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

The Bill is to reform the legislative basis of the public service pension schemes—that is of the occupational pension schemes of the Civil Service, of local government employees, of teachers, of the health services, and of the police and fire services. It should thus provide us, at just the right moment when most of these schemes are under review, with the essential machinery for modernising them in conformity with the Government's own policy, that policy being greatly to enhance the rôle of all occupational pension schemes in both the public and the private sectors.

I believe that, as such, the Bill is something of a landmark, and, in the case of the Civil Service, it brings to an end a long line of Acts of Parliament going back for more than 160 years.

Right hon. Members opposite did not have the opportunity to work out their plans in detail, but nearly two years ago they announced to the House their intention to tackle the major element in this reform affecting the Civil Service. I therefore believe that the Bill will prove to be welcome on both sides of the House and to be non-controversial.

I shall start by explaining briefly what the Bill aims to achieve, and then set this in the wider context of Government strategy before going on to deal in rather greater depth with the merits of the proposals that we are making.

The Bill has three main purposes. The first is to enable the Civil Service pension scheme to be set out in non-statutory documents instead of in Acts of Parliament. The main purpose of Clauses 1 to 6 is, therefore, to enable the Minister for the Civil Service to make pension schemes for the Civil Service and to do all the things which any person running an up-to-date, flexible and forward-looking pension scheme nowadays needs to be able to do.

In the face of these wide powers, certain safeguards are built in which I know that the staff interests will welcome, as I hope will the House.

If Parliament passes the Bill, it will approve, and thus control, the framework within which these powers are exercised, but we thought it right that Parliament should also continue to be able to control the coverage of the scheme.

The coverage is, therefore, governed by Clause 1(4) to (7). We start with a coverage which is virtually the same as that of the existing Superannuation Act, 1965. There is a power to add to the list other categories of people who are remunerated out of moneys voted by Parliament or out of the Consolidated Fund, or out of any statutory fund set up by an Act of Parliament.

The second main purpose relates to the remainder of the civil public service pension schemes—is, as I have said, the pension schemes of local government, the teachers, the health services, and the police and fire services.

At the moment, these are set out to varying degrees in primary legislation and different degrees of subordinate legislation, though none of them nearly so predominantly in primary legislation as the Civil Service scheme. The purpose of the Bill is to tidy up and to secure for all these schemes, and for any subsequent changes in them, a single consistent pattern of control. The proposal is that they should be set out in Statutory Instruments subject to negative Resolution. Again there are important safeguards for staff interests.

Incidentally, I wish to make it clear that the Bill is in no way concerned with the Armed Forces pension schemes, which are set out in prerogative instruments.

The third main purpose of the Bill is to enable the Government to complete the process of removing from Ministerial control the terms of the staff pension schemes of the nationalised industries and certain other similarly constituted bodies. The House may recall that on 9th June last I announced the Government's decision to remove this control, which by 1971 seemed to have become an inappropriate and unnecessary piece of Government activity. As I explained then, the process of decontrol could be achieved in many important instances by Statutory Instrument.

This has been done. The Bill will enable us to complete the task for those bodies, including the Post Office and the British Airports Authority, for which the change could be effected only by primary legislation.

The remaining provisions in the Bill are miscellaneous, consequential or transitional. From among the miscellaneous, I think that the House would at this stage wish to know only that Clause 13 modernises the pension arrangements for the Comptroller and Auditor General by bringing them into line with those for the Parliamentary Commissioner for Administration.

I referred earlier to the Bill's place in a wider context. I want not merely to set it in the context of our planned progress of reappraisal and reform of the arrangements governing the way people should be treated when they leave the public service but, first, to touch on how all these changes themselves fall within the Government's wider "strategy for pensions".

The Bill is concerned with powers relating to occupational pension schemes to be exercised by the Government and other public authorities as employers. These schemes are separate from the provision which the State makes not as employer but as a provider of social security for all people in old age and times of difficulty. But the recent White Paper of my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Social Services explains the Government's view of the link between the two.

It is a cardinal feature of my right hon. Friend's policy that a much more important rôle should be played by the occupational pension scheme. The social security system will provide a flat-rate coverage for all but in future all employers are to be positively encouraged to build on top of that an earnings-related provision for old age by means of their own occupational schemes.

The Government, for their part, intend to set a good example both as employer in the Civil Service and in the National Health Services, and, less directly, in relation to the occupational pension schemes of the other public services, where they also have a rôle to play.

The Bill clears the way for the final and, perhaps, most important stage in a three-part programme designed to bring Civil Service superannuation fully into line with present-day needs and enables the other public services to follow this lead, or similar avenues of advance, as they may need.

The first stage, still recent in the House's memory, was the Pensions (Increase) Act, which became law shortly before the Summer Recess. This puts on to a predictable and satisfactory basis for the first time the arrangements for increasing the pensions of public servants after they have retired. The present Bill does not affect the Pensions (Increase) Act other than in some quite minor consequential adjustments.

Next came the improved arrangements which are to be made for those who for various reasons, other than health, have to leave the Civil Service before the normal retiring age. Last week I was able to announce that these arrangements had been agreed by the national staff side. They have been agreed also by the trade unions representing industrial civil servants. Their full implementation will be made possible by the enactment of this Bill.

The third area of reform is the main public service pension schemes themselves. Here, there are two problems. One is the format, with its often cumbersome and creaking provisions for change which I shall be coming to in a few moments the other is the need to improve the terms of the schemes themselves.

The schemes are all under review, of will shortly be, in joint consultation between management and staff representatives. These reviews have been in train for different periods, but the hope is that they will all move towards completion in the forthcoming months, and that the powers under the Bill will be ready to hand to implement in a speedy and efficient manner whatever changes are agreed. Obviously, since negotiations in most instances are already in progress, I cannot, without some risk of prejudice, say much today about what is likely to emerge, net alone offer the House an appraisal of the likely changes in all the schemes. But I can offer illustratively one or two indications, from the point of view of the Civil Service, of the way things are going.

We start with the improvements already achieved in the Pensions (Increase) Act and in the recently concluded agreement on compensation, to which I have just referred. Generally, hon. Members can take it that the review will lead to a major reform of Civil Service superannuation. This is certainly due. The Civil Service, as I shall have cause to recall again in a moment or two, has been a pioneer in this field and in the past set the pace in this country. Over the years since the war, many other employers have, fortunately, begun to catch up, and not a few have now overtaken us. There have not been really major changes in the Civil Service scheme since the years just after the war when the supplementary widows' and children's scheme was introduced. It is, therefore, time for a major look.

One area in which substantial change can be expected arises from the commitment in my own party's manifesto to

"ensure that everyone can take their pension rights with them when they change their jobs".

This is carried a stage further in my right hon. Friend's White Paper, "Strategy for Pensions", which refers, among other things, to the aim of the Government as employer to introduce preservation in the Civil Service and the National Health Service well in advance of April 1975, the likely compulsory date.

The White Paper explains that, for practical reasons, the Government will not be making transferability compulsory. But in the Civil Service we are forging ahead with our plans for both preservation and transferability, which go hand in hand, and we are well ahead with discussions with the staff side on how we can best give these intentions prompt and good effect.

While it is possible to ensure that everybody in the pension scheme has a right to a preserved pension after five years' service, it will be clear that ensuring the spread of the right to transfer accrued pension rights from one employment to another is not a one-sided operation: one is inevitably involved with, and dependent upon, what other employers are prepared to do as well. So one of our aims will be to minimise that dependence, which is otherwise a serious brake on progress, particularly as we want to make progress on transfer to and from the private sector as well.

Since the qualifying period of service for preservation will be five years, we are bound to reduce the qualifying period for pension in our scheme from 10 to five years, also. This in itself will be a major improvement.

It must, also, be clear to those who take a close interest in these things that the negotiating committee is bound to look at ways of bringing about some significant improvement in that area of the scheme which copes with the contingency of the death of the scheme member. I mean things like widows' and children's pensions, death benefit, and so on. We are taking a critical look at the provisions of the injury warrant, too. Nor are we neglecting the scheme's coverage. Discussions with the staff side are well advanced also on the Fulton proposal that all temporary civil servants should be pensionable.

I am sure the House will understand that I cannot be more specific or more quantitative than this, and I certainly do not imply that those broad allusions are exhaustive. It is a major review in which we are involved and nothing has been ruled out of discussion.

When the reviews are complete, when the Bill has become law, and when the powers in it have been used to implement the results of the reviews, public service superannuation should have taken on overall an up-to-date and streamlined look, and the public services, as so often in the past, will again be setting a good example in this field to other employers. Moreover, they will be much better placed than in the past to move quickly and flexibly to meet the need for further change when it arises.

I now turn to three questions which I believe, the Bill may well prompt. Why is it right to remove a substantial amount of control from Parliament? Why go further in this direction for the Civil Service than for the other public services? Is there cause for concern here for staff, and are there any relevant safeguards for them?

To answer the first question it is necessary to delve a little into history, in fact to the 18th century, when "pension" was not so nearly synonymous with "superannuation" as it is today and before there were any Acts upon the Statute Book dealing with public service superannuation. As so often, Dr. Johnson, I suppose, had the last word on this when he defined "pension" in his dictionary as generally understood to mean pay given to a State hireling for treason to his country.

The point I want to salvage from that is that in those days "pension" was simply a word for a State payment or subsidy to a person for services rendered in recognition of his position in life or for some other reason, good or bad. It did not necessarily have even a flavour of a payment to those who were either literally superannuated or, as an early public Measure so nicely and delicately put it, "worn out in the public service".

Towards the end of the 18th century and at the beginning of the 19th century more than one Commission of Inquiry criticised the waste of public money involved in pension arrangements. The point was also beginning to be made that greater efficiency in public offices could be achieved if proper provision were made for regular payments after retirement, so that those who were too old to work efficiently could be retired without undue hardship.

The first Act to make general provisions for Civil Service pensions was that of 1810. Other Acts followed, and the first major Act dealing exclusively with superannuation was that of 1834. That Act was only finally repealed, with many others, as part of the consolidating. Superannuation Act, 1965.

I would say that there were three main reasons why these early provisions were enshrined in Acts of Parliament: first, to prevent abuses and the waste of public money; second, to promote efficiency in the public service by ensuring that people could be got rid of without hardship when they were no longer able to do their job; third, to encourage loyalty and long service and to set a standard, which, even though expressed in terms of maxima, gave staff something they could rely on.

We no longer have to rely on Acts of Parliament to achieve these ends. Among the main reasons are the development of public financial control coupled with the developing traditions and professional standards of public servants, the widespread acceptance—particularly in the public services—of the need for well published codes of conditions of service, the greater continuity of policy in such matters that is nowadays achieved between Governments of different parties, and, finally, the development of the influence of the staff associations and of the responsible exercise of their very considerable power.

