not stand on each others' toes. There was a symposium at Lille, in May, and another at Cranfield, in July. Both had been planned for some time and the timing was in the hands of the private bodies who organised them.

Secondly, in conformity with its status as a public utility linking the road and rail systems of Britain and the Continent, the tunnel would be operated, under control of the two Governments, by a public operating authority. But the Governments have agreed that it should be financed, and its construction arranged, by an organisation in the private sector which, for convenience, we call the Construction Company. Shareholders in this company would be remunerated on a basis related to the commercial success of the tunnel.

So we have four main parties: the two Governments, the private sector construction company, international in nature, and the Anglo-French operating authority. Before the project goes ahead, it must be shown to be consistent both with the national interests of Britain and France and with the commercial interests of the construction company. These all depend upon the likely demand for the use of the tunnel: and that, in turn, depends upon the attractiveness of the services it will provide and the charges it will make for them, by comparison with services and charges in other forms of cross-Channel transport. How will the choice be determined?

The two Governments have already made two massive assessments, in 1963 and 1966, of the tunnel's economic and commercial prospects. Both of them rated them highly, the second more highly than the first. It has been alleged recently that the 1963 study, which was published as a Command Paper, was in some ways not up to the expected standards. In fact, it was about the most comprehensive investment analysis using modern cost-benefit techniques to have been published in the country at that date—and say this in the full knowledge that it was published under a Conservative Government.

But, of course, the 1963 study is out of date in certain respects. So is the 1966 study.

So is the tunnel out of date.

This is the point at issue. In particular, they both rather underestimated future traffic growth and in so doing underestimated the tunnel's prospects. However, there are other factors to be reviewed, which may pull the other way. Will newer forms of marine transport, like the hovercraft, the containership, the multi-purpose roll-on/ roll-off vessel, spoil the tunnel's competitive position in this growing cross-Channel market? Of course, their proponents think so and sometimes loudly say so. But, so far, they have not produced any detailed evidence to support their case.

Nevertheless, the two Governments and the private interests accept entirely that the tunnel's prospects must be reviewed in detail before the final decision to build is taken. That will be the purpose of the two-year study period which will begin when a financing group has been chosen.

The studies will be technical, commercial and economic. They will have to complete the detailed definition of the project in operating and engineering terms and, in so doing, to reassess the costs. These new cost figures, together with new and comprehensive studies of cross-Channel traffic and of demand for future services, will be the basis for the new economic and commercial assessment on which the final decision whether or not to build must be based.

The studies will, of course, take account of new development such as hovercraft and other forms of cross-Channel link. The Ministry has consulted widely—including the Chamber of Shipping, the National Ports Council and the road haulage and motoring organisations—on the scope and design of these studies and we are grateful for the many helpful suggestions made.

The Channel Tunnel Planning Council will be set up under the Transport Act, 1968, to take part in the studies as forerunner, on the British side, of the public operating authority. A similar organisation will be set up in France. Most of the cost of the studies will be borne by the private financing group, which will set up a study company for the purpose.

I have said that the final decision to build must await the results of the final study period, which will last about two years from the choice of financing group. But the overriding control over that final decision, of course, rests with Parliament because enabling powers must be sought before work can begin. And, as my right hon. Friend has promised the House on many occasions, he intends to place the results of the studies before hon. Members before asking them to give the final go-ahead.

In the meantime, as my right hon. Friend announced on 22nd July, we have decided on the sites which must be safeguarded for terminal requirements in this country so that detailed planning of the terminals and road links may continue. We are grateful to the Kent County Council for the help it has given. Hon. Members may have noticed the Press statement made by the Kent County Council the other day.

The choice of Cheriton, near Folkestone, as the ferry terminal should more than compensate for any employment lost in Folkestone from the withdrawal of cross-Channel shipping services.

The next move will be the selection of a financing group. This is the subject of detailed negotiation at present and it would not further those negotiations if I gave details here. When the financing group is chosen, however—I hope before the end of the year—my right hon. Friend will certainly consider, with his French colleague, the need for a joint release of information on the agreement reached, the basis for conduct of the study period, and other relevant information, whether as a White Paper or in some other form.

I have given, perhaps rather rapidly, the background to the state of play concerning the Channel tunnel. However, because of the shortness of the debate, and the way in which I have had to rush through my speech, if hon. Members have any other points which they would like me to deal with we shall be only too pleased to deal with them by correspondence.

I am grateful to the Parliamentary Secretary for giving me the opportunity to make one or two observations on his remarks. From the point of view of the strategic development of the British economy, this is one of the most crucial debates which we could have. I could not help being amused by a cutting from the Financial Times dated 29th October 1966, which said:

"Channel Tunnel by 1975—cost may reach £170 million."

That was regarded then as a high figure. We are now talking about the figure of £200 million. This is a warning to us. We are now considering, not figures which seemed relevant at the time, but far higher figures for the cost of building the tunnel.

One point about which the Parliamentary Secretary was not as forthcoming as I would have wished him to be, concerns the question of delay, to which my right hon. Friend the Member for Ashford (Mr. Deedes) referred. The Ministry is not keeping to the target which it has published. It issued a Press release on 18th October, 1968, in which it said that it was hoped that agreement could be reached with a selected group in the next few months. That was eight months ago. Today, the Parliamentary Secretary said that he hoped that agreement could be reached before the end of the year. He merely "hoped" that agreement could be reached. It is possible that agreement to proceed with the detailed study will not be reached until the beginning of 1970. That puts back the schedule, with a two-year investigation period followed by a five-year construction period.

Therefore, we must talk about a Channel Tunnel coming into operation in 1977 or 1978, with the immediate effects which it will have on any cost projections, but it would be helpful if the Ministry could inject into this early negotiating stage a degree of urgency. My hon. Friends have rightly pointed out the effects on this part of England, with planning blight and the possible consequences for the transportation system of the United Kingdom which will follow from a negative or positive decision. It is, therefore, urgent that decisions are reached. It is obvious that no meaningful decisions can be made until the study period has been entered into.

I hoped that the Parliamentary Secretary would be a little more helpful in saying how the information would be published once the study period begins. He was clear that the information would be published. Is it to be published in the form of a White Paper? Perhaps the hon. Gentleman would think about that. However, plainly we would want a clear indication about how quickly the facts and figures which will be updated are to be made available to the House. Obviously, a view as to whether this is an economic proposition cannot be formed until that information has been produced.

The Parliamentary Secretary said that the tunnel would be financed and the construction managed, by a private sector company. I should be interested to know whether the Government expect to give larger undertakings to a private sector company than was perhaps envisaged in the early days. Will undertakings be necessary on behalf of British Railways to underwrite the revenue of the tunnel company in the event of, for example, industrial unrest, which could have most dramatic effects on a nerve centre of this sort? I hope that the Parliamentary Secretary will consider that and will give us the latest views on the guarantees which will be required before an investment of this size is forthcoming.

This has been a useful debate on a very important subject. My only regret is that we are faced with even more delay than was envisaged earlier.

In raising the question of what is called "the battered baby syndrome", I should like to make it clear that I am not a psychiatrist or a doctor, but that as someone who has been involved in teaching and caring for young children for some time I have a far greater interest in this subject than many laymen concerned with child welfare. I take the opportunity to raise this matter in the House because the House, as well as being a legislative body, is, I believe, a public forum in which matters of social interest with perhaps grave social implications can be raised and highlighted.

"The battered baby syndrome", as it is known in clinical circles, has come to light during the last few years. Some exceedingly young children suffer physical abuse from their parents, or, in some instances, from their parent sub- stitutes. These children are incredibly young. They are usually aged between a few weeks and three years. They are children who are incapable of speaking for themselves, as is often the case with older children who have been badly treated.

The attacks on these babies—and attacks they most certainly are—can take place at frequent or infrequent intervals. An estimate of between three and four times a year in some cases is given. It is so severe that, as a result of studies which have been made in America and work done in this country in the last two or three years, it is estimated that at least 10 per cent. of the babies who are attacked die. The figure may be as high as 20 per cent., because it is becoming clear that often a wrong diagnosis has been made. About 30 per cent. of these young children sustain permanent brain damage or permanent physical injury which cripples them for life. I am referring to cases which are now being diagnosed. Undoubtedly, over the years there have been cases which have not been diagnosed.

One of the reasons for the difficulty in diagnosis and the fact that this problem has not come to the attention of psychiatrists, doctors and social workers until recent years is fairly obvious. Very often the injuries inflicted on these babies are fairly consistent with the explanation which is given by the parents. In other words, doctors are frequently not sure that there has been a direct assault and attack upon the child.

This is understandable because few of us, whatever our occupations, would imagine that a parent or parents of a young baby would deliberately attack it physically. For this reason, the explanations of the physical injury have often been accepted by those involved in dealing with the children because there has been no plausible explanation to the contrary.

The danger arises that when the injuries of some of these babies have been attended to, more often than not in hospital, they are returned home, after being treated for, say, an alleged fall down stairs or a fall from a pram, to the very conditions in which there is mounting evidence to show that the attacks are repeated. Any doctor who may have had doubts in making a diagnosis and who has erred, understandably, on the side of the parents must sometimes, if a child again comes to his notice suffering in the same way, feel exceedingly guilty that he did not notice what was wrong before.

There is mounting evidence that several hundred children each year are abused in this way. That figure is based on cases which are known as well as on calculations for those which are not known but working back on case history reports which have come to notice.

One of the big difficulties about child abuse and baby maltreatment is that it is not a new problem. It has always affected a minority of older and younger children in every society, in some societies more than in others. It has always been a very difficult matter to establish. Without wanting to be unduly alarmist, I think that either the problem is increasing or it has always existed in this form but we are only now being to recognise it.

When using statistics in any science or relevant matter on a subject which has only recently come to light, it is difficult to say that the trouble is on the increase when we have nothing with which to make a comparison. I shall not, therefore, attempt to say that this problem is on the increase. All I know is that there are now many more cases which people recognise as battered babies than there were formerly.

Those of us who are concerned with the problem people who have worked with young children, and particularly parents, who would suffer, as I think they do, have found it utterly inconceivable that parents, often apparently loving parents—and not only apparently loving, because I believe that all of them are, in fact, loving parents—will, from time to time, under stress or through compulsion, abuse their babies in this horrifying way.

I do not want to cause alarm or to raise suspicions about the number of cases, but I raise this matter this afternoon because, however small the numbers may be, the tragic suffering in a baby thus abused remains with the child for the rest of his life. This is something which it is impossible to estimate without looking at what happens to children as they face the various problems confronting them as they grow up.

Those who have had anything to do with the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, for example, know that for many years that society has stressed the need for the public at large to report cases of suspected cruelty to young children. The society has always stressed that it is far better to be wrong than to be doubtful and let a casualty go unnoticed and unchecked. Likewise, however, all of us have been reluctant to do so. We feel, perhaps, that it is nothing to do with us or we may have been willing, for understandable reasons, to accept a parent's explanation of how a child received injuries.

If we reject the explanation of a parent—and sometimes we may know the parents—we are led to other conclusions and to consider other explanations which are too horrifying for many of us to contemplate. I believe that this attitude has militated a great deal against us in this country—and, perhaps, people in other countries, too—in being able to understand what goes on in many homes and what compulsions some parents, who themselves are deprived, are suffering and taking out on their very young children.

It is, therefore, understandable that doctors, social workers and others readily accept a parent's explanation. In my view, however, and that of the N.S.P.C.C. over the years, it is far better wrongly to accuse and to be found that one is wrong than to leave a doubt uninvestigated. To miss a danger spot and the possibility of finding out what the situation was all about must leave people who have ever been faced with these problems with feelings of guilt and worry.

One of the things which has impressed me, and on which I hope that my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary will comment, is some of the work which has been done in the United States in terms of the child abuse laws and how, in one or two States, experiments have been conducted rather to change the emphasis whereby doctors and others may complain or may report injuries on children, even if they are almost sure that the explanation which is given is satisfactory.

The difficulty is that a child of these tender weeks, months or years is utterly incapable of giving an explanation, and we have to remember this when dealing with this exceedingly young age group. In looking at some of the work which has been done in the United States—it is not conclusive and I would not suggest that it is—one of the things which has commended it, to me at least, is that if a doctor, a hospital or social worker has a child of these tender years brought to his notice and finds that it has sustained injury—certainly where there is the slightest doubt whether the injury has been acquired as a result of deliberate abuse—it is incumbent upon him to report the fact to the local authority or the medical authority for investigation. Doctors are protected if their accusations prove to be unfounded, and investigations are carried out into every case which is reported.

From the evidence, which, I repeat, is not conclusive, the obvious objection to this does not seem, to me at least, to be valid—that is, if parents know that injuries to their children might be reported and investigated fear of reprisals might deter them from taking a child to a hospital or clinic.

Evidence in the States on this is that it is not happening, but there have been no fewer cases of battered babies since this took place; moreover, that, if anything, more have been discovered as a result of investigating most cases of injuries to babies some of which have been found to be perfectly consistent with the explanation offered by the parents, while others have been found to be cases of what is called child abuse.

I think I can say that this argument about the reluctance of parents is not supported so far by the evidence. I would still have thought that parents themselves who are innocent would understand the necessity that somebody should report an instance such as this, and I would have thought that most parents would be willing to have the background situation investigated when there is evidence of a baby having been injured.

It seems to me that this is something we should look at and that perhaps my hon. Friend could have some discussion with those concerned with research into this, and who are doing valuable work, to see in what way the Home Office and others can help to try to deal with this very difficult problem.

The overwhelming case for looking at this in this way and of tightening the situation in relation to reporting instances is that it removes from the doctor or the social worker the terrible responsibility of having to decide whether or not there has been child abuse. If a doctor has to make that decision himself it must be extremely difficult for him. He is not sure, no social worker can be absolutely sure, of the consequences if he fails to make a report of cases which come to his notice. By this means we should not be placing on their shoulders a responsibility which many of them do not want and which it is not fair they should have.

The other side of the matter which we must stress is that we are always left with the danger of sending a child back to circumstances in which it received injury, and doing so because we have been reluctant to ensure whether the case should be reported, and there is evidence in this country and in America and other parts of the world that many of the children who are reported do suffer further attacks and that it is not until there have been several that people are alterted to the true facts. So I think that the argument is very strong that more attention should be given by the Government to this problem.

Another side to the matter I want to raise, very briefly, is the question of the parents who inflict this sort of damage on their very young children. I know the feeling which all of us have, which there is in every civilised society, the feeling of outrage and, therefore, of indignation against parents who injure their children in this way, and it tends to blind us to the plight of the parents themselves.

The very phrase "battered baby" itself, which I personally do not like, expresses our revulsion at those attitudes towards their children by these parents so that there is a tendency to call for their punishment, for severe penalties, severe treatment against the parents. I do not believe that it is the way to deal with this. There is no evidence to suggest that treating the symptom, in other words, treating the parent in this way, gets down to the root of the problem. I do not think that a great deal is yet known about the parent who behaves in this way. What is known is that prison sentences, harsh penalties, have in no way stopped attacks on the children.

I cannot help but feel that if the criminal law is used in these cases, in many instances it certainly can destroy a child's whole family life and the parents' family life and the relationships between them, so that it may become impossible to rebuild them, and, surely, the rebuilding of those relationships is what we all want. I do not want, because of my feelings, or because of the feelings which we all have, about the behaviour of parents and others who behave in this way to very young children, to suggest that we must at this stage take further action against people who behave in this way.

I do not believe that we can produce the results we want by punishing people; we do not know enough yet on the small amount of evidence which is available about people acting under compulsions which they themselves do not understand and cannot control.

All that I would say on this—because there are one or two things which are absolutely obvious—is that practically all the cases which have been studied in this country and in the States show, no matter the pyschological terms which are used to describe the parents, that they are psychotic, that they are neurotic, or that they are something else, that there is one thing which has emerged as common to them all, and that is that these parents themselves had a grossly unhappy and grossly deprived childhood.

This is the common fact among all of those parents who have come to the notice of those dealing with this problem. By deprivation, I do not mean deprivation of the sort we often mean when we talk about the deprived home—not poverty, not material deprivation. In these cases this is not the common factor. The deprivation here was emotional deprivation, often emotional neglect; it was deprivation of a psychological nature, which cannot be compensated for by material factors.

It is because this is the one single matter which runs through all the cases which have come to notice that it is one which, I think, needs examination and not only in terms of the parents them- selves but in the terms of the children themselves who are, perhaps, by themselves being deprived, being brought up to become parents who behave in this way and who appall us, and will themselves become inadequate parents.

I raise this matter here today because it is important that we in this House, who are occupied with all sorts of other things, and do not know a great deal about this matter—I do not know a great deal about it—are able here to bring these matters to public attention. Moreover, I firmly believe that the various Government Departments should give all the assistance and help and advice and co-operation they can to those people who are engaged in research and trying to find the solution to the problem and methods of treatment both to help the babies involved and also to help the parents involved.

Even though here we may not know the solutions, I believe that we have a duty to find out what this is all about, and have a duty to bring these things to the notice of one another and to help the social workers engaged in this field so that we may all, and the public, too, be alerted—not to be suspicious of one another, but to be conscious of the problem, and that we may come across cases which require investigation.

I would remind the House that this debate should end at 3 o'clock and that the Minister has still to speak.

All hon. Members of the House will be grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Eton and Slough (Miss Lestor) for having drawn the attention of the House to this question. I shall not detain the House very long, but I can say from my own professional knowledge that the complexity and the mystery of this problem is almost beyond understanding at the moment. I have known of more than one family in which several children are properly looked after so that no one could raise any possible complaint as to their treatment, and yet one child, a child just a few months old, suffers injuries the explanation of which, and of how they came to be inflicted, is seemingly beyond understanding—except by the explanation of ill-treatment by one or other of the parents.

One cannot say that it is the deprivation of the parent in childhood that has brought it about. If that were the explanation, one would expect all the children of the family to be treated in this way. The medical profession is mystified. A doctor, in giving evidence, said that there was not really any explanation for the injuries suffered by the child. This problem is slowly but surely coming to light and we have not yet begun to find out the explanation. I hope that the abilities within the Home Office will be devoted to trying to find a solution in the way of guiding and helping the parents.

My hon. Friend the Member for Eton and Slough (Miss Lestor) has a great knowledge of young people and often raises in the House matters concerning young children. We are indebted to her for raising the question of the "battered baby syndrome", which is a well-known topic in specialised circles. As she says, the more it is publicised the better.

During recent years the term "battered baby syndrome" has been given to symptoms and signs of repeated injuries which have occurred in this way, and the syndrome has received increasing attention from doctors, social workers and others. We cannot be sure whether such cases have become more frequent, or whether an increasing awareness of the syndrome has brought cases to light which might formerly have been accepted as resulting from accidents, from falling downstairs, and so on. It seems likely that we are dealing with an old problem which in the past was to some extent hidden by the lack of facilities for skilled diagnosis.

Hon. Gentlemen will accept, I know, that it was not until the introduction of the National Health Service that people had access consistently to the medical profession. There is reluctance, in the absence of positive proof, to attribute injuries to the action of parents.

My hon. Friend raised the aspects of psychology and psychiatry, and one needs to have knowledge of these subjects before one can understand this matter. We could probably all offer suggestions as to what might be involved. Speaking personally, I feel that it was in the 20th century that the concept of romantic marriage first appeared. The whole of communications, the Press, women's magazines, films and television concentrate on the idea of marriage being romantic, but do not go beyond the point of marriage. The disappointment afterwards, when one finds that marriage involves wandering around in the middle of the night carrying a child, comes as a shock, because the popular song does not mention that part of it. Earlier marriage may also be a factor.

The State seeks to protect children in several ways. First in point of time—and my hon. Friend saw the limitations of this—is the criminal law, which makes it an offence deliberately to injure a child, as indeed a person of any age. It is also an offence, under Section 1 of the Children and Young Persons Act, 1933, wilfully to assault, neglect, or ill-treat a child, although the kind of injuries with which we are concerned this afternoon are often sufficiently grave to constitute offences under the general law. But the prosecution of the parents, after the event, is no protection for the child. Nor is the fear of prosecution a very strong protection against injuries which are often inflicted under stress, or in ignorance of the ease with which it is possible to cause injuries to young children.

Second, the law enables a child who is ill-treated to be brought before the juvenile court as being in need of care, protection or control, and empowers the court to remove him from his parents or to make a supervision order. The Children and Young Persons Bill, now before Parliament, makes similar provision, and, in another place, the Government introduced an Amendment which will enable the juvenile court to act in relation to other children in the household where injury to one child raises a probability that others may similarly be injured. My hon. Friend said that often only one child in the family is so treated. Here again, this is action after the event so far as the injured child is concerned.

Third, there are the various services concerned with young children. We have health visitors, clinics, general practitioners and the children's department of local authorities. If these services are able to identify the children who are at risk they may he able to take action before the child sustains serious injury.

There are two problems here: identifying families whose children may be at risk; and identifying at an early stage an injury which is not accidental, so that action may be taken before a further injury is caused. Both of these problems present difficulties. As I have said, one child only may be treated in this way, the others being perfectly properly treated.

The great majority of injuries to small children are accidental, and it is not always easy for a doctor or hospital to decide whether the parents' account of a purely accidental injury is true or not. It may be that even if the injury was caused only by clumsiness in handling the baby the parents will have a sense of guilt and present a misleading story.

With a view to giving guidance on the recognition of cases of suspected deliberate injury, the British Paediatric Association, in consultation with the Home Office and the then Ministry of Health, prepared a memorandum, which was printed in the British Medical Journal in March, 1966. If my hon. Friend has not seen this, I will make a copy available to her. Copies of this memorandum were circulated by the Home Office and the Ministry to local authorities, hospitals and chairmen of medical committees. The memorandum gave guidance on the medical, social and legal aspects; on the problems involved in identifying cases; and on the action to be taken where it was suspected that an injury was not accidental.

Identification of children who may be at risk presents an even more difficult problem. It is necessary to pick out those children whose situation is such that it seems likely that they may be injured, and on whom a close watch should be kept.

The Medical Research Council is conducting at the London Hospital, under the direction of Professor Camps, some research into this question, and into the related question of how doctors can be helped to detect non-accidental injuries. We should not however, assume that research will provide us with rule of thumb answers. If, for example, it were established that an unwanted child, or the youngest child—which is sometimes the same thing—or the child of young parents, is more at risk, these are such large categories as to be not particularly useful for identification purposes. Nevertheless, it is desirable that we should build up, by research and by other means, as much information as possible to guide those who have to take decisions.

The National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children has launched a research project based on cases referred by two London teaching hospitals. An important aim of this project is remedial, to discover methods of working with families so as to avoid any repetition of injury to the child. The Association of Children's Officers collects regularly from its members case histories of cases arising in their areas, and these are circulated to all members of the association. The aim is to disseminate among children's officers a wide amount of information about situations which may occur only infrequently in any one local authority area.

Where the doctors are satisfied that a child's injuries were not accidental, the question arises what action should be taken. I think it will be agreed that the primary aim should be to protect the future welfare of the child and of other children in the family. The memorandum concluded that the doctor's first concern must be the safety of the child and recommended that he should report to the children's officer of the local authority, although it recognised that there might be circumstances where the doctor would feel obliged to inform the police.

It suggested that in some cases a joint meeting between the children's officer, the hospital consultant, the family doctor, and the health visitor and others would be appropriate. A number of courses have to be considered: whether the case can be dealt with by informal supervision and guidance by the children and health departments of the local authority; whether the child should be received into care; whether the child should be brought before the juvenile court with a view to committal to care or a supervision order; whether the parents should be prosecuted. The appropriate course needs to be decided in the light of the circumstances of each case and it is not possible to lay down hard and fast rules.

Prosecution may not always be desirable in the long-term interests of the child, particularly where the injuries have been inflicted under stress or in ignorance of the harm that, for example, shaking a very young child can do. Even if the child is committed to the care of the local authority it may be desirable when he is older to work towards his restoration to the parents, under supervision.

Moreover, the evidence is often not clear cut and a prosecution which fails may make other action more difficult. Sometimes there is no evidence sufficiently strong to justify any kind of court proceedings, but the parents may none the less be willing to accept help. The building up of a body of information about the action taken in particular cases and its results should help those who have to take these decisions.

My hon. Friend mentioned experience in the United States. As with all that she said, the matter will be looked at by the appropriate Department. The laws in some American States do not require all injuries to be reported, but only those where the doctor has reasonable cause to believe that an injury is not accidental. I could argue that that is what already happens in this country, although it does not have the force of law.

There is one other difference, although I do not want to over-play this argument, principally because of lack of knowledge of the law in this respect or, indeed, the background. There is the fact that the American doctor is in a different contractual relationship with his patient than that which has developed in this country over the years because of the nature of our Health Service and the development of local authority services over the years, which are of a different pattern from those in the United States.

It might be that the legal pattern in parts of the United States, however desirable it may or may not be there, would not be applicable to this country. In any event, if one relieves the doctor of the decision, somebody has to take it. If it is a matter of medical evidence, it comes back to the doctor ultimately.

The greatest need is for everybody concerned to be aware that a small number of young children are injured in this way, to be on the look out for signs that an injury may not have been accidental and to recognise that the object must be to take action most likely to protect the child and other children in the family. I think that as a result of the memorandum to which I have referred, and of discussion in this question in the medical and lay press, there is now a much greater awareness of the problem among doctors, social workers and others.

We will certainly do all we can to support and further all these efforts and discussions. My hon. Friend by raising this matter in the House today, has furthered that discussion. This House is a sounding board, a public forum, and I hope that the words of my two hon. Friends and myself will do something to add to the general knowledge and to bring to a wider public the nature of the problem. We hope that this debate will be a step nearer towards its solution.

The closing of the Cupar sugar beet factory is a bitter blow not only to the Royal Borough of Cupar and surrounding district, but to my constituents who work in the factory. It extends to many ancillary industries round about which are connected the growing of sugar beet and its harvesting. It is of vital importance to farming on the east coast of Scotland, which is the main sugar beet growing area, and even to areas as far south as Northumberland and Durham.

The first complaint I have to make about the closure is that sugar beet is a price review commodity. As such, if an announcement was to have been made, in which the Government apparently agree, that the sugar beet factory was to De closed, then full consultation ought to have taken place with the National Farmers' Union in Scotland. I am certain that there would be a very great outcry if it was proposed to close down a plant in any other industry without any consultation with the people vitally affected.

It is true that for the last three years the sugar beet acreage of the Cupar factory has been low and the factory has not been working to full capacity, but it is interesting to recall that even before many of the modern methods were introduced to improve the yield of sugar beet, acreage of the sugar beet crop was fully subscribed by growers in Scotland. I have on my file a letter from the late chairman of the British Sugar Corporation telling of the appeal by Scottish growers to extend the present factory or to produce another factory. I believe that there was also a demand at that time for a factory in Northern Ireland. The changes in agricultural methods plus the need for import savings, and the changes have all increased the popularity of sugar beet as a crop.

There is not time in this short debate to go into detail as to what has happened to bring this about, but the fact is that the acreage is nearly at full capacity in the factory and it should be full next year. This shows that it is now accepted by the farming community in Scotland as a profitable crop to grow.

In the last two or three years the Government have acknowledged the need for an increase acreage of cereals. There is a need for what is known as a break crop to break the cereal rotation. This is being subsidised by the Government. In this year's Price Review the amount offered was something like £1·6 million, but none of this money is going to Scotland. The break crop which has been chosen is that of field beans, which has been shown by agricultural experts not to be a crop which can be grown, roughly speaking, north of the area of Yorkshire. The £l·6 million has gone to help cereal growers in England, and nothing has gone to Scottish cereal growers. I think that there is a direct Government responsibility and involvement in this part of the agricultural programme.

There is no doubt that the bulk of growers of beet at its present price are finding it a profitable crop to grow, and if the factory were to stay open we could look forward to the maximum acreage being taken up. The British Sugar Corporation argues that it cannot make the Cupar sugar factory pay, but I think it must make plain to the farming community in Scotland why this is so. The factory was designed more than 40 years ago—I think it was opened in 1925 or 1926—and it may be in need of modernisation. I put down a Question today to the Secretary of State for Scotland asking how much had been spent on improving beet handling, because one knows that the factory was designed for an intake of beet by rail, and now 98 per cent. of the crop comes by the road. I do not believe that anyone has made clear whether the money that has been spent has been sufficient to enable the factory to handle the crop by road economically. Is it the fault of the factory not modernising its equipment that is making it run at a loss?

I understand that the corporation, I suppose one might say out of the kindness of its heart, to keep the factory going for two more years. It has helped growers by a transport subvention. I have already mentioned the obligation which the Government have in regard to the break crop. They might be able to relieve the corporation of this item of its expenditure, because the corporation has said that it is losing between 25s. and 40s. a ton on the operations of this factory. This may or may not be so, but this should not be the stumbling block to the continuing operation of the factory, and we ought to have from the Government, or through the corporation if that is how it is to be done, some realistic estimate of how this money has to be spent. Should it, for example, be spent on modernising the boiler plant, an eventuality which any factory has to face from time to time?

This factory has been going more than 40 years, and I think that we must consider what will happen in the next 20 years. I do not believe that agricultural production will go on in exactly the same way as it does now. One of the main reasons for this is that Britain's entry into the Common Market is now becoming a very real possibility and we have to consider what effect our entry will have on the sugar beet industry. I do not believe that in the terms of this debate it is possible for the Minister to answer what is perhaps a hypothetical case, but, in laying plans for the future, the corporation has said that it is trying to rationalise this industry, and, looking ahead, it is bound to take into its calculations what effect joining the Common Market may have.

As a high user of sugar, we produce about one-third of our sugar consumption. We buy sugar from the Commonwealth, which may be a limiting factor on what we produce ourselves. Having looked up the figures for 1968, I find that we buy raw sugar from France, West Germany, Holland and Poland, and refined sugar from all those countries and East Germany as well. The Commonwealth Sugar Agreement should not prescribe exactly the amount of sugar beet production which this country may have in the future. If we go into the Common Market, shall we find that producers in Germany, producing less sugar to the acre than Scottish farmers are now producing, will be able to sell it to housewives in Scotland? If that happened should we be convinced that it was right? Consumption of sugar in the E.E.C. countries at just over 6½ million tons a year is met entirely from their own resources, and they are usually net exporters of sugar. The fact that they send sugar to this country demonstrates that that is so.

Some of my English friends say, "It is no good going on about sugar beet growing in Scotland. It will never pay. You do not have the right climate", and so on. I do not believe that. I have the figures for the better growers of sugar beet in Scotland. Taking a five-year average, I find that there are yields of more than 20 tons to the acre at best.

With the changing pattern of agriculture we find people specialising more in sugar beet. Previously there were 1,200 to 1,500 growers, but the numbers will decrease while the quality of production rises. If only the right steps could be taken on the factory side, sugar beet growing would be a profitable industry in Scotland. So many new things are coming along which will increase plant population. This will ensure the increase in yield needed in Scotland.

There have been some years, not many, when Scottish average production has been better than the English figure. There is real hope for the industry. In the original statement the corporation said that it would close the factory in two years' time and that the Government had been informed. I hope that we can have an assurance that the Government and the Scottish N.F.U. will get together to see whether, in the circumstances which are likely to arise, discounting the past, this can be a profitable industry and the Cupar factory can remain open.

The House will be grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Fife, East (Sir J. Gilmour) for raising the problem of the sugar beet industry, which is in a state of extreme uncertainty and grave worry. My hon. Friend raised this question in an Adjournment debate on 19th April, 1967. I see that the Parliamentary Secretary said then that

"… we should let the situation ride and see what kind of confidence can be restored among the beet growers."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 19th April, 1967, Vol. 745, c. 771.]