Indeed, as a result of these developments the balance of argument has moved so far from the original position that in some respects it has turned right round. As life and Government become more complex, and as the pressures upon Parliament grow more intense, it just does not make sense that parliamentary time should be taken up by the passage of Bills designed to change public service pension schemes. It is now an anachronism that this condition of service alone should be enshrined in many cases in primary legislation. It helps to underline this to point out that Civil Service pensions, costing some £100 million per annum, are controlled in detail by Act of Parliament, while Civil Service pay, costing some 13 times as much, is not.

I have dealt mainly so far with the situation as it is in the Civil Service. But much the same arguments hold true of the other public services. In turning to these, I will tackle my second question of why they should be treated somewhat differently from the Civil Service in this Bill. Pension schemes in the other public services were introduced a good deal later than in the Civil Service. For example, although the police were early in the field in the mid-19th century in securing some provision, it was not until the Police Act of 1890 and the Police (Scotland) Act of the same year that comprehensive schemes were established for police, and not until the Police Pensions Act of 1921 that there was a single scheme.

At the other end of the time scale came the pension schemes for the Health Services, for which powers were given in Acts of 1946 and 1947. By that stage, some of the arguments for modernising the legislative basis had begun to be accepted, at any rate implicitly, and the National Health Service Acts of 1946 and 1947 made provision for pension schemes to be laid down in regulations requiring an affirmative Resolution in each House.

Our conclusion here is that it would not be appropriate to take these other public service schemes right out of legislation but rather that in all cases schemes should be consistently prescribed in Statutory Instruments made subject to the negative Resolution procedure.

I would not pretend that the circumstances of the Civil Service scheme and the circumstances of these other schemes can be distinguished as black from white—far from it—but there are two main reasons for not following precisely the pattern proposed for the Civil Service. First, and a very good reason, this is what the managers of the schemes themselves want and what the staff in every case, I understand, either want or are ready to accept. Second, what essentially distinguishes the other public services from the Civil Service here is that they either have a multiplicity of employers or a multiplicity of staff interests. I hope that I shall not be misunderstood if I say that the Civil Service is in these respects more monolithic, and this makes life a good deal simpler when administering a pension scheme. The need for uniformity and rather more formality makes a greater degree of parliamentary oversight desirable for the other public services.

I turn now from what is the appropriate degree of parliamentary involvement to my final question, which relates to safeguards for the staff. Hon. Members, and some in particular, are quite rightly watchdogs for the interests of members of the public services. As a Minister who shares some of the responsibility for managing the public services, I welcome this. I believe that I can safely say that in this Bill and in our plans for making use of the powers in the Bill we are neither offering to staff interests nor concealing from them any justifiable cause for alarm. Indeed, I am happy to be able to tell the House that in the case where the changes are greatest and the proposed powers are widest—that is, the Civil Service—we have this week received a letter from the Staff Side of the National Whitley Council. This records that the Bill will meet a proposal it first advanced in 1955, and rightly goes on to point out that the speedy introduction of a new superannuation scheme for the Civil Service depends on the Bill's passage through Parliament.

Having regard to the safeguards that have been built in, I can also tell the House that to the best of our knowledge the staff interests in the other public services either welcome the changes proposed in the legislative basis of their schemes or are at any rate ready to accept them.

What are these safeguards? Before any change is made in any of the public service schemes, the Minister must consult with the representatives of the staff, and, indeed, the employers where they are a third party.

On this point, the Civil Service Staff Side says in its letter:

"They will … expect that the obligation to consult will mean no less than it says, in other words that there will be a real opportunity for any Official Side proposals to be discussed with the Staff Side and for the Staff Side's views, or their own proposals, to be considered and fully taken into account before decisions are taken."

I am happy to say that this is precisely what we mean by consultation.

Second, there are provisions to protect existing pension rights in the event of any changes having to be made with retrospective effect. This can be explained more fully later if the House wishes it. Any points raised can be dealt with by my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary of State for Health and Social Security at the end of the debate.

The third safeguard applies only in the Civil Service, since only here is there scope for it. We have concluded that we can bring the Civil Service into line with the other public services in providing, when the new scheme is written up, that most of the benefits will be awarded as of right rather than, as hitherto, in the exercise of discretion. My hon. Friend would, I am sure, be ready to say a little more shout this at the end of the debate if the House wished it.

I believe that we are offering an impressive array of safeguards here, all of which are in any event supplementary to the considerable prestige and power of the staff associations and their consequent ability, at any time they wish, to make their views felt powerfully in management quarters.

To sum up, the Bill must be seen as a part of the Government's wider strategy for occupational pensions generally and, in particular, of their systematic reform of the arrangements applying to members of the public services when they retire from office. It gives powers to remove the Civil Service pension scheme from the Statute Book altogether, and for the other public service schemes to be set out consistently in Statutory Instruments subject to negative Resolution. It enables us to complete the process of removing from ministerial control all the staff pension schemes of the nationalised industries and related bodies.

I believe that Parliament will see it as helping towards a better use of its own time, that it makes a modest contribution to our aim of achieving better government, and that its powers are also in the interests of staff and will be used to bring them substantial benefits.

It is a pity that all the Government's good Bills come on a Friday and the bad Bills during the rest of the week. This welcome Bill deserves the attention of more hon. Members than are present to give it a blessing today.

I have especial pleasure in speaking on the Bill because I have been associated with this matter for so many years, and I am glad that, at last, what I have advocated for so long has now come about. Although the Parliamentary Secretary put the Bill in the wider setting of the Government's strategy on occupational pensions, this is not an indispensable part of it. Most of these proposals would have been forthcoming without this particular strategy on occupational pensions. The Labour Government intended to do something on these lines, but that would have been part of a different strategy on occupational pensions. I do not suggest there is anything wrong with the Bill on that account. It stands on its own and its merits are in its acceptance of the up-to-date philosophy of superannuation being part of the conditions of service.

The British trade union movement has been slow to accept this, more so in the industrial world than in the white collar occupations, where there has always been a considerable interest in superannuation conditions. Any trade union leader will accept that fringe benefits, including superannuation, have been slow to be accepted by the trade union movement as part of the conditions of service negotiated with wages, hours and paid holiday agreements. The Civil Service, which has always had a close interest in superannuation, recognised many years ago that it should become part of the negotiations through the medium of the Civil Service National Whitley Council. Some of us had this idea even before the staff side gave evidence to the Priestley Commission as long ago as 1955.

It has always been a great handicap to have Civil Service superannuation conditions written into statute law so that an amending Bill is necessary every time a word or a comma in those conditions has to be altered. This disadvantage was most grievous when topping-up arrangements each time required a separate Pensions (Increase) Bill. When such Bills were before the House I stressed the need for pensions to be within the scope of negotiation and agreement through the Whitley machinery so that the House of Commons would not be troubled with them. That provision is not contained in the Bill but is to be found in the earlier legislation to which the hon. Gentleman referred.

Although the Government may be accused of hustling us into the Common Market, they cannot be accused of hustling on with this Bill. Everyone has taken his time. Staff Side leaders have come and gone—including me—Treasury men and Ministers have come and gone, and this has been on the table all the time.

The justification for taking superannuation conditions away from the statutory control of Parliament is that they are now an important part of working conditions and of the whole conspectus of a person's working life and retirement, whether on health grounds or on grounds of age. That alone justifies the Bill.

I suppose that more recently the Fulton Report gave this idea a push. It was referred to, rather obscurely, in an appendix to the report. I do not regard the Fulton Report with any friendly feelings because, although it made some wise recommendations, it also said some foolish ones. I do not think that any member of the Fulton Commission can be other than ashamed of the silly Chapter 1, which aroused such indignation in the public service by its reference to "gifted amateurs", and so on. Speaking as an Inland Revenue man, I wonder how any Royal Commission could claim to have a knowledge of training arrangements for providing efficient and highly sophisticated civil servants without once going near the Inland Revenue, which has perhaps the largest body of trained civil servants in the whole of the public service. However, that is a digression. I cannot resist a little sly dig at the Fulton Report whenever its name is mentioned.

The Parliamentary Secretary stressed that the Bill withdraws superannuation conditions from the framework of statute law and puts them almost wholly into the field of the regulation of working conditions. Schedule 1 contains a list of the kinds of employment to which Clause 1 refers. On looking down the list I was surprised to find a part of the public service of which I had no previous knowledge. Who is the Falkland Macer, and what staff has he? Could we manage without him? It is interesting to see that the superannuation conditions of the Falkland Macer will be adequately taken care of.

I do not know whether the staff side of the Whitley Council will ask this question, but I shall certainly ask it: when superannuation conditions are brought within the scope of negotiation and agreement on the Civil Service National Whitley Council, will they become part of the terms of reference of the Civil Service Arbitration Tribunal? This does not arise on the Bill, but will affect the future scope of the tribunal. At present, superannuation is excluded from the scope of the tribunal, and there may be justification for including it in case of dispute in negotiation.

In an interesting passage in his speech the Parliamentary Secretary referred to all that is afoot in the major review of superannuation conditions in the public service. I have been connected with all the major reviews of superannuation for the last 40 years. What is now in the offing is probably more substantial than anything we have been able to do before because there is now much more modern thinking about this. Public opinion is much more behind reasonable conditions in the public service. I remember the economy campaigns, the carping and criticism of the public service in years past when we were going through economic difficulties. The climate of opinion today is vastly different. Although more civil servants are in touch with more members of the public than ever before, they nevertheless appear to retain the respect and understanding of the public which is so highly important.

The question whether the non-contributory scheme in the Civil Service should be superseded by a contributory scheme has been considered by at least two Royal Commissions and is still a matter of great importance from the point of view of policy.

It is also important that the Bill will confer superannuation benefits as of right in a more positive sense than in the past. There will still be a few nominal permissive grants or awards to be made, but this is merely on the basis of coming to favourable terms with the Inland Revenue. A little innocent tax avoidance is not to be sneezed at even in superannuation arrangements in the public service. After all, other people get their lump sums, and there is no reason why civil servants should not get them tax free. There is no change in policy, but it is apparently necessary to preserve favourable taxation conditions.

Another welcome feature of the Bill is the obligation to have consultation with staff interests. It is made obligatory, and this is very important. Though there has been no complaint over the years by the Staff Side about lack of consultation by the official side on superannuation matters, it has been a nuisance when we have been told that we have to reach informal agreements which are subject to Ministerial and finally parliamentary consent and then the matter will be at the hazard of the Government's legislative programme.