That statement was made against the background of the assurance that the sugar beet factory at Cupar should continue for three years. It was widely understood from that statement that a sufficiently increased beet acreage would make the factory more viable. There was no suggestion from the Government, to my knowledge, that the factory would be unable to continue, whatever the acreage planted, because it would inevitably become uneconomic owing to the capital investment required.

In the light of that statement, coupled with the increase in the transport subvention and the other factors mentioned, farmers believed that if the acreage could be brought up to a viable level the future of the industry would be assured. The confidence which the Minister looked for returned and the acreage increased from 6,785 acres in 1967–68 to 13,620 acres this year. It was widely believed that 16,000 acres would represent the acreage required for the factory to become commercially viable.

The industry is approaching this target and I am convinced that it could reach it. It was, therefore, a very great shock to the industry to be told the other day that the factory would close in two years. It was a great shock to the industry and to me to read the reply of the Secretary of State to a written Question tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh, West (Mr. Stodart) on 21st July. He asked what the estimated tonnage of sugar beet would be to make the Cupar factory operate at a profit. The reply was:

"In its present form the Cupar factory could not be operated at a profit."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 21st July, 1969, Vol. 787, c. 277.]

There was no suggestion of that in our previous debates, and the Minister must not be surprised if the industry is shocked by the position which has been presented to it today.

The confidence was such that some farmers made a very large personal capital investment. Some of them spent thousands of pounds on equipping themselves to deal efficiently with the crop, which they believed would continue into the future in the light of the Government's previous assurances.

My hon. Friend has spoken already about the critical importance of the sugar beet crop to Scottish agriculture. It is a break crop, and it is also a cash crop which cannot be replaced. It is a commodity covered by the Price Review and, therefore, the Government have a special responsibility for it. In passing, perhaps I might remind hon. Members that it also produces a useful byproduct in that it provides valuable feed.

I find it extraordinary that there should now be a proposal to remove completely the opportunity for Scottish growers to produce sugar beet when the direction given to agriculture should be to help the nation save imports, and when the direction given to Scottish agriculture should be one that will inspire its confidence. By their recent statement, the Government have dealt a mortal blow to the confidence of Scottish farmers in the Government's intentions.

I want to put several questions to the Minister which I hope that he will answer since they are critical to the whole problem. First, what capital investment is required to modernise the Cupar factory? Is it the £1·7 million which has been published in the Press, or can the modernisation be carried out with a more modest expenditure?

Secondly, to what extent have the Government considered the cost to the Exchequer of providing alternative employment for those of my hon. Friend's con- stituents who are employed in the factory? Taking a round figure of 200 jobs, on a scale of £2,000 a job, it would involve an investment of about £400,000.

Thirdly, to what extent have the Government and the B.S.C. in their calculations taken account of the improved techniques in recent years to which my hon. Friend referred and the probability that sugar beet growing, which is becoming more economic, will become even more economic in the years ahead?

Fourthly, if sugar beet is removed from Scottish agriculture, what will happen to the 13,000 acres and more at present devoted to the crop? That acreage cannot be switched to potatoes, which would be a first-sight solution in Perthshire, at any rate. However, that does not bear examination, because it would dislocate the potato trade. It cannot be switched to another break crop, because there is none available. When the Minister considers this aspect of the problem, I hope that he will bear in mind the large break crop subsidy payable in England for beans that cannot be produced in Scotland.

The root problem which the Government must consider is the effect which this decision, if adhered to, will have on the confidence of those engaged in Scottish agriculture. They must bear in mind, too, the critical need for a break crop in the Scottish arable pattern. I hope that the Minister will be able to give us some assurance that the recent statement is not the final word, and that urgent discussions would be engaged in with the industry immediately so that farmers can be told soon that the future of this crop is assured. Without that, the Government must not be surprised if the feeling of farmers is that they were gravely misled a few years ago and that the expenditure which they have been involved in as a result was inspired by false pretences.

I wish at the outset to express my gratitude to my hon. Friend the Member for Fife, East (Sir J. Gilmour) and to Mr. Speaker for his kindness in allowing this debate to take place.

I feel some sympthay for the Under-Secretary, for while we appreciate his competence in dealing with matters of health and education, we are surprised that the Secretary of State is not here, because we are discussing not a minor issue but a matter of vital importance to an important Scottish industry. There are many questions to be answered. My hon. Friends have put some and I have more. There is a great deal of explaining to be done, particularly after what the Scotsman wrote in a leader the other day, in which it said:

"It is not unfair to interpret from Mr. Ross's parliamentary answer as implying that the British Sugar Corporation should be congratulated for giving farmers such long notice—until 1971."

Then, in Farming Leader, the newspaper of the Scottish N.F.U., it was said:

"The Union and Scottish beet growers have been sadly misled. In 1966, when we were given a three-year guarantee of the factory's continued existence, the Corporation told us that its life after this year would depend on Scottish farmers growing a sufficient acreage—up to the permitted maximum—to ensure that the factory could be run economically."

When the Scottish Farmer contains a leader on this matter headed with the single word "Deceit" in large capital letters, I am led to ask: deceit by whom? As for the other Under-Secretary, the hon. Member for Renfrew, West (Mr. Buchan), in view of a remark which he made in an Adjournment debate in April, 1967, he may be let out of any charge of deceit, for he said:

"It is true … that if one were to spend the £150,000"—

that is, the amount of the break crop grant which we had suggested, by putting

"… it all into one section of the industry, that would of itself solve the problem and keep employment going".—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 19th April, 1967; Vol. 745, c. 771.]

Recent figures which we have received show that the giving of that £150,000 would not keep it going. The gap is wider than that.

My hon. Friend the Member for Perth and East Perthshire (Mr. McArthur) referred to the large amount of private capital investment made by farmers over the last few years. There is something even more disturbing in relation to the amount of public money that is involved. I refer to the grant which has been given to a co-operative group with, I understand—I have made inquiries about this —the full approval of the Scottish Office.

I understand that the Department of Agriculture was consulted throughout the negotiations, which started over 18 months ago. We must be told how public money has come to be wasted by the announcement which has been made within the last few days. There is no doubt that everyone was under the impression that, at 16,000 acres, Cupar would be viable. Its slicing capacity was given the other day as 1,966 tons a day. There are in England two factories which have a lower slicing capacity than that.

If 16,000 acres is not enough, what is? My hon. Friend has referred to the rather enigmatic reply I received from the Secretary of State the other day that Cupar could not make a profit in its present form. What does that mean? Does it mean that, if Cupar were bigger, could increase its capacity, it would make a profit? I presume it means that because there must surely be a point of throughput at which viability in a sugar beet factory is reached.

Mention has been made today of the amount of capital investment that would be required to keep the factory going. I received a written reply from the Secretary of State only today. I had asked him how much would be required over the next 10 years to keep the factory going at full capacity and what the breakdown of that capital figure would be. His answer gives the figure which has been rumoured—£1·7 million—but adds that the breakdown is a matter for the British Sugar Corporation. I hope that the corporation will give the breakdown because it is most important that we should get all the facts and figures.

The corporation, I understand—and I take my information from an article in the Glasgow Herald on 11th July—has three directors who are nominees of the Government, one of whom must be chairman. I also understand that the corporation is being offered financial incentives for "promoting economy and efficiency". If there is this Government representation, by no means a minor one, on the board, what is happening is virtually a veiled Government directive that Cupar has got to be closed.

The figures we have been given are much worse than I thought. It is essential that all possible information be provided so that calculations by the N.F.U. may be done and proposals or propositions made. Only if we get all the information, including the breakdown of the £1·7 million, can we see the road ahead. I do not want the Under-Secretary of State to be under any illusion about the serious blow this is to farming. If I may be immodest. I am aware that he is perhaps not as well acquainted with the farming industry as I am. I can assure him that it is a serious blow, particularly to the arable sector, although one must not forget the ancillary uses to which sugar beet products are put. They feed flocks of sheep and cattle all over the country.

I do not think that we in Scotland have yet really felt the full impact of continuous cereal cropping as it has been felt in the South of England. My hon. Friend is dead right. The head of the N.A.A.S. in England is on record as saying that field beans are of no use north of York. To take all this away from Scottish farmers will do immeasurable damage to them.

The hon. Member for Fife, East (Sir J. Gilmour) and other hon. Members have expressed their regret and disappointment at the decision of the British Sugar Corporation to close its factory at Cupar. I hope that they will accept in turn, particularly in view of the more recent history of the factory, that the Government sincerely share their regret at the corporation's decision, but nevertheless, for reasons which I shall explain, we reluctantly accept the necessity for the closure of the factory.

I was rather surprised that the hon. Member for Edinburgh, West (Mr. Stodart) was vague about the basis upon which the corporation carries out its activities. May I remind him that it is now operating under a 1964 incentive agreement which was negotiated when hon. Members opposite were in power and when the hon. Member himself had a measure of responsibility in these matters. That incentive agreement was to make the corporation more commercial in outlook, and nothing that has been said today leads me to suppose that hon. Members opposite disagree with that proposition. But it means that, as well as bearing more of the commercial risks, the corporation has to look for economies in its operation.

The hard fact of the matter is that it has been increasingly difficult to reconcile the demands of that agreement with the position of the factory at Cupar. It is no secret to Scottish farmers that the future of the factory was in jeopardy immediately after the 1965–66 season. The contracted acreage at that time had started to decline. Incidentally, it is not difficult to see why that acreage started to decline at that time. It was due largely to the decision of hon. Members opposite to reduce the transport subvention.

For almost 30 years, Scottish farmers had enjoyed a free-on-rail contract, under which the farmer bore only the cost of transporting the beet to the nearest railway station and loading it on to the railway wagons. Even under this arrangement, the acreage grown had fluctuated between 8,000 and 15,000 between 1934 and 1954. In 1963, however—and I hope that hon. Members will appreciate some of this history—the then Government agreed to the reduction of the freight subsidy payable by the corporation and the subsidy was consequently reduced to less than half the total transport cost.

As it happened, the 1963 beet harvest was poor and this, combined with the reduction in the transport subsidy, led to a decline in the contracted acreage from 15,500 in 1963 to only 9,050 in 1965. The rather better figures in recent years arise directly from the fact that the present Government intervened at that point to improve the transport subsidy arrangements.

It was not entirely a matter of good instead of bad seasons?

That is, naturally, always a factor in these matters, but the relationship between the level of transport subsidy and the acreage actually contracted is so close that it is clear that the transport subsidy has played an extremely important part. In any case, for 1966 the structure of the transport subsidy was altered and, among other things, this increased the average value of the subsidy.

As an added incentive, the Government added a further subsidy of 2s. 6d. a ton to be paid by the sugar consumer via the Sugar Board. The hon. Member for Fife, East asked why the board could not step in and help to keep the factory going. That is already the position. The two-part subsidy continued in 1967 and when contracting was almost completed in 1968 the consumers' contribution was raised by 6s., from 2s. 6d. to 8s. 6d. a ton. That 8s. 6d. a ton, as well as the B.S.C. transport subvention, has continued for the current season.

The result of these incentives is that the subsidy is now running at about 19s. a ton. The acreage has risen from 6,785 in 1967 to 13,620 for the current year.

As I have said, the factory appeared to be in jeopardy in 1966, and it was as a result of representations by the Scottish N.F.U. and with the agreement of Ministers that the Sugar Corporation gave the guarantee that the factory would remain open until 1969 and that its future would depend upon the willingness of Scottish farmers to grow the necessary 16,000 acres.

I have recounted that little bit of history because I wished to put it on record as emphatically as possible that the Government had given every assistance in the last few years, particularly from the transport subvention point of view, to enable the factory to be put on a viable basis. But, despite the increased acreage, the losses have continued to be very substantial indeed. They were given the other day—

It is true that the Government have given assistance, but two-thirds comes from the British Sugar Corporation.

I have given the figures. It is less than two-thirds. The 19s. breaks down to 10s. 6d. from the B.S.C. and 8s. 6d. through the Sugar Board. The Government were involved, in their relationship with the corporation and the board, in these improved arrangements—just as when the transport subsidy was reduced earlier that was a decision of hon. Members opposite.

Despite the improvement in acreage, the factory ran at a loss last year of no less than £180,000. That includes the B.S.C. part of the transport subsidy, but not the Sugar Board's part, which amounts to £70,000 per year, giving a total loss of about £250,000.

The Corporation has reviewed its longterm programme in the light of the necessity for it to have due regard to commercial considerations imposed upon it by the 1964 agreement. It has decided that it must rationalise its factory structure and that in that rationalisation a factory as small as Cupar—that is, one receiving the produce of only 16,000 acres—can never be made viable.

The hon. Member for Fife, East asked what might happen if we went into the Common Market. The basic answer is that that would perhaps increase the emphasis on enlarging the size of the factory. It would not make a factory the size of Cupar viable in present circumstances.

rose—

Perhaps the hon. Gentleman would allow me to develop the argument. Hon. Members opposite have asked for the figures, and I propose to give them.

The corporation's view is that the Scottish farmers would have to grow about 30,000 acres of sugar beet to provide a sufficient output to make the factory viable. The £1·7 million mentioned by hon. Members is not the sum which would be required to convert the Cupar factory into one which would take the production of an acreage of 30,000, but the amount which would be required to modernise a factory to cope with an acreage of 16,000. On the basis of the figures which I have given, it would be uneconomic to spend as great an additional sum of money as that on a factory which, in present circumstances, could not be made economic.

No hon. Member opposite—and as far as I know this is the general view of the farming industry—has suggested that Scottish farmers could grow 30,000 acres of sugar beet and get a sufficient return to make beet growing competitive with alternative crops. The hon. Member for East Fife, mentioned increased yields because of improved techniques in recent years, but he will know that there have been similar increased yields in the English beet-growing areas and that the gap between the Scottish and English yields is still as great as it was before those improved techniques were introduced. There is a difference in yield of between 20 and 25 per cent. in tonnage terms.

Similarly, Scottish beet has a sugar content which is on average, less than in England, and since the price is adjusted to take account of that, from that point of view it is a less economic crop than it is in England. With the transport subvention the crop becomes an economic one for many Scottish farmers. The subvention made a difference to the willingness of Scottish farmers to grow the crop. It seems unlikely that Scottish farmers would grow even the 16,000 acres without the subvention.

If we were to increase this to something like 30,000 acres, the transport subvention, by and large, would have to be greater, because we would be bringing in beet from a greater distance to the factory. The higher the subvention the less possible it is to get economic operations in the factory. We are in a vicious circle.

With the price offered, a transport subvention is required to make the crop economic for the farmer, but, on the other hand, the subvention is among the factors making the operation of the factory uneconomic from the Sugar Corporation's point of view. It is a dilemma that no hon. Gentleman has seriously faced. It is in those circumstances that, as part of the rationalisation programme, the corporation has regretfully decided, and we regret it very much, that the Cupar factory will have to be closed. The corporation has also made it clear that the rationalisation process would involve factory closures in England, although no details have been given yet.

The reason Cupar is the first to be singled out for closure is simply that it is the least economic factory. The question of total acreage will be decided by the annual Price Review. The closure of Cupar will make no difference by itself, because the acreage will simply be allocated to the other factories concerned. It is fairly clear that, had we looked at this purely from the economc point of view, there would have been a strong case for closing the factory at the end of the 1969 campaign instead of at the end of the 1971 campaign, as has been decided.

We and the corporation are anxious to allow adequate time for the farmers to adjust to the new situation and also to deal with the serious position, which I do not want to underestimate in any way, of the 200 people employed at the factory. It is a pity that this has not been mentioned more today.

I will not go over all the Government incentives available to industry in Scotland, but I would say that we shall be having discussions with Fife County Council to ensure that land is available for incoming industry, and we will also discuss any action that might be taken to ensure that the area is attractive to industrialists. The Board of Trade will also be anxious to bring additional employment to the area. Apart from the normal activities, I would remind hon. Gentlemen that it was announced by my right hon. Friend in the spring, that the Department and the Scottish N.F.U. were setting up a joint working party to provide information to food processors willing to expand in Scottish locations.