When one has been in Government and been on a legislation Committee and a Committee dealing with future legislation, one knows the difficulty of slotting in very often desirable Bills which get pushed aside because Governments are bent on other and more important things. This right of consultation is important.

Another Clause in the Bill—Clause 2(4)—provides for retrospective effect to be given to new schemes where that is agreed. This, again, is very welcome.

The hon. Gentleman referred to the letter he received from the Staff Side of the Civil Service National Whitley Council. He did not refer to the safeguards which the Staff Side hoped would exist. The Staff Side mentioned three: safeguards for existing pensions, accrued pension benefits, and the Minister's obligation to consult staff interests. The Minister has given a full assurance on the third point, and, indeed, I think also on the other two. If there is any doubt, I am sure these points can be dealt with later.

There can be no worsening of existing superannuation conditions without the consent of the representatives of the staff interests, and I believe this is written into the Bill. Naturally, staff interests are concerned about changes lest they do harm to existing arrangements, and safeguards will, naturally, be sought.

I turn to the nationalised industries. The hon. Gentleman referred to the Written Answer on 9th June, in columns 339–340, about the completion of the process of liberation from ministerial control of nationalised industries' superannuation schemes. I suppose there is a history—I confess I do not know what it is—to the retention of ministerial control over the superannuation arrangements of the nationalised industries. This is probably because the Government feared that the nationalised industries might otherwise go off on their own and produce superannuation schemes which might be quoted by other staff interests in the public sector. I do not know whether that was the reason, but obviously the Government wanted to keep their hands on the development of superannuation arrangements throughout the public sector—directly for the civil service, and indirectly in local government and the nationalised industries. This arrangement can now go. I imagine the great freedom that will come from this will be felt mostly in regard to the Post Office, some of whose schemes are tied to ministerial control and have not been dealt with by Statutory Instrument Finally, I come to the local authorities, which are dealt with mainly in Clauses 7 and 10. Again, assurances are sought and the National Association of Local Government Officers is raising a number of points. It might be worth while to put them on record. The association says:

"Schedule 3 does not contain references to such matters as preservation of superannuation rights on reduction of remuneration under Section 6(5) of the Local Government Superannuation Act 1937 as amended by Section 8(3) of the Local Government Superannuation Act, 1953."

This is obviously complicated because of the cross-references to other legislation.

There is also a reference to paragraph 7 of Schedule 3, which is believed to replace a section of the Local Government Superannuation (Benefits) Regulation, 1954. Another point raised by the Assocation relates to paragraph 8 of the Third Schedule, which is thought to some extent to duplicate Section 25 of the 1953 Act. No doubt these matters can be dealt with in Committee, and there are some detailed points which will come up more particularly on the local authority side.

I have discharged my present duty and have been very glad to defer my journey for the day to do so. One can be in this House a long time without accomplishing anything very much, unless one is lucky in the ballot for Private Members' Bills and even then one does not always succeed in the end. I am very glad to see the end of my long advocacy to make superannuation conditions in the public service more businesslike, to link them with conditions of service to which they belong, and to enable the normal course of bargaining to look after pensions as well as pay.

I have rather enjoyed listening to the two initial speeches on this Bill, which obviously must be a very good Bill indeed. It is pleasant to be able to welcome a good Bill.

During the period of years I have been in the House of Commons I have always taken a special interest in pension schemes and from time to time I put in my own oar. I shall not be able to offer any realistic comments on the provisions of the Bill, which are very complicated, and one needs to be like the right hon. Member for Sowerby (Mr. Houghton) to be quite sure where one is on such a Bill.

I thought how lucky the Minister was when he moved the Bill, because it sounded as though he had had no trouble over the negotiations. This must almost be a record. Perhaps he suppressed the arguments which took place—I do not know—but he certainly had a very easy ride.

I feel a slight twinge of conscience that I have to raise one matter which I feel ought to be put on the Statute Book, because it is so important. I feel that there should be adequate safeguards on this subject. I should like to say a few words about the nationalised industries and certain safeguards which may or may not be in the Bill.

Curiously enough, ever since I returned to the House of Commons in 1950, when quite a number of nationalised industries had come into existence, I have always looked closely at any new pensions increase legislation that is about to go on the Statute Book. I have always had close contacts with superannuitants in the gas and electricity industries and also in the railways, and have sought to discover how they would benefit from increases which come about through normal national legislation. There was no exception in respect of the last Pensions (Increase) Bill to the processes which I always undertake and I had from superannuitants in some of the industries questions about what their situation would be. I therefore wrote letters to the chairmen of the various boards and received in return answers which were relatively satisfactory.

However, I received a letter from the Chairman of the British Railways Board, the right hon. Richard Marsh, who was a great figure in the House until he took on this very important commitment, which somewhat staggered me because he said that the practice which had been followed ever since the railways had been nationalised would be put into operation on this occasion and that superannuitants would receive their increases but that he could give no undertaking that British Railways would make—and I suppose that this is the right phraseology—an annual review of the national pensions scheme. He went on to make what I considered to be a rather unfortunate comment about the case which I had put to him. I was very upset by it.

I have been in Parliament a long time and I like to be sure that things are as they appear to be and to ensure that everybody's position is safeguarded. Therefore, I ask my hon. Friend the Parliamentary Secretary to confirm that Parliament will have the opportunity of putting Questions on the Floor of the House about pensions in the nationalised industries. I understand that we are able to ask Questions on this matter because I was told that the Minister for Transport Industries had already replied to Questions about pensions in British Railways.

I wish to quote the answer from the superannuitant who had written to me in the first place after I had sent him the reply of the Chairman of the British Railways Board. Having said that he had got his increased pension, for which he was very grateful, he stated:

"Regarding the Board's statement"—

and the letter to me had been written by the Chairman, the right hon. Richard Marsh—

"I only paid in £100 and had received £330 in return"—

which is what the Chairman had said—

"I wish to make it clear that October 1st, 1954, was the first occasion on which I could join a superannuation scheme and I paid into it the maximum I was allowed to. During my 48 years railway service"—

and I hope that everybody notes that—

"I have never been able to join any other pension scheme".

In the days of private ownership of the railways, I do not think that the workers were properly treated with regard to pensions and superannuation. When they did receive such benefits, they seemed to me intolerably low. It is pathetic to think that this man worked for all those years on the railways and yet it was not until 1954 that he was able to enter a superannuation scheme.

He goes on to say—and I quote this because I am very proud of it:

"I am extremely grateful for your kindness and trouble in this matter and very thankful you are willing to help such as myself."

So we have settled this matter for the moment, but there was a very nasty sentence in the letter which the Chairman of Railways Board sent to me. I do not think he can have meant it in that way, or he must have failed to realise that I would feel that he was being unfair. I know that part of the responsibility lies with private enterprise, but I never thought that anyone as distinguished as the right hon. Richard Marsh would get himself into such an attitude of mind that he would put a sentence like that in a letter to me about a man who had served the railways very well over a very long time. It absolutely staggered me and I felt very badly about it. I cannot think why he should have put it in the letter. It obviously hurt this old railway superannuitant and I do not like old superannuitants being hurt.

As I have indicated, the railways will not commit themselves to an annual review. The gas and electricity undertakings do not say this in their comments on this change in the procedure concerning nationalised industries. I should hate to think that the railway superannuitants might suffer in future.

We are handing over to the nationalised industries the right to control their own pension schemes. I disagree with that, but, after the co-operation which has been displayed between both sides of the House on the Bill, I am not likely to win my point. It always takes about 10 years to win any battle in this House, but I like to move a step forward whenever I can. I do not think that I shall win, but I should like to make a suggestion to my hon. Friend if he is determined to hand over to the nationalised industries the right to control their own pension schemes.

I understood from my Government that we were concerned about people who live on small fixed incomes. It hurts me very much to think that, to get the Bill tied up beautifully, these people may be at risk. I cannot believe that the Chairman of the British Railways Board will not fall into line when he has time to think over the matter again. He might have been annoyed by the letter which I sent to him from this railways super-annuitant. I do not know. However, it is obvious that, if we hand over control entirely to the nationalised industries, railways superannuitants may be at risk. I cannot see any way of protecting them, except by getting an assurance from my hon. Friend that Questions will be allowed in the House.

Mind you, Mr. Speaker, there is always a way out. I like to be able to put Questions in this House. This is the right way to conduct parliamentary democracy. But on occasions when, owing to protocol, Questions cannot be asked in the House, one can always table Motions. I am certain that the Chairman of the British Railways Board will read the debate today. He will have a natural interest in it. Therefore, I hope that he will take notice from me now that if I cannot win my battle today with my own Minister, which I should very much regret, there will be snorters from me on the Order Paper if railway superannuitants are not protected as they always have been since nationalisation of the railways became a fait accompli.

I say this because I was absolutely shattered by the letter to which I have referred. I am determined to stand up for those living on small fixed incomes in the belief that one day they will get recognition. This country has been built up in many effects and ways by the services rendered to it by people who are now in the category of superannuitants, retirement pensioners, and the like. In Parliament, I have always tried to look after the interests of those living on small fixed incomes.

I am not at all happy about this matter. I am speaking rather crudely and perhaps cruelly because I cannot believe that anyone like the Chairman of the British Railways Board should take the line that he has. It may be that, like many things British Railways have done, ordinary employees are not of such interest to the Railways Board as whether it can get sufficient money to make trains go at 350 miles per hour, which heaven forbid!

I should be grateful for a specific answer to this question. I am jolly glad, at any rate, that the railways superannuitant to whom I have referred is at last, after all these years, able to get this small increase of pension. I am not happy about the pensions increases anyhow. I should like a great deal more to be done for the pensioners. However, I want it firmly, on the record that we shall not be restricted from asking Questions about superannuitants in the nationalised industries.

I thank you, Mr. Speaker, for squeezing me into this debate. I tried to catch your eye last Monday on the Housing Finance Bill. Had I been fortunate in doing so, I should certainly have denounced it as a vicious and inequitable piece of class legislation which is rather typical of this Government.

Today, I am happy to join my right hon. Friend the Member for Sowerby (Mr. Houghton) in extending a sincere welcome to this Bill. Like the Minister and my right hon. Friend, I think that it is a non-controversial Measure, and certainly it has the support of all the Civil Service trade unions. That in itself is quite remarkable in a period when the union-Government relationship is perhaps somewhat strained, to put it mildly.

I should, at the outset, declare an interest. I am acting as a consultant to the Civil and Public Services Association, which is the largest of the Civil Service trade unions, with a current membership of 185,000, and a great membership potential. Looking at some of the Measures before the House, particularly the Common Market legislation and the Housing Finance Bill, there is probably a recruiting dreamland ahead of it.

I should like to concentrate on those parts of the Bill which concern the Civil Service. As the Minister said, obviously following detailed consultation with the history-books, the provision of pensions and superannuation allowances for civil servants by Statute dates back many years—even a little beyond the incredible experience and recollection of my right hon. Friend, who, we know, has done so much on this issue—to about 1870, and I gather that there were even earlier Acts which laid the basis for many of the best schemes in both the public and private sectors.

Again, as the Minister said, pension schemes in the post-war period required flexibility to meet new contingencies. It has been the case that even minor adaptations to the Civil Service scheme has meant the absurdity of coming to Parliament to obtain an amending Act. This has meant the dual disadvantage of delay in putting right minor anomalies and a burden on the valuable time of this House.

My right hon. Friend has drawn attention to the Fulton Committee which, in 1968, recommended that changes should be made

"more promptly and with less fuss."

The Labour Government accepted that recommendation, and undoubtedly they would have carried it out had it not been for the brief but rather decisive aberration of the electors in June, 1970.

Since then, I am told that the Staff Side and the Official Side have worked hard and long to modernise the Civil Service scheme. Indeed, the Minister has confirmed that if the Bill is approved it will be possible to introduce a new up-to-date scheme which has most of the features common to the best occupational schemes.

I should like to comment on one or two points in the Bill. They have all been dealt with, but I should like to underline one or two.

Clause 1(1)(a) appears to provide that a Civil Service scheme could be introduced which will, for the first time, provide a legal entitlement to the main pension benefits, although Ministerial discretion for some benefits may still justifiably be necessary. Previous Acts have recognised that pensions may be paid. I recognise that pensions to those who qualify have rarely, if ever, been withheld, but no doubt this lack of an absolute right to a pension has given cause to understandable annoyance in the past. The Minister seems to have confirmed my understanding on this point, but he said that this may be spelled out in more detail subsequently. That would be helpful.

Clause 1(3) concerns consultation. Again, my right hon. Friend has touched on this. I wonder whether it is as specific as it could be. There are all kinds of consultation, ranging from merely notifying unions at the last moment to the full and frank consultation which apparently has been the experience of the Civil Service unions in superannuation matters, when in other areas Government consultation with the unions, especially in recent months, has left much to be desired.

I welcome the Minister's firm assurance that in future there will be Real, full consultation with the staff interests before any new scheme is introduced, or changes of significance are made, but may I take the matter a little further and ask the Minister to assure the House that no such changes will be made against the declared interests of the majority of the staff? I think that it would be helpful if, either in reply to the debate, or in Committee, the Minister could take these matters a little further.

Clause 2(3) provides some cover against arbitrary retrospective acts by the Minister by guaranteeing that changes will not be made which retrospectively alter accrued rights, without consultation with staff interests. Pension rights accrue over a long period, and employees are entitled to an assurance that changes will not be made half way through, or perhaps at the end of, a long career, which worsen their conditions of service.

I hope that the Minister will give us a little more assurance on those points if not today, then in Committee. If he can do so, bearing in mind the general welcome which the Bill has received from the unions concerned, I very much hope that, unlike so much of the legislation which is before the House, it can be helped on its way with the maximum speed.

The Minister spoke about setting this Bill within an overall pensions strategy. Like the hon. Lady the Member for Tynemouth (Dame Irene Ward), I, too, am keenly aware of the need to do more for people on small fixed incomes. I wish that the Government would adopt a little more short-term strategy, as opposed to a long-term one, on pensions generally and that the ordinary State pensioner, who is clearly falling further be hind daily in the battle against inflation, could receive some more immediate attention from the Government.

If I were convinced that the Bill was to be the means of bringing redress for those who are suffering as a result of low service pensions, or even as a means of making a substantial contribution towards doing so, I should joint the rapturous welcome which it has been given, but, as I am far from being so convinced, mine is possibly a lone voice of dissent.

As I read it, the Bill proposes to take out of the legislative field Civil Service pensions and to bring into it pensions paid to Health Service workers, firemen and local government workers. I think we have to consider why it should be desirable to take Civil Service pensions out of the legislative field and simultaneously to bring into it the pensions of other public servants.

If it is the case that Civil Service unions are so confident of their ability to negotiate satisfactory pension arrangements with the Government that they feel it is no longer necessary to have the legal safeguard of pension plans being set out in statutory documents, that is to be welcomed. I should not for a moment quarrel with the judgment of Civil Service unions in this matter. Their relationship with the Government is as good as any relationship between employer and employee in this country, and therefore they can come to satisfactory pension agreements and have satisfactory negotiations. It may be that the present parliamentary procedure is an impediment to the quick implementation of schemes about which they agree, but my limited experience, as a member of the Select Committee on Statutory Instruments, of dealing with delegated legislation leads me to the view that the procedure laid down does not delay to any appreciable extent the introduction of pension schemes, nor does it take up much of the time of the House.

If one wants to examine the argument, one has only to consider how little of the delegated legislation relating to Civil Service pensions has been debated on the Floor of the House. To the best of my knowledge ever since I have been a Member—and that is since 1966—none of the schemes has been debated on the Floor of the House. They have gone through virtually unchallenged. Most, if not all, have been dealt with under the negative procedure, and therefore if they have not been prayed against there has been no question of their being debated on the Floor of the House. In the parent Acts dealing with the pensions of teachers and policemen, provision is made for retrospective effect to be embodied in the delegated legislation, and that ensures that there is no hold up in that respect either.

I welcome the fact that the Civil Service unions are hoping that they can dispense with any recourse to legislation for the purpose of settling pensions, but the part of the Bill dealing with that is inconsistent with the provisions in it affecting the pensions of Health Service and local government workers, and firemen. Is it a justification for the Bill that the unions representing the fire brigade, Health Service and local government workers are not strong enough, and confident enough of their relationship with their employers, to be able to negotiate schemes without having recourse to the protection of delegated legislation?

If these unions believe that by having a measure of parliamentary accountability for their schemes they will derive considerable benefit, they must be under the impression that Members will give such schemes careful consideration and look after the interests of those concerned. I question whether we can do that under our delegated legislation procedure.

In that respect the Bill is most untimely. I question whether this is the time to include in delegated legislation the pension schemes of firemen, Health Service and local government workers, bearing in mind how difficult it is for the House to exercise proper control over the merits of delegated legislation. This difficulty has been recognised, somewhat belatedly perhaps, to the extent that there is a proposal to have a joint committee of both Houses to examine it. The evidence before the Select Committee on Procedure on the question how effective control could be maintained over delegated legislation led the Committee to the conclusion that the present situation was unsatisfactory and should be thoroughly examined.

If one wants to quantify the problem of control of this kind of legislation, one has only to examine the number of Statutory Instruments which come before the House. During the recent Summer Recess, more than 200 such Instruments were laid. In the course of a year, between 600 and 800 Instruments can be laid, and there is no possibility of them all being debated—not that we would want to debate them all. But what is serious is that there is always a struggle to find time to debate the few against which Members do want to pray. I am not making a party political point, because this has happened under Labour and Conservative Governments. There have been many occasions on which it has not been possible to debate Statutory Instruments which have been prayed against.

One must therefore assume that if the Bill is passed and if some dissatisfaction is expressed with any provision of the pension schemes relating to firemen, local government workers, teachers or policemen, and they wish to have the matter ventilated in the House, there will have to be a Prayer because the provisions applying to all of them will come under the negative procedure, and in view of the competition that exists for time in the House it is likely to be a considerable time before any such grievances are considered.

When my hon. Friend refers to the need to protect public service workers outside the Civil Service, is he reflecting to any extent the views of the organisations which represent these people?

I will come to that. I can claim to reflect the views of at least one group of public service workers in my constituency, namely, teachers. However, I do not base my main contention on representation of, for example. N.A.L.G.O., the N.U.T., the Schoolmasters Association or the union that represents fire brigade workers. I base it on my experience of delegated legislation. This leads me to the conclusion that it is not a protection for these people as it stands. I rest also on the fact that the House has now agreed to consider the whole sphere of the control of the merits of delegated legislation.

I come to the effect of this legislation on the method of calculating pensions, for if we are to embody in delegated legislation means of calculating pensions, we must bear in mind that this will have an important effect when we come to deal with the wider question of how we are to ensure that the pensions of public service pensioners maintain some sort of relationship with the cost of living.

The commitment to bienniel review is welcome and I hope it will be made clear at a very early stage just how wide the scope of the review will be. In respect of teachers, who have been controlled by delegated legislation for some time, their position will not be changed by the Bill. In common with a number of other superannuation schemes, their pension levels are based on the average salary of the final years of service. Any superannuation scheme which works in this way must inevitably, in a period of rising prices and salaries, result in the super-annuitant beginning his period of retirement with a pension which is less in value than he considered he would have got had it been a period of steady prices. He therefore starts at a disadvantage.

With the present system of fixing teachers' salaries the situation is even more grave. It has been represented to me by many teachers in my constituency that teachers who have served for a number of years and who are at the maximum point of their salary scale must, as a result of the introduction of the last salary increase, requalify for maximum salary. In other words, they must work under the new scales that have been introduced before being able to qualify for the maximum pay on those grades. This can mean that because a teacher's pension is based on his last three years of service, he can start with a pension which is lower than the appropriate proportion of the maximum scale which he might otherwise have expected to receive I trust that we shall receive an indication before the Bill goes into Committee whether the methods of calculating pensions will be covered in the Statutory Instruments which will be laid relating, to those pensions, whether they will relate to the current methods which are adopted for fixing pensions in certain spheres of the public service, and whether they will take note of the method of determining the salaries of teachers on the maximum scale.

I must of course comment on a question of transferability. In a society which has changed in such a way as to require people to alter their jobs more often now than ever before—some of the recent statistics of job transfers are alarming—it is necessary to ensure more transferability of pension rights.

One of the advantages of the delegated legislation scheme is that it has enabled provision to be made to carry pension rights over from one section of the public service to another. I want to be sure that it will be possible to have transferability of pensions between those schemes covered by delegated legislation and those which are not so covered in the public service, and even between the public service and nationalised industry.

Frankly, I cannot feel satisfied with any superannuation Measure which does not lay this down clearly. I agree with what the hon. Lady the Member for Tynemouth (Dame Irene Ward) said about the need for years of campaign to bring about desirable changes. We must at some stage put into our legislation requirements for the transferability of pension rights, first for the sake of people in the service who may be forced to move, but second in the interests of the efficient working of industry and the public service.