Since then there have been a number of initatives, with the food processing industry. Although I cannot say anything definite about this now, in such a matter East Fife is one of the most productive arable areas in the country, and is in a favourable position to attract the interest of food processors. Naturally, the Government and the N.F.U. hope that this initiative will produce results and, if it does, we would like to think that East Fife will share them. As a joint initiative this is well worth mentioning, although I cannot say anything further.

My final point is about the adjustment from the farmers' point of view. All hon. Gentlemen have spoken about the importance of sugar beet as a break crop in Scottish conditions. None of them, however, has mentioned the natural break crops of grass, ladder crops and potatoes which, in terms of acreage, account for considerably more than the 16,000 acres in question. The acreage for the fodder crops is 190,000, for potatoes—it is declining, I know—104,000 acres and for rotational grass, over 1,700,000 acres.

Has the Department made any estimate of the capital cost to the farming industry if it has to go into grass and stock it with cattle?

I cannot give figures for that. In the overall Scottish context, even if one compares the acreage with the total cereal acreage of 800,000 acres, we are dealing in this problem with a relatively small acreage, although I am not in any way diminishing its seriousness for the farmers concerned.

My hon. Friend has dealt with the grass aspect. Will the Minister turn his mind to potatoes, to which I referred? Does he believe that we could produce an extra 13,500 acres of potatoes in Scotland without distorting the potato trade?

I did not say that. I appreciate that there are difficulties in the potato trade, but reductions in the potato acreage have been considerably greater than the 16,000 acres with which we are concerned today. These processes of adjustment face farmers in Scotland and elsewhere as part of adjustments to changing agricultural conditions. The point I am making is that this is certainly not an insoluble problem in the context of the kind of notice which we have been given for the closure in Cupar.

Obviously, we regret the closure very much, but, for the reasons which I have given, the factory is no longer economic. No serious argument has been put forward, either today or at any other time, to demonstrate that it could be made economic. In those circumstances, closure is inevitable but there is time both for the farmers to adjust to the new situation and for us to use every effort, as we shall, to try to bring new industry to the area. I hope very much that we shall succeed.

We think a lot of our countryside in Wiltshire and of our good agricultural land. I am very pleased to have this opportunity for a brief debate and I am grateful to Mr. Speaker for making it possible.

I wish to tell a story which has not been heard in this House before. It is a story which sheds the greatest doubt on the integrity of our planning procedures. It is a story which can only lead to the summoning of a fresh public in- quiry. If at any point I am wrong in my facts, I hope that the Minister will not hesitate to correct me.

The story begins three years ago, when consent was refused to English China Clays Limited to extract chalk from a particularly lovely valley near Salisbury. The company then lodged an appeal. It is a large and efficient company and, on this second occasion, it took no chances. It was most careful to prepare the way beforehand, and it did so with the skill which I would expect of it. Indeed, by dint of persuasion and money, the company succeeded in silencing opposition before ever the inquiry was opened.

First, a representative of the company called at the Ministry of Housing and Local Government. That was a month before the appeal was heard. There, he told a long story, which, incidentally, had not been told at the time of the initial application, about a new industrial process concerned with chalk which was a potential export winner—a commercial secret which at all costs must be denied to our overseas competitors. He said that, of more than 200 sites explored, this Wiltshire valley held chalk of a unique quality necessary for the company's invention to be exploited. By the time he put on his hat and left the Ministry that day he had obtained agreement that the public inquiry should be held in private.

At that time I had no knowledge of these things. I had no knowledge of the meeting at the Ministry, nor had my constituents. There was no one present to put forward an alternative viewpoint. To agree to hold a public inquiry in camera was without precedent, and one might think that, before adopting an unprecedented procedure, it would be wise first at least to invite the observations of other interested parties and, if not, then at least to warn them beforehand of what was afoot. But this was not done.

Having secured that flank, the company then turned its attention to the local authority. The chalk is to be removed in 15 or 20 ton lorries; maybe 70 of them a day, maybe more. The total annual extraction is to run up to 200,000 tons. It stands out a mile that the simple rural lanes could not possibly stand up to such traffic, and, therefore, talks with the local planning authority and with the county surveyor took place. The surveyor's primary concern, quite rightly, was the cost to the ratepayers of road improvements. And the talks were successful.

Yes, the company offered a sum of money. It was agreed then and there that if the appeal succeeded the company would pay to the local planning authority £30,000. How that figure was achieved I do not know. Perhaps £20,000 or even £25,000 would have been rather niggardly; perhaps £40,000 would have been unnecessarily extravagant even for a company which earns annual profits in the region of £10 million. In the light of this offer, this contribution to road improvements, the highway objection was withdrawn.

Thus the second flank was now secured, and thus for 30 pieces of silver this Wiltshire valley was sold. The stage was now set. The Minister accepted the story—

This matter of the negotiations between the company and the local authority about the contribution for road improvement has not been before me in an official way at all. I am just wondering what is the evidence for this. I am not suggesting that the hon. Gentleman has not got it, but has this appeared in council documents or in the Press, because this is obviously something I should like to study after the debate?

I am delighted to be able to enlighten the Minister on this. I have the reference in my files here. I think that I shall be able to persuade the hon. Gentleman, if it is necessary, that it was a "considerable sum" of money, but it does not affect the principle of the thing. The sum in question was £30,000. The stage was set, the Ministry accepted the story, the local planning authority appreciated the money, and what remained of the procedures was a mere time-wasting formality.

In June, the public inquiry, as it was called, took place in Salisbury. Perhaps we were rather too naive, but my constituents and I did not realise that the dice were already loaded against us. The neighbouring farmers, to their credit, had enlisted the aid of a local Salisbury solicitor and, moreover, the distinguished geologist, Dr. Hancock, from London University, as an act of kindness, had travelled down to give help to the threatened parish as an expert witness.

Ranged against them that morning they found that a whole concourse of eminent persons had descended on Salisbury—a leading Queen's Counsel, a group estates surveyor, a consultant landscape architect, a chartered architect and a research manager—the whole panoply of commerce. As I said earlier, the company was leaving nothing to chance despite the successful preliminary spadework.

There and then the tawdry charade was played. The pre arranged in camera procedures were applied. Some of my constituents were asked to leave. The elected representatives of the parish on the rural district council and of the county council were shown the door. The geologist, too, was hustled from the room. Perhaps one day the Minister will consider giving him 48s., the price of the second-class return rail fare to Salisbury. He knew too much, of course, about the qualities of chalk, and he might have been difficult.

There was no warning, and thus no opportunity to prepare a defence against this unique procedure. If justice was done it was not seen to be done, and neither I nor my constituents believe that it was done. For the second time, evidence taken into consideration by the Minister was heard behind locked doors.

Fifteen months then went by. From June, 1967, until September, 1968, the Minister here pondered his decision, and well might he have done. He decided to hold a special examination of the chalk. He described this in a letter to me as an "independent examination". I suggested that perhaps I, too, might be permitted to hold an independent examination, but the suggestion did not find favour. If it was to be independent, certainly nobody was allowed to see or to comment upon it, and thus, for the third time, evidence taken into consideration by the Minister was produced and studied behind closed doors. I confess that I often have doubts about our democratic system, but at least in this case democracy cannot be blamed, because it played no part at all.

Finally, and I believe reluctantly, the Minister signed the death warrant of that valley. Whether the Board of Trade pressed him against his better judgment I shall never know, but, knowing him personally as I do, it is the kindest interpretation which I can place upon it.

In such a case application may be made to the High Court within six weeks to quash the Minister's decision. The House may think it reasonable in those circumstances that when a local authority has had secret procedures foisted upon it without warning it should avail itself of this right. Admittedly, the law and the use of lawyers are expensive and litigation, by its nature, is always uncertain.

But in this case it is not just lawyers' fees which are at stake. If application had been made to the High Court and had failed, and the Minister's decision had been upheld, there would have to be further consideration as to whether the £30,000 would still have been made available. I do not know the answer to that. However, I know that within those six weeks no application was made to the High Court.

Thus the company broke into the valley. Already, its huge yellow machines are at work. Already, the first slick of white chalk is visible there in the landscape. And already a new application has been submitted to work a further 155 acres. What is more, 412 acres were bought last month at the highest figure ever paid for Wiltshire farmland!

Today, the corn is ripening, but the fields will not be there much longer, because the machines will eat them away. This process is planned to continue throughout this century and into the next. Unfortunately, time is so short that I have been able to sketch only a few of the facts, but I hope that I have given enough of them to explain why no choice exists other than to have a fresh inquiry. If the Minister accepts my plea, I shall thank him for it sincerely. If not, I shall have to give more detail to the House. I have sufficient faith in the House and in public opinion to feel that sooner or later the Minister must accede to my request. If there are problems of compensation, one knows that similar problems have been solved before.

It is interesting that one of those who were sworn to secrecy was the excellent clerk to the rural district council. But I ask myself what sort of a council chamber is it where the clerk is bound in perpetuity to withhold information on local issues from the elected members of his own council? What is a local authority if it is not the elected membership itself? Yet on this occasion the Minister will remember that it was the elected members who were shown the door.

What is my own position in all this? Like the Minister, I am here in this place to represent my constituents. We both need to understand their problems. Yet with the Minister's knowledge and express intention, I, a fellow Member of this House, have been kept in the dark by him for two years—and I am still in the dark. I still do not know what transpired in that room in the heart of my constituency. Yet some of my constituents were there sworn to secrecy with the full connivance of the Minister.

Today, when I meet and talk with them they are unable to tell me anything at all. The Minister has placed a barrier between us. How can an hon. Member be expected to safeguard the interests of his own constituency when his constituents know more of the local problems than he does, yet they are bound by some or other Minister to silence?

Since when have Members of this House been denied information by a Minister of the Crown, information already given to those whom they represent here? The Minister has been party to a conspiracy of silence, and by so doing he has raised grave issues of principle and of privilege.

When I have sat down, it may be that I shall have no further chance to come in again in this debate. Therefore, perhaps I might suggest to the Minister that when he replies we are not particularly anxious to be told that what took place in those in camera procedures was purely technical, as if technicalities excuse the principle and whitewash the enormity of the whole event. Second, I hope very much that we shall not hear too much about that mysterious deceptive alibi "national interest" in allowing this valley to be destroyed, because I do not believe, and the Minister does not believe, that the chalk in this, the loveliest of sites, is unique among more than 200 other sites which it is claimed have been explored.

It was quite soon after I entered this House, I think it was about eight years ago, that there was a chalk case at Stansted, in Essex. The Minister will remember it well. It seems to me curious how incapable Governments are of handling anything so white as chalk! And yet Stansted was as nothing to this case at Salisbury. Planning procedures should above all, be fair, open and impartial, and yet these smell to high heaven. There was the secret interview at the Ministry, the secret offer of cash, the secret proceedings at Salisbury, the expulsion of the only expert witness, the insult to elected councillors, the disablity imposed on a Member of this House, and the secret examinations described as independent. How green was my valley, and how correspondingly squalid, disreputable, clumsy, and hole-in-the-corner were the measures taken to achieve the destruction of this valley.

It is true that I have referred certain aspects of this case to Downing Street—as no doubt the Minister knows—and to other quarters. I think that the kindest thing I can bring myself to say is that these are difficult days, and that many of us find it easiest to put the telescope to our blind eye. But I have absolute confidence in the wisdom and sense of fairness of this House. I am not sworn to secrecy. I have not been offered £30,000 to withdraw my objection. Instead, I value my freedom, and I use my freedom to ask the Minister now to take the only course open to him, to summon a fresh inquiry.

The hon. Member for Salisbury (Mr. Michael Hamilton) has, almost in the last hour of this term, taken the opportunity of raising some very important constitutional and planning points. He has spoken in strong terms. All I can say is that were I in his position, fighting what I believed might lead to the desecration of one of the most beautiful tracts in this county, and, indeed, the whole country, I might have taken the same kind of action as he has taken in the interests of Wiltshire and his constituents.

One of my troubles in this case is that I am so much in sympathy that I have had to guard against not being sufficiently judicial in the advice I had to give to my right hon. Friend. So many of the hon. Gentleman's remarks and his letters have found a ready response in my heart because I react in the same way as he does. To do the hon. Gentleman all credit, not only has he raised the matter continuously with my right hon. Friend and myself, but he has put some issues to the Parliamentary Commissioner and to the Council on Tribunals. He has left no stone unturned, although to complete the record I may say that both those bodies have not been able to say that in the handling of this matter there has been any maladministration or that the Department or its inspector has been guilty of any action calling for censure.

There is no doubt that this was a particularly difficult and complex case. All of these mineral applications are difficult by their very nature, and, if successful, nearly always mean a fundamental change. One of our difficulties is to attempt to weigh up on the evidence before us, the case for development in the public interest and the case for spoiling what may be something of inestimable beauty. Although the Americans have gone some way towards putting a monetary value on beauty and amenity, we have not.

It is extremely difficult to make the right decision, and because of the complexities in this case I thought that we might be under criticism, not so much from the hon. Gentleman, of which I do not complain, but for the fact that our Ministry was delaying for so long a decision of considerable importance. The case was novel, the issues new, and I thought that until we had tested certain evidence I could not advise my right hon. Friend. This has meant delay and I am sorry, although I think that every step I took in that direction has been more than justified.

I know that this case has caused the hon. Gentleman great anxiety, but I can tell him that it has caused myself and my advisers considerable anxiety, too. We have gone to the utmost degree of investigation and taken the greatest possible trouble to reach what we feel was the right decision.

This will not be the last opportunity for the hon. Gentleman to raise these matters, and I am glad that he should have all opportunities, because I have nothing to hide and I want to put as much as I can on the record. It is true that a representative of the company called on my Department and said that because of the commercial nature of the process for which it needed chalk, and in view of the international competition, it would like that part of the inquiry dealing with the special qualities of the chalk to be held in camera.

The advice that they were given by the Department was as follows. The company were not told that they could have it in camera. The Department told them, as it must, these matters being laid down by the regulations for the holding of inquiries, that these are matters for a decision by the inspector as provided in the Town and Country Planning (Inquiries Procedure) Rules, 1965, but there is no bar to part of the proceedings being in camera. It is a matter for the inspector. He has the discretion and right, having listened to the case, to decide whether he thinks that it is in the public interest to hear part of it confidentially.

I am bound to concede that, whenever one departs from the normal procedure, be it in a criminal or civil case or in a planning case, there are certain problems. Although the courts from time to time exclude the public from the whole of a case, or from certain parts of it, they do it only in exceptional circumstances when, for example, there is a secret process involved which, if it were published to the world, would result in great damage to one of the parties, or when perhaps some evidence cannot be given unless it is given in secrecy.

In this case, the inspector heard the application on the first day of the inquiry. Having listened to the submission, he decided that at a particular time on the second day he would be prepared to hear part of the evidence in camera about the nature and quality of the chalk and why the company said that it was different from deposits of chalk elsewhere.

When I first heard the reason for the application, and why my technical advisers and trade advisers recommended that in the public interest it should succeed, and that it all turned on a question involving chalk, I had as much disbelief as the hon. Gentleman that one chalk was very much different from another. Then I read the evidence given in camera. But I felt, as no doubt the hon. Gentleman felt, and as the parties before the inspector no doubt felt, other than the applicants, that, while the company had made out an ex parte case, it was not subject to the kind of cross-examination which might have been possible had an expert been advising the other parties.

The inspector decided to hear part of the proceedings in camera. Before him there were the representatives of the applicant company. Having looked at them, however, I am not sure that they were quite as high-powered as the hon. Gentleman suggests, but, certainly, the company was well represented. Another of those appearing before the inspector was the clerk to the local planning authority, which had delegated power from the county council, accompanied by two officials from other local authorities. I understand that the appellant company also suggested that the solicitor representing the third patries, who were the adjacent owners, might also be present.