I do not take a doctrinaire view about the efficiency of the Civil Service compared with private service. Indeed, I think the Civil Service could benefit from the transference to it of people from private industry. On the other hand, as a result of working in certain areas of private industry, I suggest that it could benefit from the transference to it of people from the Civil Service, who would bring in some civilising influences, possibly in the field of industrial relations. We must ensure in Committee that such transferability as has been possible in respect of previous delegated legislation is maintained.

In view of what I have said, I cannot give the Bill an unqualified welcome at this stage. I hope that in Committee and on Report we shall ensure, first, that such benefits as the Civil Service have had from delegated legislation will be available to others who will come into the sphere of delegation; second, that the methods of calculating pensions will take proper account of the rising cost of living and the way in which inflation devalues; and, third, the possibility of extending the provisions relating to the transfer of pension rights, though I fear that on this point I am being somewhat optimistic.

The House will agree, I think, that we have had a short and sweet debate, even including the speech of the hon. Member for Barrow-in-Furness (Mr. Booth). I congratulate those who have taken part, starting with the impressive performance by the right hon. Member for Sowerby (Mr. Houghton) with his venerable and unparalleled experience in this field, on the way in which they have managed to keep to the main issues of principle, when the Bill presents the House with many opportunities of diversion down detailed Committee alleyways which, in view of its complexity, could land us in a great deal of rather technical discussion in a Second Reading debate.

The main scope of the Bill is that it alters none of the public service pension schemes, let alone those of the nationalised industries, but is concerned essentially with conferring enabling powers. My own point of entry to this very technical subject is by virtue of my responsibility for health matters in the Department and thus for the National Health Service and its own superannuation scheme. This is one of the schemes affected by the Bill.

Although I am, therefore, no stranger to these matters, I must confess that, on first acquaintance with the 60 pages of the Bill and its formidable list of Schedules, I found it intimidating and felt inclined to retire into one of those havens of refuge that it is my Department's responsibility to maintain.

However, the very technicality of the Bill is in itself a justification for it. Superannuation in the public services is still so extensively laid down by statute and for the rest in a mixture of different degrees of surbordinate legislation that there is a tremendous tangle of legislation to pilot one's way through. To wind up the old powers and provide the new and simpler powers which we seek has been a most complex exercise for the draftsman, as I am sure the right hon. Member for Sowerby will appreciate.

This is simply a measure of the need to put an end to this degree of parliamentary control and to change, simplify and consolidate the legislative basis of schemes in the way that the Bill makes possible.

I should give an explanation of the reference to the Falkland Macer which the right hon. Gentleman's eagle eye detected. The Macers are officers of the High Court of Justiciary and the Court of Session. The Falkland Macer is appointed by the proprietor of the lands of Falkland in Fife under an old heritable grant by the Crown. Since those early days the lands of Falkland have been inherited by a private individual who appointed a Macer in 1941 and it has been made over by him to the National Trust. This private individual has nevertheless not divested himself of his heritable right to appoint a Macer, so although the Macer serves the court, unlike the other Macers he is not appointed by a person acting for or on behalf of the Crown and is not therefore a civil servant. This is why he comes into the Schedule.

The right hon. Gentleman referred to an important N.A.L.G.O. point. He suggested that this might be a Committee point, and what he said has been noted both by myself and my my hon. Friend. We will see that it is looked into in Committee.

The right hon. Gentleman also raised a tentative question about arbitration. The new shape of things to come does not mean that superannuation in the Civil Service is to become arbitrable. It has always been considered right that decisions on pension terms should ultimately rest with management and that to arbitrate piecemeal on them would rapidly produce a scheme riddled with anomalies and would undermine the Government's aim to set a consistent set of standards for the public service pension schemes.

I appreciate that. It would be no part of this Bill, but obviously there may be room for some argument about that in the appropriate place.

The right hon. Gentleman's point in that connection has been noted.

The right hon. Gentleman went on to talk about retrospection. My hon. Friend referred to the safeguards built into the Bill as a reassurance to staff in the event of the wider powers being taken. The right hon. Gentleman dealt briefly with the argument against any use of the retrospective power to worsen pension rights, but perhaps I could elaborate on this For all the public service schemes, there is provision to ensure that any changes made with retrospective effect shall not work so as to reduce any pension already in issue. In the case of the Civil Service we have thought it right to go rather further, seeing that future changes here will be that much further removed from parliamentary control. So we have also built in a provision that no retrospective change shall work to reduce the accrued value to date of superannuation rights, including those of serving members, unless the staff representatives have been consulted and have agreed.

Hon. Members might ask why it should ever be necessary to give a power which could work to reduce accrued rights. Some benefits are specifically related to contributions, and the staff may wish to take a retrospective improvement in benefit, together with related increases in the relevant contribution, which could technically be interpreted as a worsening of accrued rights or expectations. But that could well be the choice of the staff and we do not want to exclude it.

My hon. Friend the Member for Tyne-mouth (Dame Irene Ward) covered an enormous span in her short speech—starting by saying that it was a very good Bill and ending with the alarming announcement that we could expect snorters from her on the Order Paper.

My hon. Friend is fully aware of the Government's decision, announced in June, to remove from the nationalised industries the need to secure Ministerial approval for their schemes. We are merely completing the job. I am sure that my hon. Friend agrees with us that the nationalised industries are commercial public bodies of high standing. It is just because we believe that the boards of the industries, being responsible, should carry full responsibility for deciding whether their scheme should include this or that or any entrenched safeguards that we took the decision we did. There is no inconsistency here. The position with the public services is that there is no change in the degree of Ministerial control and responsibility. Given that premise, it is a matter for us to decide what safeguards should be retained in the Statute.

My hon. Friend asked about the effect of a change on her freedom to ask Parliamentary Questions. This is strictly a matter for the various Ministers, but where there is no Ministerial responsibility there can be no answerability. But I do not think that hon. Members—particularly my hon. Friend—have found that our right hon. Friends or their Departments have been unhelpful—

No, they have been very helpful.

—in supplying information when that has been a sensible way to meet the need.

For example, on 27th October, my hon. Friend the Member for Hertfordshire, South-West (Mr. Longden) received an answer from my right hon. Friend the Minister for Transport Industries which is significant in the light of what my hon. Friend said today about the letter which she has had from Mr. Richard Marsh. My right hon. Friend said in that answer:

"The Railways Board have increased the pensions of superannuitants by amounts similar to those of the Pensions (Increase) Act, 1971."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 27th October, 1971; Vol. 823, c. 330.]

So it was in fact possible to elicit from the Minister an answer bearing precisely upon this question.

I must leave aside the wider question of what the nationalised industries feel it right, in the light of their responsible commercial status, to do by way of standards of superannuation, but my hon. Friend will be aware also that the forthcoming pattern of pension provision which the Government propose will contain this underlying safeguard of the quality of the reserve scheme which is bound to be taken as the minimum and as the exemplar, if nothing else, for schemes in other parts of the wider public sector.

The hon Member for Islington, East (Mr. John D. Grant) mentioned legal entitlement. I confirm that the apparently not very powerful words in Clause 1(1)(a),

"are to be paid or may be paid",

as he inferred, amount to that legal entitlement which is the novel and welcome innovation of this Statute.

He spoke about consultation and inferred again that my hon. Friend may want to elaborate this matter in Committee. This is certainly the case. We shall certainly go further in Committee. But the Civil Service Staff Side, as the hon. Gentleman knows, have defined what they mean by consultation and we agree 100 per cent. with them. We do not want to add to it. I have no doubt that if he has an opportunity, the hon. Gentleman will pursue this in Committee, and my hon. Friend will be only too willing to meet him and to help.

The hon. Member for Barrow-in-Furness made a number of quite wide-ranging comments on the Bill. Some of them fell a little outside the scope of the debate today in that they raised very wide issues of the quality or absence of quality of subordinate legislation and the debates we may have on it. Perhaps I can clarify one misconception, which possibly arose from my hearing of the hon. Member's words or conceivably exists in his mind, namely, that we are bringing the wider civil public service pension schemes into a statutory form, where hitherto they have not had it. I am sure that the hon. Member understands, as I do, that the wider civil public service pension schemes are set out in a mixture—this is the trouble—of primary legislation and subordinate legislation, in many cases subject to affirmative Resolution procedure and in others the negative Resolution procedure.

We are trying to take steps which are justified by the slight difference between the Civil Service scheme and the civil public service pension schemes, by reference to the fact that a feature of the latter is the multiplicity of employers or staff interests. The wide differences in the particular details of the different schemes, and the need to bring in some sense of consistency, uniformity and authority to a hatch patch of bases of provisions, as it is at present, is our justification for treating them differently from the rather more monolithic straightforward Civil Service scheme. But it is not that they have not hitherto enjoyed some statutory basis; it is the need to set them out in a consistent and authoritative frame in this basic instrument.

It may be because of the very complexity of the procedures used that I failed to make clear the areas which would be brought within the terms of the Bill. But for the sake of absolute clarity, can the Minister confirm that the Bill takes all of the Civil Service pensions, as we generally understand that term, outwith the delegated legislation arrangement but brings all of the other public service pensions, as we generally understand them local government, fire, police and ambulance—within the delegated legislation procedure, provided that they have been under arrangements previously?

Yes, that is broadly true. The Civil Service pension scheme will cease to be governed in detail by Act of Parliament and will be set out in a non-statutory document. That is for civil servants.

We come to the next category, the civil public service schemes, which embrace a whole range of other bodies, such as teachers, firemen, the National Health Service and so on, and they will come into the parliamentary ambit and be subject to regulations themselves subject to the negative Resolution procedure. But there is yet a third category, what one might call the public sector schemes of the nationalised industries, upon which we have already acted; we have given them entire mastership in their own domain because they are commercially responsible public bodies.

A number of other points made by the hon. Member for Barrow—although I and my hon. Friend have noted them carefully—bear upon the reviews of the details of the various schemes which in all cases are currently in train. It would be premature to comment on them. The very purpose of a review is precisely to bring the provisions of these schemes into line with conditions today, and I have no doubt that the reviews will meet many of the points expressed by the hon. Gentleman.

On the point about transferability, may I ask directly whether the changes made here have any effect on the provisions which previously existed for transferability of superannuation contributions and rates as between one branch and another of the public service?

They change nothing which already exists in terms of transferability. But we hope that they will make wider transferability feasible and available in the future.

Recognition that people should be provided for by their employer in their old-age, as the House recognises, has even shorter, younger roots in our social history than acceptance that ill health or decrepitude merited some special provision. In Britain the public services, notably the Civil Service, have led the nation in good employer practice in this respect. Both our schemes and their framework now need bringing up to date, and this is generally recognised. By itself, the Bill goes most of the way towards achieving the latter aim. It also gives the power to affect the former aim when the necessary negotiations to which I referred are completed.