I must now clear up one point. In these inquiries, the parties normally appearing before an inspector are the appellants themselves and those who are objecting. A formal objector will be the local authority. There are, under the 1962 Act, what we call Section 17 objectors. They are either owners or occupiers of land which is being subjected to planning application and they have a right to be there. There were no Section 17 objectors in this case. However, going beyond that, the inspector has the discretion, and almost invariably uses it, to permit others with the public interest at heart to be parties to the proceedings, even though, legally, they have no right to be there.

I mention this because in an official communication which the hon. Gentleman received, though not from my Department, there was a reference to "statutory objectors". In fact, apart from the local planning authority, there were no statutory objectors. There was nobody under planning law, other than the local planning authority, who had any legal right to be heard at the inquiry. However, despite that, the solicitor representing the adjacent landowners allowed those others to whom I have referred to be present. This should be on the record, because it was a generous gesture on the part of the company to allow this representation, when it wished to preserve the commercial secrets which, it said, were essential for it.

While these parties were before the inspector during the proceedings in camera, they were not in a position to examine the technical evidence. The company agreed that, because the technical evidence about the quality of the chalk could not be tested, the Minister should have the right, if he thought it necessary, to carry out independent tests. I am glad that that recommendation was made and agreed because, frankly, had it not been agreed it would have been difficult for me to have conducted a prolonged and searching examination into the claims that had been made about the chalk.

Under the auspices of the Government Chemist, other Government bodies and people highly skilled and expert in these issues, the chalk was investigated. Thus, to make the picture a little less black than the hon. Gentleman put it, it was, fortunately, suggested that, if we wished, we could conduct tests. I caused these tests inquiry to be made. In addition to the Government Chief Scientific Adviser we had the advice of the Director of the Institute of Geological Sciences.

Samples of chalk were taken from a number of sites in Southern England and subjected to prolonged tests in laboratories under the independent supervision of advisers from the Government Chemist's laboratory and the Stationery Office and representatives of my Department. I have no doubt that the investigation which I caused to be made was thorough, was quite independent, and proved—I admit, to my surprise—that the chalk on this site had certain properties which were not to be found in chalk elsewhere and which was certainly readily accessible.

I cannot put my hand on my heart and say that nowhere else in the country would it have been possible to have found such chalk. However, I can say frankly, the company having examined samples taken from several dozen places, that no alternative sources of supply had been found. Certainly, I am advised that there is none readily accessible—some- times one can find chalk on the side of a mountain or somewhere equally inaccessible. In the face of the backing that was given to the proposition—I refer to exports and other matters—one had to say that the company had established an exceptional case.

I come now to the other matters which the hon. Gentleman quite properly raised. He complains—and I can understand his attitude, since I should feel the same myself in his position—that, while the clerk of the authority and the solicitor for the neighbouring objectors have seen that evidence, when he asked for a copy of the confidential report he was refused one. Our difficulty is that, if proceedings start in camera in this way, and the facts are given in confidence, we are all bound by it. Had I sent a copy of the report to the hon. Gentleman, it would have been quite an improper thing for me to have done, although I am sure that the hon. Gentleman would have acted most honourably. Had we put some sort of restriction on him in sending him a copy, I imagine that he and others would have said, that it was not acceptable. It really was an impossible situation for me.

However, let us suppose that I had got over that difficulty, that the hon. Gentleman had said that he wished to discuss the matter with me and that I had agreed, or that we had discussed the report elsewhere. The company would then not only have had a sense of grievance, but might well have taken action in the courts, claiming that the Minister had acted irresponsibly. We may have found ourselves involved in an action for damages and perhaps in other consequences. Once one embarks on a procedure where confidentiality is at issue, one must maintain it.

I only wish that that had not been the case and that I could have acceded to the hon. Gentleman's request. He asked today, "Does this not mean that the public are in the dark, having been denied an opportunity of cross-examination about the quality of the material?" I have tried to answer the latter part of that question by showing, I hope, that the hon. Gentleman's fears are to some extent allayed by the prolonged and searching investigation that we have made. But we must not overlook the fact that, when the clerk of the local planning authority was before the inspector in the in camera proceedings, he represented the public. It need not perhaps have been he. It could have been the chairman of the local council or other councillors. That is always a matter of judgment on a particular issue. But the public were represented by the chief officer of their local council at the in camera proceedings. To what extent, they were not in quite the defenceless position suggested by the hon. Gentleman.

I must also put on record one other matter. I know nothing, and can make no comment, about any other application, because it is certainly not before me. I do not know whether it is yet before the local planning authority. In this case, the application was to develop 25 acres. We allowed only the exploitation of 10 acres for a five-year period, at the end of which there must be restoration. In the decision letter, a large number of stringent conditions were included to make the disturbance of this wonderful piece of country the minimum possible.

Furthermore, although we could not make it as a condition because it is not a matter which comes under planning law, we made the strongest recommendation that conveyance of the chalk should be by rail. I gather, although I have no official knowledge of it, that the company is negotiating with British Rail for the chalk to be transported by rail. The more that can be done, the less disturbance there will be by heavy lorry traffic in the lovely lanes to which the hon. Gentleman referred.

If the hon. Gentleman looks at the conditions about noise, working hours, which are limited, screening, restrictions on blasting, the fact that the whole procedure has to be worked in arrangement with the local planning authority, he will see that we are trying to give the most favourable circumstances and cause a minimum amount of interference with the countryside.

I am grateful to the hon. Member for raising this case. He knows that this is the first time that in camera proceedings have been used in a planning case. The matter has been looked at by the Council on Tribunals and the Parliamentary Commissioner. I am relieved to say that there has been no suggestion that in the hand- ling of this matter the Department had done anything unfair or wrong. We are having discussion with the Council on Tribunals about possible rules for any future in camera proceedings.

Even though the parties have the right of audience at these in camera proceedings there should be firm rules as to procedure so that we can meet the hon. Gentleman's complaint and justice is not only done but seen to be done. The public, even though they had no legal rights under planning law to cross-examine, understandably felt dissatisfied that they never knew what the company's evidence was and could not test it through their own experts. We are having these discussions and can rely upon the Council on Tribunals to insist on rules if it is thought necessary.

The hon. Gentleman asked me whether we would have a further inquiry. I would be delighted, if only to allay—I will not say the hon. Gentleman's activities—but his fears in this matter, to have a further inquiry. However, under planning law, once the Minister has given his decision his functions cease. He has no further say in the matter. Should there be a further application the whole matter could come before him in the normal way assuming that the local council does not grant the application. Otherwise, of course, there would be no appeal.

If a further application is made, as I believe it has been, is the Minister empowered to call it in for his personal consideration, or does it rest at the option of the local planning authority?

The Minister has wide powers. In a case like this, involving an area of outstanding natural beauty, if he felt it wise to do this, he could do so.

We are sometimes accused of trying to run everything from Whitehall, but we have entrusted planning authorities with this responsibility. The Minister must take limited action in this way, because we must proceed on the assumption that local people know more about their area than anyone in Whitehall, however gifted. This is something we follow carefully and continuously. There are exceptional cases for all sorts of exceptional reasons.

Also, if, at an interim stage, I had suggested to the hon. Gentleman that he could have seen the in camera evidence, or had taken some other step before the Minister gave his decision, the appellants might well have come back and gone to the High Court for a writ asking us to carry out the inquiry procedure to which we were committed by law. There must come a point in these procedures when a decision has to be given and that is the finish, or the matter will never be decided. I cannot satisfy the hon. Member on that point.

What I can say is that as a result of this case and his care and, I hope I am entitled to claim, the care of my Department, proceedings of this sort in camera are being considerd. I hope that the hon. Gentleman will feel that his efforts have not been in vain, either in relation to his constituents, because we have drastically limited the application, or in relation to the country in general where this is a new proposition which will be considered carefully.

I am grateful for this opportunity, partly because, as a lawyer, I confess to a feeling of guilt. My right hon. Friend will know that it is not often I feel the necessity of apologising for the legal profession, but it is true that in dealing with some of these matters we have continued to hold fast to concepts which were evolved in a very different age.

The legal textbooks deal with industrial relations under the heading "master and servant". That is outdated for a number of reasons, not least because it fails to take account of practices which, to those who know them, are everyday matters, particularly the practice of management contracting with a person not for services but for the carrying out of a complete piece of work in return for a specified fee.

This is not even a particularly modern evolution. In the part of the country where my constituency is situated, the Black Country, it has been known at least since the eighteenth century. In coal mining districts it was widespread under the title of the "Little Butty" system, and it persisted well into the twentieth century. It is well known in the iron firms, and for a long time it has been known in the building and construction industry. The Royal Commission on Labour in 1894 had complaints from trade unions associated with the building industry about labour-only subcontractors of whom it was said that, having no reputation to lose, they paid low wages, used inferior materials and scamped their work.

I hasten to add that those who made the complaints insisted, as it is only right that I should insist this afternoon, that it was not true of every self-employed independent contractor. There are many who have perfectly legitimate reasons and who carry out their work quite satisfactorily in this form, but even then there were all too many of whom complaint could be made.

But the practice has become much more widespread of late, particularly in the building and the construction industry, for a number of reasons which were examined in some detail by the committee under Professor Phelps Brown which reported in July, 1968. One group of reasons reported by the committee was rather disturbing. These reasons relate to a method of securing for oneself an almost illicit exemption from the financial contributions which the rest of us are called upon to tear.

It is a way of evading selective employment tax; it is a way of evading paying a substantial proportion of social security contributions; it is a way by which the employee can pay Income Tax under Schedule D instead of under Schedule E so that he pays a year in arrears and gains 12 months' virtually tax free bonanza.

These matters were examined in some detail by my hon. Friend the Member for Newark (Mr. Bishop) in a debate in the House on 26th March, 1968. I do not propose to attempt to embellish what he said on that occasion, but this is an example of what has become almost the national pastime of calling things by fancy names in order to beat the Chancellor of the Exchequer.

There is a feeling abroad among people who are otherwise honest and unselfish that there is one person who is fair game for every confidence trick and that to snatch every penny one can from him by whatever means commends itself is legitimate, and morally does not count. I refer to the Chancellor of the Exchequer. I am grateful for this opportunity because this is a further example of this kind of attitude, and I should like to seize this chance to make my protest, not because of the real regard in which I hold the Chancellor, but because it is not he who loses. The people who lose are other members of the community, often decent, hardworking people, who have done nothing to deserve having this burden transferred to their shoulders.

Professor Phelps Brown's Committee gave a startling example of this in considering the effect of financing the industrial training scheme. Paragraph 329 points out that the Construction Industry Training Board inquired of a number of employers and local authorities the names and addresses of all the labour only sub-contractors who carried out work for them in the year 1964–65. It was supplied with 45,794 names and addresses and it duly issued 45,794 forms. Of those, 15,444 were returned through the Dead Letter Office; the Post Office had never heard of the people concerned. From another 16,024 no reply was received. So that out of the original 45,794 it received replies from only 14,326, and of those 6,667 revealed a payroll of less than £5,000 per annum, 7,012 were able to satisfy it that they were self-employed and did not employ anyone and were not therefore liable to levy. Out of the original 45,794, only 647 turned out to be leviable.

I invite my right hon. Friend the Minister of Public Building and Works to say whether, to protect the public from this kind of unfair transfer of burden, the Government have considered the possibility of implementing the recommendation in paragraph 448 of the Phelps Brown Report to the effect that anyone who pays for construction work by someone other than a registered employer should be deemed to be the employer of the person he pays, so that the person who orders the work will be responsible for Selective Employment Tax and other employers' contributions for social service purposes and for deducting income tax.

That is not the full extent of the objection. It is true that if the matter stood there the extension of this practice would be condemned by the very reasons for its spread. One objection emerges from paragraph 340 of the Phelps Brown Report, in which it is pointed out that in the public sector of the building industry, labour-only sub-contracting is very much less prevalent, partly, admittedly, because it is disapproved of by the trade unions. But another substantial reason appeared to be that officials believed that it was very much more difficult, with this method of getting the work done, to keep control of standards and maintain quality.

But perhaps the most serious mischief with which we are confronted is a concomitant of avoiding liabilities, because when a person seeks to avoid liabilities he frequently finds that he has avoided becoming entitled to benefits. One example is payments under the Redundancy Payments Act. A number of workers who have taken part in this practice discovered that when they were no longer in work they were not entitled to payments under the Act.

Perhaps the most serious aspect of this matter concerns responsibility for industrial safety. The law relating to master and servant imposes on employers an obligation to consider the safety of their employees. They must provide safe equipment and ensure that there are safe methods of working. If an employer fails to do this and injury results, the employer may find that he is liable to pay a substantial sum of damages. There is, however, no such obligation on a subcontractor. He may have the same obligation as other members of the public, but he certainly does not have the obligation of an employer.

Therefore, someone who is injured in consequence of the negligence of a subcontractor, or someone who is himself a subcontractor when he is injured, may discover that not only does he undergo the pain and suffering concomitant upon the injury but that, having lost a considerable time from work and having found his earning capacity permanently impaired, he is not entitled to recover compensation from anyone. There is a gap in the family budget and there is no method of closing it.

That, again, is not the full extent of the mischief because, if someone might be under an obligation to pay damages when a victim is injured, that someone might feel under a responsibility, at least to himself, to ensure that no unnecessary injuries occur; but with no one responsible in damages, there may well be no one who feels sufficiently strongly that he has an incentive to ensure that no injuries occur. Therefore, accidents happen which need never have happened. Limbs are lost, eyes are lost and sometimes lives are lost which could have been saved.

If the subcontractor employs his mates, if he is the kind of subcontractor who arranges with the management to provide a fixed body of labour to do the job, he will be responsible as an employer to his mates. Unhappily, however, the very factors which make him a labour-only subcontractor often ensure that he is not in a position to provide expensive equipment and, if an injury occurs and an award of damages is made against him, that he is not in a position to pay the damages, either.

If the Bill recently introduced by my hon. Friend the Member for Consett (Mr. David Watkins) reaches the Statute Book, as we may now reasonably hope, those who employ labour on this kind of basis will be under an obligation to insure. Where this practice prevails, however, it is sometimes all too difficult to enforce even those laws which have reached the Statute Book.

An attempt was made in the building industry by the National Joint Council to meet the problem in working rule 8, which imposes upon the main contractor a number of obligations, including an obligation to satisfy himself that those who work are covered by insurance against employer's liability. For reasons which all of us who have sat in the House during the past Session know well, however, this is not a rule which is legally enforceable, and all too often it is not enforceable by any other method, either.

Sometimes, too, those who take part in the arrangement are misled—I do not suggest deliberately, but they are misled—when they are informed that there is in existence a contract of insurance which will indemnify the management against liability to subcontractors as though they were employees. The magic word, how- ever, is "liability". Very often, when a claim is made, it is pointed out that since there is no liability, the clause does not apply.

In an attempt to meet some of these problems, I applied to the House earlier this Session for leave to introduce a Bill and I was granted that leave. The purpose of the Bill was to implement paragraph 441 of the Phelps Brown Report, not only for the building industry, but for a number of other industries. The purpose was to ensure that the main contractor was liable for industrial safety as though he were an employer.

On Second Reading, that Bill was objected to on behalf of the Government. I venture to hope that my right hon. Friend the Minister may be able to explain this afternoon the reasons which prompted the Government to take that course. Although, owing to the hour of the day, not many of my hon. Friends are present, I assure my right hon. Friend that I am not the only person who has ventured to wonder why that course was taken. It may be that the Government have it in mind to implement the recommendation of the Phelps Brown Report, and that being so, it would Le natural that they would wish to do it, not piecemeal, but as a whole, and they might wish to draft the legislation themselves. I am sure that if that were the case my right hon. Friend would not overlook the fact that my Bill sought to deal with the situation in certain other industries, too. It may be that the Government have it in mind, if the Phelps Brown recommendations are implemented, to see how they work in the construction industry with a view possibly to implementing them in other industries.

If that were so, and my right hon. Friend could give that assurance to the House, I could perhaps find it in my heart to understand and forgive, but I think it is right to warn him that there is a real feeling about this in the trade union movement generally and among a large number of my hon. Friends in this House, and that if he has any doubt as to that he need only look at the list of sponsors of my Bill, a list which was limited only by the maximum permissible number of sponsors.

It is very important that my hon. Friend should have an opportunity of speaking on this matter at such length as he deems necessary, and I realise that the hon. Gentleman the Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Mr. Costain) also wishes to make a contribution to the debate, and I shall content myself with saying that.

I think it right, however, that I should pay tribute to the work which has been done on this subject by the Industrial Law Society and, in particular, by Professor Wedderburn and Mr. Geoffrey Clark and Mr. John Williams and, among trade unionists, by Mr. Poupard, of the Amalgamated Society of Slaters, Tilers and Roofing Operatives.

I can understand the Government's feeling on this and I have some sympathy with them. There are many other matters waiting to be dealt with, matters which may be more attractive to the public and more likely to catch the front pages of the newspapers. If something is done in this matter there are two categories of people who will benefit. One is the general public, who will be spared the loss to the Exchequer and an unfair transfer of burdens through these financial operations. It is not easy for any individual to identify himself under the comprehensive label of the "general public". The other category who will benefit will be the victims of accidents which have not yet happened, and which, if these recommendations are implemented, perhaps never will happen. It may be that from neither of those categories can the Government claim the gratitude to which they would be entitled if they were to implement these recommendations. I can only offer my right hon. Friend this comfort, that he will from a large number of people, on behalf of their members, their constituents and their colleagues, have earned that gratitude if he and the Government find it in their heart to do so.

The hon. Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Mr. Costain) will need the leave of the House to speak again, but in the special circumstances I think that the House will give it to him.

Thank you very much, Mr. Deputy Speaker. By leave of the House I should like to make a very brief inter- vention and as I have spoken before already I shall do so extremely shortly.

I should like to congratulate the hon. Member for Rowley Regis and Tipton (Mr. Archer) upon raising this very important subject and upon the very thorough way he has studied it. I think there are three points which may be made.

Although the hon. Member's case was not primarily concerned with the building industry he has quite rightly raised it around the building industry because this is the industry where this labour is largely used. I do not think he quite followed through sufficiently the Phelps Brown Report, which shows quite clearly that labour-only subcontracting has been the type of work which has been necessary in certain parts of the industry, particularly house building.

What does worry the industry and also worries the Opposition is the fact that this type of work has grown very rapidly in the last two years. Indeed, only yesterday I had a note from my own labour exchange saying it was unable to give me accurate figures about the number of vacancies filled in the building industry because so many building workers were self-employed.

The matter which concerns us most is the unhealthy hothouse growth of this practice, which is due entirely, we believe, to the effects of S.E.T. Indeed, the President of the National Federation of Building Trades Employers at a meeting at Nottingham in a special reference to this said that if the Government want an efficient industry they must make up their mind whether they want that or the S.E.T. He said:

"They can either have an efficient building industry or S.E.T. They cannot have both."

I hope that the hon. Member's efforts will lead to more power being given to the Minister's elbow in asking the Chancellor of the Exchequer to get rid of this ridiculous form of taxation.

I should like to follow the hon. Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Mr. Costain) in congratulating my hon. Friend the Member for Rowley Regis and Tipton (Mr. Archer) on the manner in which he has raised a very important topic. I agree with the hon. Member for Folkestone and Hythe that this is a matter which primarily concerns the building and construction industries, and I will deal with the points which he has raised.

It is not only in the last two years that labour-only sub-contracting has been of importance. As my hon. Friend pointed out, it has been growing ever since the 18th century, but in his elegant historical treatise he omitted the period between 1961 and the present day. The figures are available between 1961 and 1966, when S.E.T. was introduced.

In 1961 there were 93,000 self-employed persons in the construction industry, about 6 per cent. of the total. By 1966—that is, before the introduction of S.E.T.—the number had grown to 147,000. In other words, it was growing at the rate of about 10,700 every year. Whether or not S.E.T. had been introduced, it would on that basis be in the region of 175,000, or 10 per cent. of the employees in the construction industry today.

What we have to deal with is a problem that has been with us for some time and which, for whatever reasons, has been growing at the expense of many hard-working members of the industry, both employers and employed. The 175,000 is a "guess" figure. Professor Phelps Brown puts it at between 165,000 and 200,000.

There are 100,000 who are self-employed without employees. There is a strong distinction here. A labour-only sub-contracting employer may be performing useful work for the community—I would not dispute that—but where the labour-only sub-contracting employer is self-employed, this tends often to the belief that it is for reasons other than the best performance of his work.

My hon. Friend the Member for Rowley Regis and Tipton gave several reasons why, in his view, the practice was a bad one. He instanced bad workmanship. This is a complaint that has often been made about the self-employed person in the construction industry and, above all, about the gangs of self-employed persons sometimes known as the "lump", the point being that, without adequate supervision, work can be skimped. I was interested to learn from him that this is a complaint that has been with us not only for the past few years. It appears to have a good historic background to it, if only in the area in which his constituency is situated, but, whether or not that is so, this is a complaint which is frequently made.

I am sure my right hon. Friend would not want to convey the impression that it is only in the Black Country that certain standards of work are inferior. The Royal Commission considered the whole country.

I certainly would not like to pass judgment on the Royal Commission which gave its views in 1894 or thereabouts. I am sure that that consideration applies all over the country.

The major point is that labour-only subcontracting on the scale we know it, with its large ingredient of self-employment without employees, is due, as my hon. Friend pointed out, to a desire to avoid taxes. I almost said a desire to "evade" taxes, but I am not certain of the legal aspects of that word and perhaps it is better to use the other nomenclature. In any event, that is the reason for it. It is very hard on the rest of a hard working and patriotic industry that those whose design it is to avoid tax should gain benefits at the expense of the others.

It has been said by some employers, and I would not question it, that the difference it makes in the pay of persons concerned in the industry is about £4 10s. a week. That seems to be about the figure. It is a tremendous inducement to employers to employ self-employed people in labour-only subcontracts. Other things follow inevitably. My hon. Friend has mentioned the question of redundancy payments. When a man finds himself in a position of not being able to work, there are many other benefits that he is unable to claim.

My hon. Friend made a strong point on the matter of industrial safety. It seems wrong that the lives and health of a large proportion of workers in le building industry should be at risk because in a large number of cases people are avoiding tax. I share with him a feeling of distress that should be so. I agree with him that where a man is self-employed on the basis about which we have been talking there is a lack of responsibility for safety. In such cases nobody knows, and I am afraid nobody cares, where the responsibility lies for seeing that a man is not injured or that he is properly insured in case he is injured. This again I find a matter of great concern.

The question then is what can one do about it. My hon. Friend had some rather hard strictures to make on the Government for objecting to the Second Reading of his Bill earlier in the Session. I will not hide behind the truth of the matter, which is that the Government were objecting not necessarily to the Second Reading of his Bill but to 'ts automatic Second Reading. That is the way in which the House works; that is the procedure.

My hon. Friend is quite right in assuming that a piecemeal solution of the problem would not be welcomed by the Government. This is a vast and important problem in the construction industry, and it needs to be dealt as one, rather than piecemeal. I hope he will be satisfied if I assure him that in the event of any legislation his point will be sympathetically considered.

It has been said by my hon. Friend that the Government have had so many other urgent matters to consider that they have not given the weight to the Phelps Brown proposals that they ought to have done. This is a kind way of saying that they have been neglecting their duties, but there are excuses. This does not represent the truth. The situation is that in March 1967 the Phelps Brown Committee was set up jointly by the then Minister of Labour and my predecessor. Its terms of reference were to consider the question of labour only sub-contracting in the building and civil engineering industries.

It reported just over two years later, in July 1968. Both sides of industry were consulted, and the first round of consultations was completed seven months later, in February 1969. It took seven months for the collective wisdom of the industry to be collated and collected. From that moment a working party of my officials and the other Departments concerned considered the reactions of the industry. This working party reached conclusions three months later. That was only two months ago.

If my hon. Friend believes that the Phelps Brown Committee rightly took a little more than two years to consider this, and the industry rightly took seven months, he might give the benefit of the doubt to the Government if, after five months, they have not come forward immediately with legislation which in any event would die with the Session. I can promise my hon. Friend that the Government believe this to be a difficult and urgent problem, and that they are well aware of all the points he has raised. They are considering urgently the desirability of legislation. It is a complex question and there are a number of snags. If and when such legislation is decided upon, the points made by my hon. Friend will be among the first to be taken into account.

My right hon. Friend the Minister of State, Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and I took part only two days ago in a similar debate and on a similar subject. This reflects the fact that the world today is becoming so closely inter-related and that many of the services which at one time were primarily performed by the national States are more and more being taken over by the international community. It is for this reason that, within two days, this House has had to debate a subject concerning the development of new forms of international organisation.

I will not say much about the background of this subject—the development of an international system of tele-communications satellites—because I know that it is well known to my right hon. Friend. It is sufficient to recall that the existing system was always intended to be an interim one. It was established about five years ago, when only about a dozen countries were even interested in the subject, and willing to take part in early negotiations, and when there was only one nation technically equipped to play a prominent part in the system.

The result of that was that until recently the membership of the whole organisation was extremely limited. But, more than that, the result was that the United States played a dominant rôle within the organisation, which was reflected in two separate ways. On the one hand, all the day-to-day management of the system was placed in the hands of COMSAT, basically a United States national organisation, although certain marginal steps have been taken recently to give it more of an international appearance.

Second, the United States was given a voting power within the I.C.S.C., which was the governing body, that would always have more than 50 per cent. of the votes. Although this was not alone sufficient for it to win every vote, it meant that in practice it could be fairly sure of being able to get its way on almost any major question that arose.

Third, there was another factor which perhaps to some extent arose from that, but which I do not want to go into in detail today, and that is that, in practice, a large majority of the contracts placed in connection with the system have been placed in the United States. This is a complex subject, because it is arguable—and I shall say a few words about this in a moment—that the United States would win more contracts if the system was made fully international, in the way that I am seeking to argue this afternoon, than if it remained in the hands of what is virtually a United States organisation, COMSAT which, in recent years, has bent over backwards to place contracts in this country and in other European countries, even if they were not fully competitive with tenders made in the United States. I say no more on that.

Will my hon. Friend consider the fact that few other countries, including our own, have shown any will to prepare themselves for this, and, therefore, when asked, "Have you tested this equipment in space?" have had to say "No", because of a lack of interest in it?

I agree with my hon. Friend. It is not merely a lack of interest, but a lack of technical knowledge to a considerable extent.

It is probably true to say that not sufficient interest has been shown by organisations in this country and elsewhere in Europe about the immense opportunities, except insofar as the ground stations are concerned, where we have played an im- portant rôle. This was one of the major defects of the present system, which required to be reconsidered when the whole system was re-examined this year.

Two other developments made this re-examination particularly necessary. One is simply the enormous technological advances during this period. In the early stages the system relied on satellites such as TELSTAR, which in these terms is somewhat primitive. But the satellite system now has already launched the INTELSAT 3 series of satellites, and will shortly be launching the INTELSAT 4 satellites, which will have about 10,000 channels each, and will provide an infinitely better service than has been available so far. The importance of this is. that the whole satellite system will, as a result, play an even more important part than it does today in the public communications system of the world.

The next factor is the impending development of a regional system of satellites which might, in one way or the other, encroach upon, or be incompatible with, the international system. The Soviet Union has announced its intention of establishing an inter-sputnik system, and it is encouraging that since then the Soviet Union and satellite countries in East Europe agreed to take part, at least as observers, in the recent discussions in Washington. The other development was the proposal of the French and the West Germans to develop a regional system in Europe, which again makes it all the more necessary to have an integrated international system which can co-ordinate the activities of these regional systems with each other.

There have already been some discussions in Washington, first of all, in a conference of all the members, including many new members who joined so as to be able to take part in the conference. Altogether, there were about 70 participants, and about 15 observers from East Europe. Since those discussions in February and March of this year, more recently there have been meetings of a preparatory committee in Washington. At the end of those meetings, it was decided to have further meetings of the preparatory committee in September and November and a reconvening of the conference as a whole in the early months of next year.

I want to suggest to my right hon. Friend some of the considerations which, I hope, will be in the minds of the Government in the forthcoming discussions. So far, although many detailed points have been thrashed out at some length, it cannot be said that there has as yet been universal agreement about the type of system to be established. My main point is that the system should be converted from what is almost a national one—and certainly one which is dominated by one or a very few nations—into a fully international one.

One way in which I would like to see this done is by the entire system being placed in some kind of relationship with the United Nations. The system as a whole might become one of the specialised agencies of the United Nations. After all, the United Nations already has agencies concerned primarily with communications matters, such as I.M.C.O. in shipping and I.C.A.O. in civil aviation. This organisation is in a somewhat different category from those, because they are primarily regulatory agencies, while this is an operational and commercial system which is selling services to the public. But I do not feel that, on this account alone, the idea of a specialised agency need or should be cast aside.

In any case, whether or not a specialised agency is set up, I suggest that the new system should be brought into some kind of relationship with I.T.U., the existing U.N. agency, which is primarily concerned with similar matters, and I would be interested to hear the views of my right hon. Friend on that possibility. I believe that the Swedish Government at one time were interested in establishing some relationship of this kind. If they revert to that proposal, I hope that we shall be prepared to support them, I believe, also, that the United Nations Secretariat has expressed interest in this system, both in the sense that it would hope that there was some relationship with the U.N. organisation as a whole, and because it would be glad of the opportunity to use channels on certain occasions, for example, in communications with peacekeeping forces in the field and for other similar purposes. However, I accept fully that whether or not this system is made into a U.N. agency or body of some kind is not of primary importance. It would be of symbolic importance as establishing the fully international character of the system. What really counts is whether the structure and organisation of the system is made fully international.

I want here to mention four points on which I hope that Her Majesty's Government will seek to achieve a fully international system. The first is the obvious question of access. Any system of this kind should be freely available to any nation, or any individual, or company of any nation who might wish to make use of it. I will not pursue that aspect, because, on the whole, it is fairly generally agreed.

The second point which I want to stress is the question of integration. If it is a fully international system and an effective international service, it is essential that all regional systems should be fully co-ordinated by it.

It was generally agreed at the recent discussions that any regional system should not be incompatible with the international system. This is, I suppose, something of a concession, but I am not sure that it goes far enough. For example, it does not make clear exactly what the relationship will be between the governing body of the new system and the regional organisations. It should be made clear that any State which becomes a member of the new system automatically enters into an obligation to see that any other system with which it is associated can be established only in conformity with the directives and wishes expressed by the governing body of the new Intelsat system.

The third point I wish to make in connection with the international character of the system is that it should have the legal status of other international organisations. This question was discussed at the recent meetings in Washington. Such a system should have a similar international status as the existing United Nations international agencies, including the privileges, immunities and tax status which those organisations have, and I hope that Her Majesty's Government will support this view.

The fourth and most difficult point in this connection concerns the structure of the new agency or system. This point has been discussed at the recent meetings in Washington, where there has been general agreement that there will be an assembly of some sort, a governing body and a managing body. The real question is the relationship between them, and I will discuss each in turn.

First, it is essential that there should be an assembly which is representative of all Governments and all member States of the organisation and which will meet—just as the assemblies of the existing specialised agencies meet—perhaps only once every two or three years but which will, on those occasions, be able to reach decisions on questions which primarily affect governments.

We are talking here of an organisation with links not only among Governments but among the so-called signatories; the communications organisations which must undertake the day-to-day operation of the system. Some have suggested there should be a second assembly to link these signatories. This is not, in my view, an important point. The need could be met as well if delegations to the assembly included representatives of these signatory organisations, with the purely technical matters being discussed among them at separate meetings. However, we should support the idea of an assembly of Governments which would, in a sense, be the ultimate decision-making body of the organisation.

Secondly, it is universally agreed that there must be a governing body which should be in session all or most of the time and which will make most of the day-to-day decisions of the organisation. It is also generally agreed that the voting power cannot continue to include a permanent majority of the United States. It is agreed that the voting power should be related to the investment of each member State and that this, in turn, should be related to the use made of the system by each member State.