I hope that my hon. Friend and I have satisfied the House that this is a wholly reasonable and necessary measure. Indeed, the encouraging response from the benches opposite indicates that this hope is fulfilled, that it preserves a proper degree of parliamentary oversight in these matters, but no more than is proper, and that the interests of staff concerned will be protected by established good employer practices and reinsured by the safeguards written into the Bill.

I beg to move:

That the Parliamentary Constituencies (Abingdon and Newbury) Order 1971, a draft of which was laid before this House on 2nd November, be approved.

It may be for the convenience of the House if we discuss at the same time the remaining Orders on the Order Paper. I take it that I have the approval of the House for the adoption of that course.

indicated assent.

The House will recall that the last report by the Boundary Commission for England, following its last general review, was dated April 1969. Although the Order giving effect to its recommendations was not made until November, 1970, this Order had to define constituencies by reference to local government areas as they were at 1st January, 1969. In that respect the Order was some 18 months out of date by the time it was made. The purpose of the present series of Orders, affecting some 25 constituencies, is to bring it up to date in respect of the boundaries of those constituencies. In accordance with previous practice, a separate Order has been prepared for each of the 11 groups of constituencies concerned.

During the debates on the draft Orders in October, 1970, hon. Members from both sides of the House drew attention to places where local government boundaries had been adjusted or where there had been some re-warding. It was urged by hon. Members that in these cases interim reviews should be carried out as soon as possible. In replying to the debate I pointed out that the decision whether a particular interim review should be undertaken was entirely a matter for the Commission. I am sure that the House will be glad to see these results of the Commission's first interim reviews, and to see that they have been completed so quickly.

The House will also be glad that the report gives details of the electorates affected by each of the recommendations. When the last interim review report was presented in 1963, there was criticism that insufficient details of this sort were given. The House will be grateful for the fuller report, including the maps, which is now provided.

I do not think I need deal with the detailed recommendations for each constituency. These recommendations are clearly set out in the Commission's Report, which hon. Members will have read I would only draw attention to the Commission's observations in paragraph 2 that it received no representations, and, therefore, no objections, when its provisional recommendations were published. It can be said, therefore, that the Commission has managed to please everybody in the way in which its recommendations are put forward.

I hope the House will approve these Orders.

When we last debated this matter, which was two years ago under the previous Administration, there was far greater interest in the discussion on redistribution than there is today. If it were not for the fact that my hon. Friend the Member for Manchester, Ardwick (Mr. Kaufman) has what is for him a most important matter to raise later, I should be able to observe that the question of parliamentary redistribution interests nobody.

I shall be very interested in the next batch of orders which the Minister of State will introduce, because they will affect my consituency.

I concede that we are dealing with only 25 constituencies and that only about 11,850 people are affected. However, there are basic principles involved in even this minor redistribution. Those principles were present two years ago but were almost completely ignored by the then Opposition. I shall return to them, because the House should know what the Government's intentions are about parliamentary redistribution.

As the Minister of State has explained, perhaps by implication in one sense, under Section 2(3) of the 1949 Act there must be a continuous review of parliamentary boundaries as a result of local government changes. Two of these Orders relate to the area of the Greater London Council—Southwark and Bromley—and therefore affect an area of local government in which the changes have been operative since 1963. Although there is one aspect of the London Orders to which I shall return, as a general principle I can see the logic of what the Government are doing. I shall question some of the other Orders.

Since the 1948 Act we have had general reviews. It has been the law since 1958 that there shall be a gap of 10 to 15 years between each review. What will be the date of the next major parliamentary reboundarying? The Labour Government were seized of the fact that major local government reforms were in prospect.

The Rules for Redistribution of Seats—Appendix A to the Second Periodical Report of the Boundary Commission for England—state:

"4.—(1) So far as is practicable having regard to the foregoing rules:—

(a) in England and Wales:

(i) no county or any part thereof shall be included in a constituency which includes the whole or part of any other county or the whole or part of a county borough or London borough;

(ii) no county borough or any part thereof shall be included in a constituency …:

(ii) no London borough. …"

I have already put that aspect out of my argument.

"(iv) no county district shall be included partly in one constituency and partly in another.

(2) …'county' means an administrative county".

Legislation passing through the House will alter all of them.

"'county borough' has the same meaning as in the Local Government Act, 1933".

Legislation now going through the House will put an end to that Act.

"'county district' has … the same meaning as in the Local Government Act, 1933".

We argued that it would have been good sense to have delayed, in that the local government reform changes would have been known by this time and, therefore, by 1973 the Parliamentary Boundary Commission could have given effect to the local government changes and then there could have been sense in parliamentary boundaries. There was much discussion on that question. Allegations of gerrymandering were made. I would not mean it, but if I were to accuse the Government of gerrymandering on this occasion there might be some mention of it in the Press tomorrow. The matter is still of fundamental importance, but nobody is greatly interested. A great deal of political arithmetic was resorted to at the time in an effort to find out what the parliamentary effects would be. In fact, there was no effect other than parliamentary redistribution in a small number of seats. In the event, the changes are to take place for the next General Election.

Because of the fundamental local government changes that are taking place, the Boundary Commission's recommendations will involve in Leicester and Harborough altering boundaries with no electors being affected. In other areas only 13 electors will be affected. In the London area, where the changes in local government have applied since 1963,3,000 electors are affected in Southwark.

Surely we are not to go through this facade any more in the future of regularising, under the rules, boundary changes or local government areas which will no longer exist. It is an utter waste of time. Except in the cases of Southwark and one other area which affects 1,700 electors, only 11 or 13 people are affected in each area. What is the point of going through this process? When in opposition hon. Members opposite took a different view. There will now he no rhyme or reason between local government boundaries and parliamentary constituencies.

We ought to know whether we are to continue to have minor changes of this sort, involving no persons at all in many cases, to bring into accord local government and parliamentary boundaries when, as we all know, the local government areas are in process of being dissolved.

The hon. Gentleman might argue that, because the next General Election will come some time between now and 1975, there is some logic—though pretty small logic—in amending boundaries. But if after the next election one will have to wait up to 10 years, any logic in that argument completely goes out of the window.

On this question of the 10 or 15-year period, I raise this further point. Are we sticking to the 1958 Act? Have the Government any intentions in that respect? Are we to keep the 10 to 15 years, or will they seek to alter that? If they propose not to alter it, if they are sticking to their view in Opposition that local government changes do not matter two hoots, what about the fundamental redrawing which is to take place? The House may be showing sense by its scant attention to these Orders today, but what about the fundamental question?

There are minor changes being made in respect of Bromsgrove and Redditch, but I am told that long before the major redistribution that constituency will comprise 160,000 electors. Nothing is to be done about it, apparently. Recalling what we had to listen to two years ago, I can only say that such a situation is utterly nonsensical. In the meantime, we shall pass Orders altering constituency boundaries in which there are no electors involved, in which there are 11 involved, or 13 involved, and so on. But nothing is being done about the real issue that matters, the change of the demographic map, let alone the fundamental changes in local government boundaries.

I happen to think that the Labour Government were right in 1969, although the Press, the leader writers and the learned journals thought otherwise and preferred to talk what I thought was a lot of rubbish about gerrymandering. So be it. But at some time the Government must govern and do the right thing. I feel that we are wasting our time this morning on Orders of this kind while the House has before it a Measure which will sweep aside the whole basis.

We want to know the Government's intentions. The point has been put to me time and time again, and I want the Government to confirm that they do not intend to alter the 1958 Act and that the next major parliamentary redistribution will be 10 to 15 years after the previous one.

We shall not oppose the Orders—they are not worth opposing—but we want to know what the Government intend.

May I have the leave of the House to speak again?

The hon. Member for Leeds, South (Mr. Merlyn Rees) raises two points. First, he complains that these orders affect only a very small number of people and are, therefore, insignificant. In our last debate on the subject, as I said in opening, there was considerable pressure from right hon. and hon. Members on both sides urging that the process of interim reviews should continue. I believe that it is the wish of the House in general that interim reviews such as have taken place in the past between the main reviews should continue. The general reviews take some time. Even if we decided to start one today, it would be at least four or five years before it could be completed.

In effect, the hon. Gentleman is asking why we should carry out reviews of any kind when the House is being asked to pass a local government Bill which will have a major effect upon local government areas. The answer lies in the general principle by which the Commission is bound—I have no indication whatever that it does not have the support of the House—that constituency and local government boundaries should as far as possible coincide.

The Commission is bound to have regard to local government boundaries as they are at the moment, not as they may be at some future time, whether or not the local government Bill is passed in its present form or with amendments.

As the hon. Gentleman rightly said, the Local Government Bill will change the whole pattern of local government in England and Wales as from 1st April, 1974. He asks what are likely to be the future arrangements regarding constituency boundaries as from that time. The Commission can take into account only the boundaries as they are at the moment, so that until the new arrangements come into force in 1974 that will be the basis of its consideration.

For understandable reasons, the 1949 Act was couched in terms of the Local Government Act, 1933—and, as it happens, the Local Government (Ireland) Act, 1898—and all I am asking is whether, when that legislation is ended by 1st April, 1974, we shall have to have amendment of our parliamentary redistribution Acts of 1948 and subsequently, since otherwise the Boundary Commission will be marginally amending constituencies in the context of local government boundaries which no longer exist and legislation which no longer exists.

The Commission will continue to work—in fact, it has another series of constituencies under consideration now—on the existing procedure until, in its opinion, it is right to start another general review of parliamentary constituencies. As the hon. Gentleman knows, the Commission is required to report the outcome of its general review between 1979 and 1984. Because of the extent of the redistribution required following all the local government changes, I should certainly expect it to report earlier rather than later during that period.

If the Commission is to be able to report in 1979, it will probably need to start its preliminary work about three years from now, towards the end of 1974 or early in 1975. It will thus be starting its work on the next major reorganisation of constituency boundaries at the time when the Local Government Act, as it will then be, is intended to come into force, and it will be starting work at that time on the basis of the boundaries which Parliament and the Local Government Boundary Commission have decided.

We have no proposals at present for introducing legislation to ask the Boundary Commission to bring forward its work before the statutory period.

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for that; it answers the major question. But I must come back to the other point. At 1st April, 1974, there will be the new and enlarged local government areas, which in the north—certainly in Yorkshire, the West Riding and South Yorkshire—make fundamental changes. The same is true in other parts of the country. After that date, will the Boundary Commission go on making little changes in boundaries, involving nil, 11, 13 electors and the rest, according to local government boundaries which no longer exist? The Minister has satisfied me on the major question, but will it really go on making minor changes to keep agreement between parliamentary and local government boundaries, which was the object 20 years ago? Surely it will not go on doing that for non-existent local government boundaries?

No. The normal position is that when the Commission starts to work on a major review it says that it does not intend to introduce any further interim changes. Therefore, there will be a period from the time when the major review is started when it announces that it will not be introducing any interim changes. That is some years ahead. In the meantime I shall be bringing forward similar Orders to keep the situation up to date until such time as the new, major review is started. Indeed, I have another series of constituencies under examination.

Perhaps I may ask one other question, because I am asking questions on behalf of large numbers of people. Could the hon. Gentleman let me have a list, perhaps by way of Parliamentary Answer, of all those constituencies now being investigated? It would be information of value to the House, and there should be ways in which hon. Members should know these things, perhaps by reading about them in their local paper or learning about them from town clerks.

The constituencies involved, which the Commission announced in the notice of 4th October that it intended to review, are Camden, Hampstead; Camden, St. Pancras North; Christchurch and Lymington; New Forest; Manchester, Ardwick; Manchester, Blackley; Manchester, Central; Manchester, Gorton; Manchester, Moss Side; Manchester, Openshaw; Manchester, Withington; Daventry; Wellingborough; Northampton North; Northampton South; Norwich North; and Norwich South.

I am very grateful to the hon. Gentleman.

In the debate on the Superannuation Bill today my hon. Friend the Member for Islington, East (Mr. John D. Grant) was able to go considerably wide of the Bill at the beginning of his speech. As time does not press upon me as it did in my previous Adjournment debates, I might be tempted to do the same and refer to such problems as unemployment in my constituency. But I count myself fortunate to have the opportunity to put to the House, without pressure of time, the subject I have been seeking to debate for some while. Therefore, I will confine myself to that, and be content to do so.

The subject I am raising arises out of a case which was brought to my notice by a public-spirited constituent, the Rev. Geoffrey Clark, without whose intervention a doctor might still be practising to the public danger. It is far from my mind to seek to pillory the doctor, because the case was extremely pathetic on the doctor's side, but the outcome was that two of the doctor's patients died. It is almost certain in one case and extremely likely in the other that the doctor's neglect was responsible for the deaths. From that tragic and unhappy episode arises a general case which I believe to be of considerable public importance.

The awareness of the Rev. Geoffrey Clark of the situation to which I have referred led to a complaint to the Manchester National Health Service Executive Council on 14th April last year. The complaint then proceeded to grind slowly through two different procedures until the doctor, almost one year from the date of the original complaint, was removed from the N.H.S. list by the N.H.S. Tribunal. But in the meantime the patient concerning whom the original complaint had been made had died, following the doctor's failure either to give the patient treatment or to secure treatment for the patient elsewhere.

The doctor's memory was extraordinarily shaky. Four times the doctor forgot either to make calls upon the patient's home after being asked to do so or to refer what turned out to be a very serious—indeed, fatal—case to a hospital. While the complaint was going through, another patient suffering from similar negligence, the forgetfulness of the doctor who did not make calls when they had been requested, also died.

So the first patient was the subject of a complaint to the N.H.S. and the second patient died while the complaint was being processed and the doctor concerned was still being permitted to practise. From this episode two questions arise, and I have been in correspondence about both with the Under-Secretary of State.

The first question that arises is what machinery is there to prevent mishaps of this kind if no one makes a complaint? The second is: how can further mishaps be prevented while the complaint is actually being processed? When I was in correspondence with the Minister earlier this year he replied to both those points and said this:

"If an Executive Council consider that the continued inclusion of a doctor in their medical list would be prejudicial to the efficiency of the general medical services then they can ask the National Health Service Tribunal to direct the removal of a doctor from their medical list (and in effect from any other Council's list)."

This is what happened, he said, in the case of the doctor concerned.

"However, this is not the only procedure that an Executive Council can adopt. The terms of service also provide that: 'Where the Council, after consultation with the Local Medical Committee, are satisfied that owing to the continued absence or bodily or mental disability of a practitioner his obligations under the terms of service are not being adequately carried out, they may with the consent of the Minister make such arrangements as the Minister may approve including the appointment of a deputy for and on behalf of the practitioner, and may deduct the cost of the arrangements in part or in whole from the remuneration of the practitioner; or they may with such consent give notice to the persons on his list that the practitioner is for the time being in their opinion not in a position to carry out his obligations under the terms of service.'"

Those are the points which the Minister made in seeking to prove that there was machinery to remedy the situation of which I have complained. But, in fact, this machinery is totally inadequate. The machinery was far too late to stop the first death, and was in no way effective in stopping the second death. This is where the suggestion which I am putting forward comes in.

My suggestion is that there should be regular health tests—and I would propose annual health tests—for doctors over 65. The doctor in this case was aged 82 and had undoubtedly, from all the evidence, become senile and no longer in command of the faculties necessary for adequate general practice. The memory had almost totally gone. Nevertheless, the doctor, as often happens with old doctors, was highly esteemed, so highly esteemed that pharmacists in the area corrected erroneous prescriptions which were brought to them from the doctor.

Yet a doctor practising in this way, and without any complaint being made, had been practising to the public danger. We know what happened to two patients, but it is impossible to know what more harm was inflicted by the doctor until the practice was stopped. A routine health check of the kind I am suggesting would have prevented a situation of this kind arising, without leaving it to the uncertain chance of a complaint which might or might not come. A person who gets short weight in a shop requires a certain strength of mind to make a complaint. To make a complaint against a doctor and go through the National Health Service machinery, especially when that doctor is, on past services, popular, requires a considerable strength of mind and determination, which might not always be present, and a readiness, if necessary, to make oneself unpopular. We were fortunate in this case that in the end my constituent, the Rev. Clark, had the strength of mind to make the complaint, to follow it through in a determined way and ultimately to bring it to my attention. But we cannot rely on this happening, and until Mr. Clark did it in this sad case it did not happen.

I make it absolutely clear that the last thing I wish to do is to stop elderly doctors practising. I do not wish to hamper them, I do not wish an arbitrary date to be set from which doctors should cease to practise. It is well known that many elderly doctors with their long general practice experience are very good doctors who give good treatment; they understand their patients well psychologically; and in return their patients are often very fond of them. I am in favour of doctors continuing to practise, however old they may be, with the single proviso that they should be fit to practise. But it is important that we establish their fitness to practise. Doctors do not have a retiring age and can, therefore, continue to practise indefinitely until a disaster forcibly brings to the attention of the authorities the ned to stop them practising.

We all know that senility can descend very suddenly. It can come early or late, but it comes suddenly. A doctor who has perhaps for decades been practising for the public good can suddenly turn into a public danger, as this doctor did. I suggest a regular health check from the age of 65 because that is the national insurance retirement age and, therefore, a suitable age from which to start. A regular health check could have intercepted this case—and might well have intercepted others of which we do not know—long before the case came to the attention of my constituent.

I ask the Under-Secretary of State in his reply not to turn down out of hand the request I am making to consider instituting regular health checks, perhaps once a year, on all doctors over 65. This would not, and I do not mean it to, stop elderly and aged doctors from practising, but it would protect doctors from a sudden incapacity which might not be outwardly obvious.

I am encouraged by the fact that the profession seems to have welcomed this suggestion. I understand that the issue of the General Practitioner out today which deals with the subject of this debate quotes the words of doctors who say that they would welcome it. It would, as I say, protect doctors and also protect patients. Despite what the Minister said to me in correspondence, the present machinery does not do this. The most the present machinery can do is to close the stable door after the horse has bolted, but in this situation the bolting horse can cost lives. In this case the machinery did not even stop the horse from bolting.

The executive council took the action which it was entitled to take in January this year. The Minister in his letter set out a list of actions that could have been taken in this situation. A deputy could have been appointed in fact, a deputy was not appointed. The doctor's patients could have been informed that the doctor was not fit to practise. In fact, the patients were not so informed. Yet the executive council took the matter so seriously that it referred the case to the National Health Service Tribunal. Nevertheless, it neither appointed a deputy nor informed the doctor's patients that the doctor was not fit to practise.

It is farcical that what was done was simply to withhold £100 from the doctor in respect of breach of service. This inflicted no injury on the doctor—not that one wanted such an injury to be inflicted—but it did not even use the powers available to protect other patients from the incapacity of this doctor to practise. Therefore, the very next month—after the machinery which the Minister has cited to me had been brought into play and the penalty of withholding £100 had been executed on the doctor—another of the doctor's patients died in very similar circumstances to those of the previous patient.

I do not raise this subject in any way in a spirit of vindictiveness against the doctor, for whom I am very sorry, and certainly not against the executive council or anybody else. I am also not seeking to load the balance against doctors. I do not wish to create a situation in which a doctor is guilty until proved innocent. Doctors provide an exceptionally valuable public service—as I myself know, having been well treated by them recently in Westminster Hospital—and they do a vital job.

I am simply seeking to protect doctors and their patients by asking for two things. First, I ask for regular health checks for doctors who reach the age of 65. Secondly, I ask for some system of supervision of doctors against whom complaints are made. I do not ask for an onerous form of supervision since that would be intolerable, but when one has a situation in which a complaint has been made against a doctor and a patient dies as a result of lack of attention by a doctor, it leads one to think that while the slow machinery for complaint is proceeded with—and I understand that in everybody's interest it must be slow—there should be protection of the doctor's patients as well as the interests of the doctor himself.

The Minister in his letter to me said:

"I have no reason for thinking that, in general, the safeguards I have mentioned are not proving effective."

In general, they may not prove ineffective, but the fact is that in particular they did prove ineffective. A patient died; and one cannot know whether in other cases they are proving ineffective.

I ask the Minister not to give a "Yes" or "No" now, but to say he will go from the House today and carefully consider the case I have put to him and write to me, letting me know how he proposes to deal with the situation, which I am sure he takes quite as seriously as I do. I ask this because in the end the lives of patients are more important than any other consideration.

It is important, at a time when we are considering the broader question of the reorganisation of the National Health Service, not to lose sight of the sort of problems that bear on the man in the street. This is why I am grateful to the hon. Member for Manchester, Ardwick (Mr. Kaufman) for raising this topic today. He dealt with the matter with some delicacy in the light of the tragic personal aspects of the case, with its unavoidable public repercussions. Perhaps he would convey to his constituent, the Rev. Mr. Clark, the appreciation of us all for the public spirited and delicate way in which he has intervened in this matter.