But there is considerable disagreement about exactly how this should be interpreted, and this raises the problem of how far domestic usage should be included, especially domestc use between States such as Pakistan, which are territorially divided. There is also the question whether past, present or future use should primarily count in determining the voting power in the governing body.

It is clear that the voting power cannot simply be on a one nation one vote basis. There must be, as there is in the I.M.F. and the World Bank, a considerable dominance among those nations which give most to the system. But I want to give a warning on this.

The example of the I.A.E.A. shows the difficulties which can arise when there is a major difference in voting strength between the assembly and the governing body of an organisation. We may be well advised to seek a system in which member Governments, even if they were not large investors, had slightly larger voting power in the governing body if that were to help to avoid the periodic battles, such as those which have taken place in the I.A.E.A., between the assembly, the main body of the membership, and the governing body, which undertake management decisions.

I turn now to the question of management. It is generally accepted that management must be taken out of the hands of COMSAT. Differences have arisen over the interim period—how long it should be, what kind of structure there should be, what kind of relationship there should be between the governing body and the management. We should seek a system, I should have thought, under which there is some kind of director-general with a secretariat responsible to the governing body, even if many of the operational activities are still undertaken either by COMSAT itself or by some other organisations of this kind. This would serve to establish an international interest in the management decisions of the organisation, and might also serve to prevent friction over questions of contract.

Finally, I want to stess the importance of decisions on matters of this kind in the establishment of the sort of international community many of us wish to see. Services of this kind—above all, communications services—are public services which, for example, in the case of national States, have, for a very long time, often been taken into the hands of Governments and have been run by them in the public interest, for the public as a whole. It is important to ensure that, in an international community, something similar should be done. If, therefore, we wish to avoid the many conflicts which would otherwise inevitably arise between the various national organisations involved in these activities with the continuing shrinking of the globe, the objective of Her Majesty's Government should surely be the establishment of a fully international system of communications satellites, which may serve the interests of all nations and which will not be dominated by those nations which are most advanced and most technically equipped. I believe that, in this way, we shall best serve the interests of the international community as a whole.

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Oxford (Mr. Luard) on raising this subject, because it is vitally important to those of us who have been urging the Government and other European Governments for many years, virtually since 1964, when the interim agreement was first signed, to come to some definite decision as a European entity. One of the tragedies is that, although 1st January, 1970, is to be the operative date of the new arrangement, Europe has still not made up its mind.

Four items were discussed recently in COMSAT and in INTELSAT. I know that my right hon. Friend the Minister of State has played a considerable part and is anxious to get the right decision. But I am worried about the weakness of the Government's position on the question. We broadly support the Germans on the issue but want a much weaker arrangement. We want there to be a lot of "wishy-washy" areas where we can avoid something definite. I do not believe that an international communications system can operate like that. This is why I detected signs of annoyance in my hon. Friend about the interim arrangement.

I do not defend the American position on the Intelsat interim arrangement, but it would not have got off the ground if the Americans had not firmly said that they were to operate these satellites and insisted on a budget to provide the money and, by arranging for a built-in majority of 51 per cent., assured that the decisions were made and that the money was forthcoming.

It should not be believed that if we and the rest of the world, or the rest of the membership of the Intelsat interim agreement, take the view that we do not want to pay, the Americans will have to reach an agreement with us, for there is enough money privately subscribed in America to run the Intelsat on its own. The Americans do not need a subscription from the rest of the world to make it operate. If the rest of the world, particularly Europe, decides to set up a regional system—and I tried to get our Government and other European Governments to do that, because it is of fundamental importance, although we do not have the time today to go into the background of that argument—unless we are prepared to ensure that we operate exclusively through Intelsat our difficulty will clearly be how to carry out the sort of functions which will permit the exchange of pictures and provide the ability to see the enormous scientific achievement of this week.

I hope that my right hon. Friend will attempt to express the Government's view more positively than has hitherto been the case. I do not defend any continuation of the American position in which to some extent they are arguing that there should be no major reformation of the interim arrangements. They believe that only minor modifications are needed and that the arrangement will continue as for the last five years. I do not agree. But it is equally certain that if we say that that is not good enough, this country and Europe will have to decide to be more positive in our approach and not run away from the enormous capital investment which will be needed in the coming years.

My hon. Friend referred to INTELSAT 3 which has about 1,200 channels. INTELSAT 4 will have about 5,000 channels and INTELSAT 6 will have in the range of 10,000 channels. It is no good our saying that the money should be spent in some other way. If we are urging the Americans to greater reform as other members of the arrangement, we for our part must accept the commitment and appreciate that it will cost us large capital investment. Once one begins this system, one cannot stop half way.

We have to consider the implications for us. We have a heavy investment in telephone submarine cables and I can well understand the Post Office not being keen to see that investment, which has not yet been repaid, being overcome, so leaving the Post Office with a deficit because we have gone to the new system of satellite communications which means that the enormous investment in submarine cables is no longer needed.

I urge my right hon. Friend to try to be more positive. He is to represent us at the resumed conference on 18th November and I beg him to understand the tremendous opportunities which are open to the world by the use of communications satellites not only for televison and telephones, but in a whole range of uses including the attack on world poverty. He will be charged with the critical duty of trying to see the future and make the right decision. We need the global system and I believe that our country and Europe must be initially involved. I hope that when he comes to negotiate he will have great success on our behalf.

I should like to join my hon. Friend the Member for Shoreditch and Finsbury (Mr. R. W. Brown) in congratulating my hon. Friend the Member for Oxford (Mr. Luard) for raising this very important question of international arrangements for communication satellites. Both of my hon. Friends have taken a long and informed interest in this subject, and I want particularly to pay tribute to the work which my hon. Friend the Member for Shoreditch and Finsbury has done for a long time in the Council of Europe and W.E.U. I am sure that he would not expect me today to canvass all the controversial issues in which he has been involved with these organisations.

We are all extremely conscious of the role that satellite communications play in modern society. It is very appropriate that we should end this parliamentary week with a discussion on this subject. It is by means of satelllites that we have for some time been watching events in other parts of the world. This week we had the opportunity of witnessing in our own homes the historic moment of man's first step on the moon, at the very instant it happened.

We tend to take things so much for granted, but it is only a matter of five years that this system has been in existence. As my hon. Friend the Member for Oxford said, dependence on satellite communications is growing. The international telecommunications satellite consortium known as INTELSAT and the network of earth stations for our international telephone telex television data transmission and other services are bound to play an even more important role in future than they have in the last few years.

I know that the Postmaster-General would agree when I say that from the technical and operational viewpoint INTELSAT has been, and continues to be, an outstanding success. During the five years of its existence it has put into orbit three generations of satellites, and the system now provides global coverage, thus achieving the original objective of the consortium. A total of 17 States signed the Washington interim agreements in 1954 establishing INTELSAT, and they have now been joined by a further 51 countries. Many other States have expressed an interest in applying for membership.

This country was one of the founder members, and is the second largest user of the system after the United States. I agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Shoreditch and Finsbury that much of the credit for this achievement must go to the Americans. Were it not for the enlightened attitude and generosity of the United States Government the INTELSAT system would not have been possible. We would no. have had the opportunity of watching the moon landing, nor would we have had the opportunity of seeing live, election events on the other side of the world, cricket and football matches, the Mexico Games and all the rest. United States technology and ideas provided the starting point which led to the development of a purely world-wide system.

Similarly, we owe a debt of gratitude to COMSAT, the United States corporation, which acted as manager of the system. Whatever changes we may think necessary in future, and I agree that changes are desirable, we must ensure that nothing is done which may impair the technical and commercial viability of the system. As my hon. Friend the Member for Oxford said, the Washington agreements under which INTELSAT was established were interim agreements. It was envisaged that, following an initial trial period, member countries would come together to write a permanent arrangement for the organisation which would come into effect on 1st January, 1970. To this end, a conference was convened in Washington in February, 1969, and negotiations are to continue this year with a view to arriving at definitive arrangements as soon as possible.

It is now clear that because of the complexity of this task and the differences of view among member states, a new agreement will not be completed this year. But there is every hope that a settlement will be reached next year. Meanwhile, the interim arrangements will continue in force. It is an indication of the great importance that the United States Government attach to this subject and to these negotiations that they have appointed so distinguished a leader of the United States delegation as Governor Scranton. I had the pleasure and opportunity of discussing these matters with him when he was here in, I think, April.

In response to the request of my hon. Friends, I should like to focus on what the Government believe to be the main considerations in negotiating permanent arrangements for INTELSAT and I should like to take up some of the points raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Oxford. I do not think that he will find that we are totally unsympathetic to some of the points that he made.

The two principal objectives, which I believe are entirely compatible, are the continued economic and technical viability of the system and arrangements which permit full participation by all members in determining the policies of the organisation. In the Government's view, and, I think that I am right in saying, in the view of all INTELSAT members, some changes are necessary in the structure of the organisation if these two objectives are to be achieved. The temporary arrangements which were acceptable to a small group of nations in 1964 are not in every respect appropriate to a permanent organisation consisting of a very much larger number of members, some of which are developing their own satellite technology. Essen- tially we are trying to devise arrangements which are more democratic and which will not only satisfy INTELSAT'S existing members but encourage other States, including those of Eastern Europe to which my hon. Friend referred, to apply for membership or make use of the system.

Since the negotiations on definitive arrangements for INTELSAT are not being conducted in public, the House will understand if I do not describe in detail the many issues under consideration. But I think that I can and should give some details of the structural changes which we believe will contribute greatly to the well-being of the organisation. My hon. Friend the Member for Oxford will find that we have anticipated in our discussions a number of his very important points.

First, it appears to be the general wish of INTELSAT members that an assembly should be established in which all member States would be represented and in which they would all have an equal vote. I do not think that my hon. Friend mentioned the size of the vote in the assembly, but I do not think that he would dissent from that proposition. Broadly, the task of the assembly would be to review the past performance and future activities of the organisation and consider such issues as are appropriate to Governments rather than to communications entities.

Secondly, as my hon. Friend mentioned, there is a strong feeling that when the governing body which is to replace the interim committee and in which the commercial policy of the organisation is determined, no one member should occupy a predominant position. In 1964, because the United States were very large investors in the system, COMSAT, the United States representative in the interim committee, was accorded a vote of about 60 per cent. which has since, because of the admission of new members, fallen to 53 per cent.

While we subscribe to the view that member States' investment in the system and voting rights should reflect their use of the system, we believe that the permanent voting arrangements should be such that, at least, no one country should be able to impose its will or block decisions which command the support of the vast majority of members.

Thirdly—and this is, undoubtedly, the most difficult issue—the United Kingdom and the great majority of INTELSAT members do not consider it appropriate that the management of the world-wide system should be directly and formally in the hands of COMSAT, particularly as that entity is also the United States spokesman in the governing body and possesses by far the largest voting share.

The United States Communications Satellite Act, 1962, under which COMSAT was established, made provision for COMSAT to assume that duale rôle and this was inevitable and understandable in the infancy of INTELSAT and as an interim arrangement. In our view, however, it is not appropriate or acceptable that this arrangement should remain enshrined in a definitive agreement.

We believe that provision must be made for different arrangements which will ensure that the management body is the impartial servant of the governing body and, thus not only serves, but is seen to serve, the interests of all INTELSAT members. We believe that this would be practicable and attainable despite the difficulties which it may cause for the United States and consistent with the paramount need to protect the viability of the system.

In the governing body, does my right hon. Friend favour simply one man, one vote, or one man, one weighted vote according to investment or one man, one vote according to usage of the system?

As I have said, in the assembly we accept the principle of equal votes, but I will not disguise the fact that the negotiation of the voting system in the governing body will be an extremely delicate and difficult business.

I do not think that at this early juncture in the negotiations, it would be helpful if I gave any further indication of our view. I am trying to indicate the kind of final solution to which we are working, but the detailed arrangements will be difficult to achieve. As the negotions are confidential, it would not be helpful for me to go further.

Will my right hon. Friend comment on my point that there have been other international organisations, such as in which there have been periodic conflicts between the governing body and the assembly because of excessive weighting? I am in favour of some weighting, which is inevitable, in the governing body, but will my right hon. Friend acknowledge that there must be careful consideration against weighting predominantly in favour of the most developed countries.

I readily agree that we should not have excessive weighting, because the word "excessive" already prejudges the answer. The whole question is what would or would not be excessive. I accept that there is a difficulty.

I stress that to succeed, this must be a technically efficient and commercially viable organisation. If the Olympic Games were held but because of incompetence or disagreement in the body running the organisation we did not get the live performance that we now expect there would certainly be many debates or Questions on the subject in the House. We have, therefore, to work out a system which will give the full opportunity of all members to participate in the organisation, but, at the same time, we must have one which will be efficent and commercially viable. This is the heart of the difficulty and of the delicate negotiations which have been going on for a long time.

The negotiations have been conducted at the official level by a team of representatives of the several Departments concerned. They have been led by Mr. Killick, an Under-Secretary in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and I would like to pay tribute to the work which he and his colleagues have done and are doing.

In conclusion, I take up the final point of my hon. Friend the Member for Oxford about placing INTELSAT under United Nations control. INTELSAT is, in a sense, a peculiar animal. It is an international public service, fully conscious of its high responsibilities. At the same time, as I indicated in reply to his intervention, it has to be run on a sound and continuing commercial basis. We do not believe it is necessary, appropriate, or even practically possible that INTELSAT should be an organ of the United Nations.

Neither the United Nations nor the other member States of INTELSAT have suggested a change of this kind. What we do think important is that the permanent arrangements of INTELSAT are such that they fully conform with the principles enshrined in the United Nations Charter and in the General Assembly Resolution 1721, and they are, that the organisation should be open to all member States of the United Nations and of the United Nations agency, the International Telecommunication Union, that all States have access to the system without discrimination, and that all member States should be able to participate in determining the organisation's policy, which should reflect its fully international nature.

We confidently believe that a settlement on these lines will emerge from the current negotiations in Washington, in which the United Kingdom will continue to take an active part.

I should, therefore, like to thank my hon. Friends for their contributions and for raising this very important matter. I hope that they may take some satisfaction from the position which we have taken and from our determination to seek an efficient and genuinely international organisation for the future.

This is the final debate before we rise for the Recess, but perhaps not the least important. I think that the House will welcome an opportunity to discuss the proposal for an Anglo-French nuclear force, which is causing very real concern to many people of informed opinion. There are hon. and right hon. Members who regard Herr Strauss, the West German Finance Minister, as the author of this proposal, but, in fact, the authorship is in dispute.

At Question Time on 12th June last there were animated clashes between my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition, the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Bexley (Mr. Heath), about precisely what had been said on the question when the Leader of the Opposition met the American Press on 25th May.

The Times had reported the right hon. Gentleman as saying:

"The European partners must sooner or later have a nuclear capability."

The right hon. Gentleman the Member for Bexley insisted that a full transcript of his statement was available, and it is from that document I should now like to quote.

The right hon. Gentleman was asked by an American journalist, Mr. Dale,

"How about the proposal made last week by Herr Strauss that Britain merge its nuclear forces with the French forces, or do you favour a continued independent British deterrent? "

The right hon. Member for Bexley replied:

"I was very interested in this proposal, because I was over here just over two years ago, giving the Godkin lectures at Harvard, three lectures about Europe, and in one of those lectures, dealing with foreign affairs and defence, I put forward exactly this proposal. The form in which I nut it forward was that the French and British nuclear deterrents should jointly be held in trust for Europe."

I think that anyone who read the Godkin lectures as a whole would agree that there is some justice in the right hon. Gentleman's claim that he is the originator of the idea, and that it is not so much a Strauss proposal as a Heath proposal, or, at the very least, that it is a Heath-Strauss proposal.

But there are others abroad who subscribe to the proposal, and I should like briefly to mention what was said at a recent conference of French and British Parliamentarians when I and other hon. and right hon. Members went to France at the end of June under the auspices of the Franco-British Parliamentary Relations Committee. Senator André Monteil, who is the President of the Commission on Foreign Affairs, Defence and the Armed Forces, made it quite clear in his report to the conference—and I honour him for his frankness—that

"We French, Government supporters and Opposition alike, see in atomic co-operation between our two countries the real test of whether Great Britain…really is turning towards Europe and abandoning her rôle of brilliant second to the United States of America."

Thus, the proposal has been taken seriously in France, and it is worth while considering why it was made and why it attracted the support of extremely influential opinion in France and elsewhere in Western Europe.

My reading of the right hon. Gentleman's Godkin lectures convinces me that he believes nuclear sharing with France to be an essential part of the price for British entry into the European Economic Community.

From the French viewpoint, the proposal has its attraction. France is still very much a lagging fifth in the nuclear league table and has been feeling the economic pinch of increasing so-called defence spending. Indeed, M. Debré, the new Defence Minister, was recently enjoined by the French Prime Minister to cut his coat according to his cloth.

Referring to this in a recent leading article, The Guardian severely criticised the Heath-Strauss proposal for nuclear sharing, and went on to say:

"The expense and lack of credibility of these two albatrosses that hang round the necks of both the French and the British Governments should lead no one to think that a joint albatross around a joint neck would be any cheaper, more credible, or in any way more desirable. Least of all should it be thought that the pooling of our nuclear resources with those of the French will speed our entry into the Common Market."

I agree, and I think that the overwhelming majority of people in this country would agree with The Guardian's assessment; for the Heath-Strauss plan is not only extremely dangerous and against all our present efforts to arrest the growth of nuclear armaments, but, from the British point of view, it would also be deeply cynical to follow this course.

Let us consider how the proposal for an Anglo-French nuclear force would affect the international undertakings entered into in the post-war years by British Governments of both parties. First, there is the United States Atomic Energy Act of 1946, which is better known as the MacMahon Act. It is the view of expert opinion that the implementation of the Strauss/Heath proposal would involve dishonouring our commitments under that Act, for who can say that we should not be making available to the French information which was passed to this country under the provisions of that Act?—or are Herr Strauss and the right hon. Member for Bexley saying that the MacMahon Act should be regarded as a dead letter and ignored?

Secondly, there is the Anglo-American bilateral agreement of 1958 on Co-operation on the Uses of Atomic Energy for Mutual Defence Purposes. Article 7 of that agreement lays down clear conditions on dissemination. Would these not be breached by any unilateral decision by this country to communicate classified information, or transfer, or permit access to, or use of, materials or equipment, made available under the agreement?

Third, there is the amendment in 1959 to the Anglo-American bilateral agreement of 1958, with the same conditions on dissemination and the same very serious question arises.

Fourth, there is the partial test-ban treaty of 1963, to which the French Government did not adhere, and indeed, they have continued to test nuclear devices in the atmosphere. Perhaps my right hon. Friend could say to what extent any implementation of the Heath-Strauss proposal would affect the attitudes taken by the French and British Governments to that important treaty.

Fifth, there is the Non-Proliferation Treaty of 1968, to which we have adhered and the French have not. Article 1 of the treaty states:

"Each nuclear weapon State party to the treaty undertakes not to transfer to any recipient whatsoever nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices or control over such weapons or explosive devices directly or indirectly."

Will we not also be clearly in breach of our undertaking under the treaty, in the preparation of which my hon. Friend took such an honourable and leading part?

It may be that the right hon. Member for Bexley regards the Non-Proliferation Treaty as a mere scrap of paper. But he will not carry this country with him in that view, and he should now be pressed to "come clean" about the real implications of his proposal for nuclear sharing. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Easington (Mr. Shinwell), with all customary good sense, has pointed out

"Mr. Heath has no right to go round the world peddling this proposal as though anybody in Britain outside himself supported it. Mr. Heath, who wants to revive all the fears of the nuclear consortium, and include Germany with all that that might stir up on the Russian side, is not speaking for Britain."

Moreover, there is great satisfaction that my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister, in his speech at Barnsley, and elsewhere, has spoken so emphatically against the Leader of the Opposition's views on this matter.

I should be grateful if my right hon. Friend could comment in his reply on the logic, if we were to have nuclear sharing with France as members of the same economic and/or political community, of excluding other West European partners, including West Germany, from the deal. I hope he will agree with me that it would be far preferable for the French now to sign the partial test-ban treaty and the Non-Proliferation Treaty than for us to be cynically considering a nuclear deal with that country.

Let us ask them now to stop poisoning the atmosphere. Let us place more emphasis on nuclear disarmament than on nuclear proliferation. Let us also make it plain to our friends in Western Europe that there are in this country only a very few fanatical Europeans who would favour the right hon. Gentleman's proposal.

It is time now for the activists for peace and international understanding to give the Heath-Strauss proposal much more detailed study. I know that they will do so with the sombre thought in mind that Western Europe, with its 75 major cities in close proximity to each other, is among the most vulnerable regions to nuclear devastation, and has the most deeply vested interest in nuclear disarmament. In Western Europe there would be unimaginable destruction and loss of life. My view is that we should be taking the most important lead in nuclear disarmament.

Since I am initiating the final debate before the Summer Recess, I should like to take the opportunity to express my warm appreciation to Mr. Speaker, his deputies and all his staff, indeed to everyone who works in the House, which is so eminently well served, and to convey to them all our every good wish for an enjoyable and happy Recess.

Of all the important issues discussed in Parliament today, this, unfortunately, may turn out to be the most grave. Why is it that Herr Strauss, the tough guy of Germany, is so enthusiastic about the idea of the pooling of nuclear arms by Britain and France? The obvious answer is that this is his way of securing what he has so far been denied—nuclear weapons for West Germany; a West German finger on the nuclear trigger.

Would I trust the West German generals with H-bombs? I would not even trust them with water pistols, and I am entitled to say that because I would not trust our own generals, or any other generals, with such weapons. They are genocide weapons whose use is not justified in any circumstances at all. When one remembers that nearly all the leading generals in West Germany served as officers in the Luftwaffe, or in Hitler's armed forces generally, one's doubts are by no means dispersed.

When Herr Strauss spoke in London to the European Atlantic Group on 19th May, he said:

"The first step could be for Great Britain and France to pool their nuclear arms, creating the core of a nuclear force. In this initial stage of the community the order to use nuclear weapons could be given only by the existing authorities in whose territories part of the nuclear arsenal were located."

I ask the House to note the words, "In this initial stage". That certainly implies that there would be later stages, in which other countries would participate. It has another serious meaning, too, that the time would come when West Germany could order the use of the nuclear bombs on its territory; and there are a large number of such bombs on its territory at the present time. It is significant that in the same speech Herr Strauss was opposed to any arms limitation agreement being reached between the U.S.A. and U.S.S.R. Starting with the original mistake of arming West Germany, it would be madness to go further and give her access to nuclear weapons.

I might add that I am also opposed to the Anglo-Dutch-German agreement for nuclear collaboration, even for peaceful purposes, because of the difficulty of preventing its abuse and the spread of this knowledge and this plant to military purposes. Just at a time when there seem to be some hopeful signs of a détente between the Big Two—and I profoundly hope that I am not speaking too soon—it would be tragic if this proposal for an Anglo-French nuclear force and its probable extension were adopted.

Why spoil the prospects for peace? For immediately the Soviet Government would shy away from East-West co-operation. Her fears of West German militarism are even greater than ours. The Nazi invasion cost her 20 million lives. Only yesterday Mr. Kosygin emphasised the importance of having a West German signature on the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, a signature which is still missing.

Unfortunately, as my hon. Friend said, it is not only Herr Strauss who wants an Anglo-French nuclear force. The Leader of the Opposition, and many of his Conservative supporters in this House, and the French Prime Minister, have all recently given encouragement to the idea, the latter no doubt because of the fact that France is several years behind us in her nuclear military developments, because of the enormous cost of catching up, and because of France's new economic difficulty.

Our own Prime Minister has resisted the proposals, but, unfortunately, he said in the House on 22nd July:

"If France were to come within the nuclear planning group, that might help to create a new situation."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 22nd July, 1969; Vol. 787, c. 1490.]

Many hon. Members on this side are opposed to any spread of nuclear weaponry, either outside or inside N.A.T.O. It would be greatly reassuring if the Minister of State could give a categoric undertaking that there will be no Anglo-French nuclear force of any kind. That would more than justify this debate.

Possibly the greatest danger of a third world war lies in war by accident. It could start through the misreading or misinterpretation of a signal, through the intervention of an unbalanced commander somewhere along the line of control, or through the unintended launching of a nuclear bomb. The more Governments possessing the bomb the greater is the danger of such an accident. Today, there are five such Governments; God help us if their number grows. Our object should be a reduction to two and then to none.

The geni is half out of the bottle. The task for humanity is to stuff it back again. To allow it to get out further is to do the devil's work, for which the price may be nothing less than the extinction of mankind. To take such a risk merely to get into the Common Market would be both tragedy and farce. For many reasons I am opposed to our entering to the E.E.C. One is that I fear that the E.E.C. is intended in some ways as an economic basis for a military pact. To worsen the prospects of peace is a price we should not pay, even if we approved of entry into the Common Market.

It would be an intolerable price; it would be worse than selling our soul for a mess of potage; it would risk selling our children's lives for a load of tripe. The constructive alternative is a European security pact with mutual reductions of forces by N.A.T.O. and the Warsaw Pact alliances and the replacement of East-West antagonism by East-West collaboration.

I am sure that I speak on behalf of all hon. Members in asking you, Mr. Irving, to convey to Mr. Speaker and to accept, with your fellow Deputy Speaker, and all the officers and servants of the House, no matter how humble their capacity, our grateful thanks for their great services this Session, which has been particularly demanding in time and in other ways. We would like to express our gratitude and wish you all a very happy Recess.

It would also be our wish for you to convey to Mr. Speaker our very good wishes for his forthcoming journey to the United States and particularly to say how pleased we are to know that he is to be present on the historic occasion next week, the 350th anniversary of the Parliament at Jamestown, the oldest Parliament in the New World. This and many other activities of Mr. Speaker at home and abroad are of immense service in bringing Parliament and people closer together.

If I may now turn to the debate, in a sense I am rather superfluous here today because, as I understand my hon. Friend the Member for Manchester, Wythenshawe (Mr. Alfred Morris), his main complaint was with the Leader of the Opposition and not with the Government and, perhaps understandably at this unprecedentedly late hour on a Friday, the Leader of the Opposition is not present to reply himself. I am sure that my hon. Friend would not except me to undertake that duty.

Equally, I think that I am a little superfluous in the sense that my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister has dealt so often and so effectively with these issues both at Question Time and in speeches inside and outside the House that I can do little more than summarise and repeat the points which he has made.

The first point which I want to make very clearly is that a debate about an Anglo-French nuclear force is an wholly hypothetical issue. No official proposals have been made for such a force or for Anglo-French nuclear collaboration in defence matters. The French Government have only recently taken office. No doubt they will spend some time yet considering their attitude towards N.A.T.O. and European defence matters generally, including nuclear questions.

However, it may be useful to repeat some of the points upon which the policy of Her Majesty's Government is based. If I may, I will make one point to my hon. Friend the Member for Salford, East (Mr. Frank Allaun) about his reference to the current tripartite centrifuge negotiations in which I have been personally involved between the Netherlands, the Federal Republic of Germany and ourselves. From the very first meeting, it was made clear that any collaboration would be strictly within the international obligations of the three countries and that there would be appropriate safeguards to ensure that this was so. It is a collaboration for civil nuclear energy.

It should be stressed that we have not yet reached a final agreement, and I would ask my hon. Friend to wait and see the final outcome—

It will be too late then.

It would not, in any case, be a matter of providing one country with a knowledge of enriching uranium which it otherwise would not have. The basis of the collaboration is that each of three countries will be able to produce its own enriched uranium by centrifuge means. If there was not a tripartite international arrangement, there could be three separate national entities. So my hon. Friend's point about proliferation is not soundly based if he meant that proliferation was coming from the centrifuge arrangements. Certainly, there is no intention on the part of any of the other parties to proliferate in the Non-Proliferation Treaty sense.

As I have said, Anglo-French nuclear collaboration in defence raises complex issues. It cannot be considered in isolation as a purely Anglo-French matter—or even as an exclusively European affair. Proposals of this kind are inevitably linked to wider international strategic and disarmament questions. Not only do we have to bear in mind the importance for us of N.A.T.O. but also the provisions of the relevant agreements with the United States.

In short, it is clear that any discussion with the French in this area would be more fruitful if we had previously established a clear view and a closer understanding of our common interests on fundamental questions of foreign and defence policy.

We have always favoured much closer co-operation on defence matters among European countries, not least between France and ourselves. This, in our view, is best done within N.A.T.O. so that it strengthens rather than divides the alliance. Hence the support that we have given to the development of defence discussions among the European members of the alliance. We would greatly welcome French participation in these discussions and closer French association with N.A.T.O. generally. However this is, of course, a matter for France to decide.

As regards nuclear discussions, N.A.T.O. also offers the most appropriate forum—

As regards nuclear discussions, N.A.T.O. also offers the most appropriate forum, the Nuclear Planing Group, which was set up specifically for this purpose. France, of her own choice, is not a member of the N.P.G. It is open to her to take appropriate steps to associate herself with the N.P.G. at any time.

If France were to approach us with proposals for nuclear collaboration, which so far has not happened, we should of course listen carefully, as we would to anything which the new French Government may have to say to us. We are prepared and always have been prepared to discuss at any time with the French Government mutual questions of interest in nuclear weapons. However, as the Prime Minister told the House on 17th July, we would want to be

"extremely careful about anything in the weapons sense, in a bilateral sense or in any sense outside N.A.T.O."—[Orion REPORT, 17th July, 1969 Vol. 787, c. 879.]

My hon. Friends have raised the question of the possible linking of these suggested arrangements with an application to join the Common Market, and I remind them again of what my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister said on 22nd July in reply to the right hon. Gentleman the Leader of the Opposition. My right hon. Friend, referring to Anglo-French nuclear co-operation, said:

"In my view, it would be extremely unwise to link this with negotiations for entering into the Common Market. I have seen no disposition on the part of the Six to attempt to extract from us a deal of that kind, linking two things which are very different indeed."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 22nd July, 1969; Vol. 787, c. 1490.]

I hope that my hon. Friends accept my right hon. Friend's statement. I am flattered in thinking that they want my views after they have heard those of the Prime Minister, but I am happy to say that my views and his are identical, at least on this question.

We would also, of course, be mindful of our obligations under, for example, the Non-Proliferation Treaty.. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Manchester, Wythenshawe (Mr. Alfred Morris) for his kind references to the part I was proud to play in getting this treaty signed and agreed. What we want very much, for all the reasons my hon. Friend the Member for Salford, East (Mr. Frank Allaun) gave, because proliferation is a serious danger, is to see the treaty brought into full effect as soon as may be.

Any collaboration would have to be consistent with our status as a power which has both signed and ratified the Non-Proliferation Treaty. There is a good deal of talk about a European nuclear force and the like. I repeat what I told the House on 8th July, 1968, and which I repeated in November when we ratified the treaty, about the position of the treaty in respect of these rather loose, woolly proposals about a European force.

The treaty allows for the succession of a federated State to the former nuclear status of one of its components. However, a federated State would have to control all of its external security functions, including defence and all foreign policy matters relating to external security. This covers the possibility, which we should not wish to rule out, that one day a politically and economically united Europe might have weapons of its own, including nuclear weapons. But I think that we all agree that this is not an immediate issue.

I hope that my hon. Friends will accept that my reply will permit them to go away for the Recess and enjoy it, and to feel that a good deal of the oratory and writings about an Anglo-French nuclear force are on a hypothetical basis. As far as Her Majesty's Government are concerned, no official proposals have been made. If they were made, we should endeavour to respond to them on the lines that my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister has so often put before the House and, much less adequately I have tried to summarise today.