The hon. Member will agree that the problem is not an unmanageable one in point of size. Perhaps I can put the matter in perspective by saying that there are approaching 50,000 doctors employed in the National Health Service, more than half of whom are employed in the hospital service.

Under the terms and conditions of service of hospital medical and dental staff a hospital doctor's regular contract comes to an end when he reaches age 65. Where service needs prompt it, a hospital authority might occasionally extend a contract for one-year periods or less until the doctor concerned reached age 70; there is no provision for employment of hospital doctors after that age. Any doctor rendering services in a hospital must continue to satisfy his employer that he is fit to do so, and any employer not so satisfied may require the doctor concerned to submit to a medical examination.

Only a relative handful of doctors over 65 are in fact employed in the hospital service. Of the 20,000 or so general practitioners under contract to the National Health Service only approximately 1,400—or about 7 per cent.—were on the last date for which figures are available, 1st October last year, aged 65 or over. Of these 1,400 the majority are, I am quite sure, capable and conscientious, as I am sure the hon. Gentleman would agree. I have no doubt that they give good service to their patients, by whom they are held in high regard, and that such doctors would be the first to recognise any impairment of their ability to provide treatment for their patients and the first to accept the consequences of such a recognition, however unwelcome.

Having said this to set the scale of the problem in perspective, I ought to add that I fully recognise the force of what the hon. Member said about the efficiency of a doctor being quite literally a matter of life and death in some circumstances. What I hope to show in what I shall now go on to say is that outlets exist for any problem situations to come to notice and that they can be dealt with urgently if necessary. Where the problem is not so urgent the statutory procedure for dealing with complaints against practitioners is likely to be involved. This is admittedly time-consuming and I will say more about this aspect when I talk about the procedure.

Let me turn then first to what I suppose one might call "consumer" practice where patients are dissatisfied with the effectiveness of their doctor. Every patient is free at any time to change his doctor, without having to explain either to his doctor or to anyone else why he wishes to do so.

The procedure for making a change is described on the medical card issued to each patient; but essentially it is very simple. The patient, after having given notice to the local executive council, chooses the doctor by whom he would prefer to be treated, goes to him, and asks to be accepted by him as his National Health Service patient. If the doctor agrees, the patient informs the executive council, who make the necessary arrangements. If a patient has difficulty in finding another doctor he can go to the executive council and ask to be assigned to the medical list of one of the doctors in his neighbourhood.

The point about this, in the context of the hon. Gentleman's concern, is not only the obvious point of a patient's right to change his doctor, but the fact that an executive council would soon become aware of a doctor who was at all regularly giving rise to concern.

The second main point is that the terms of service of general practitioners provide that executive councils may themselves take action against a doctor who for any reason is failing to provide a satisfactory service. Where the council are satisfied that because of a doctor's continued absence or bodily or mental disability his obligations under his terms of service are not being adequately carried out, they may make arrangements for carrying on the practice.

Before they take action under this provision, councils are required to consult the local medical committee and also to obtain the approval of the Secretary of State. But these checks and safeguards do not prevent councils from operating the procedure. During the last five years the procedure has been invoked 19 times, mostly because the doctor had developed some form of illness but occasionally for other reasons. Clearly this is the right procedure where there is evidently an urgent situation—in other words, a doctor is so impaired either physically or mentally that he or she is more likely than not, if faced with an emergency, to do damage by act or omission. It is very unlikely that occasions will not arise when patients have some cognisance or awareness of a limitation such as the hon. Gentleman described—the sudden onset of senility.

I have indicated that the procedure is used fairly rarely, but its existence no doubt facilitates more informal action by the executive council, the local medical committee, or by partners and colleagues, where through sickness or age or for any other reasons a doctor's capacity to practise effectively has become impaired. From time to time I become aware of individual cases of this nature, where as a result of such informal persuasion doctors resign or retire or engage assistance or reduce their medical lists, or limit their clinical responsibilities in some way. In the nature of things, the cases that occur are disposed of without being brought to the attention of my Department formally. But we hear about them.

In short, I hope the hon. Gentleman will accept that where doctors over, or for that matter under, 65 are not giving a satisfactory service there are mechanisms operating which can and do reduce or eliminate the problem—if need be, urgently.

This is all very well, and I accept what the hon. Gentleman says. But will he turn his attention to the specific example which I mentioned in which an executive council had a case brought to its attention which it regarded as extremely serious—so serious that it referred it to the National Health Service Tribunal? It did not employ the mechanism available but simply fined the doctor a relatively small sum. How can we be sure that the safeguards are operating adequately?

I hope that I shall cover that point when I deal more particularly with the case which the hon. Gentleman has brought to our notice today and in earlier correspondence.

I should like to turn to the statutory procedure dealing with complaints against general practitioners and for taking the drastic step of removing their names from the medical lists of executive councils. It might be helpful, therefore, if I were briefly to explain these procedures. Family doctors are independent contractors who are under contract with local executive councils. Under their contracts they are required to comply with the terms of service set out in the National Health Service (General Medical and Pharmaceutical Services) Regulations. For example, a medical practitioner is required to render to his patient all proper and necessary treatment; to visit and treat a patient whose condition, in the opinion of the doctor, so requires; and to take all necessary steps to enable a patient to receive treatment from the hospital and specialist services where the patient's condition requires such treatment and the patient agrees to receive it.

If a patient considers that his doctor has failed to comply with the terms of service, the patient or, as appropriate, his representative can complain to the executive council. The handling of complaints is governed by procedure laid down in the National Health Service (Service Committees and Tribunal) Regulations. The complaint is first considered by the chairman—a lay member—of the medical service committee of the executive council. There are some detailed points of procedure at this stage leading up to consideration of the complaint by the full committee which has the power to decide whether there shall be an oral hearing.

Apart from the chairman, there are three other lay members and three professional members on this committee. After any hearing that is necessary, the committee reports the relevant facts from the evidence placed before it and the inferences it has drawn on whether there is a breach of the terms of service. It reports its findings to the executive council and recommends what action should be taken. The executive council makes a decision on the complaint and sends copies of the service committee's report, together with a statement of its decision, to the parties concerned and to my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State.

There is a right of appeal to the Secretary of State against the council's decision. In the more serious cases, executive councils may consider that the evidence revealed by a service committee case is such that it should make representations to the National Health Service Tribunal that the continued inclusion of a doctor's name in the council's medical list would be prejudicial to the efficiency of the general medical services.

This disciplinary procedure is a quasi-judicial one. It provides a framework for the investigation of legitimate complaints by patients but at the same time gives practitioners some degree of protection against frivolous or unjustified complaints. By the very nature of their work doctors, as a profession, are perhaps peculiarly exposed and vulnerable to unreasonable complaints.

The procedure provides for certain processes to be gone through and because of its formal nature it is difficult to cut corners. An executive council can take the serious step of making representations to the National Health Service Tribunal only when it has sufficient evidence to suggest that it would be in the public interest to prevent a practitioner from continuing to provide services. In Tribunal cases certain steps have to be followed to safeguard the interests of practitioners as well as those of patients and it inevitably takes some time to marshal evidence and have a case considered by the Tribunal. However, those administering these procedures endeavour to ensure that cases are dealt with as quickly as is consistent with the administration of justice, which, alas, sometimes grinds relatively slowly.

Before I leave the question of the steps that can be taken in effect to stop a doctor from practising, I should mention that it is open to the Secretary of State to pass facts which have come to his attention to the General Medical Council for consideration by it of disciplinary proceedings.

It is at this stage that I should say a little about the particular case with which the hon. Member was concerned and which he specified in some detail. The complaints made against this doctor were made early in 1970 and the service committee of the local executive council heard them in July of that year. The executive council endorsed its committee's recommendation and sent the cases to my Department in August. The Secretary of State considered that the cases were serious enough to justify a substantial withholding of remuneration, and after completion of the appropriate processes under the Service Committee Regulations a withholding of £100 was directed in January, 1971.

The executive council also made representations to the National Health Service Tribunal which sat in February, 1971. As a result of the Tribunal's decision, the doctor's name was removed from executive council lists at the end of March of this year. I accept that it took a long time for this to occur, but about this I would say two things. The first is that this doctor very rarely answered any letters, so that the statutory procedures tended to be slowed down on this account. But I can think of no other case in which this extraordinary unwillingness to communicate by correspondence or by any other means has arisen; it is virtually unique. The second is a point I have already touched on generally. The National Health Service Tribunal is in effect depriving a person of his livelihood—at least so far as the Health Service is concerned—and the need for speed in the interests of patients has to be balanced against the fact that it would be wrong to take such a step without giving the practitioner every chance to put his or her side of the case.

Before I come to the hon. Gentleman's main suggestion, perhaps I could just say about his subsidiary point—that immediately a doctor has been the subject of a complaint there should be a sort of audit of his work—that I do not think it would be practicable. Even supposing it was right to divert scarce medical manpower to this sort of function, I do not think it would be fair to ask general practitioners to submit to checks when, as I have said, a complaint may be trivial or even malicious. And if someone were charged with deciding whether the degree of seriousness of the complaint justified checks, then that person would in effect be prejudging to a large extent the result of the statutory procedure for considering the complaint.

I turn to the particular suggestion which the hon. Gentleman put forward, namely, that there should be an annual medical check of general practitioners over the age of 65. However, first I reassure the hon. Gentleman that, always being anxious to listen carefully to any points made by hon. Members, I shall ponder and weigh carefully what he said. In turning down the main burden of his argument, I do not completely rule out any reaction to what he said, he having taken great pains to elaborate and expound his thesis.

The first point to make is that, although a medical check would no doubt pick up actual physical impairment, it is hard to see how such a check could settle the acid question whether the practitioner has sufficient energy and competence to conduct his practice. The question is surely one which might depend on the size of the practice and its location. Running a practice which depended on covering large rural areas, normally snow-covered in winter, is clearly a great deal more physically onerous than running one in, say, a suburban area. The job of coming to conclusions of this kind would be invidious.

This leads me to my second point, that, because it would be an invidious task, I doubt whether many doctors would be prepared to undertake such a medical examination of their colleagues. In effect, it would mean taking their future employment prospects into their hands in an informal and unofficial way.

I have tried to deal as carefully as possible with the hon. Gentleman's points. I can well appreciate the local concern about the complaints made against the doctor which led to the hon. Gentleman's interest in the matter. I hope that I have shown that remedies exist for the general problems with which he is concerned. The particular statutory procedure for complaints against practitoners is, as I have said, slow; but, as I have also said, we must not forget the interests of the patients and, equally, the vital aspect that the doctor's livelihood may be at risk.

I think that I can fairly say that both my right hon. Friend and I are open to any suggestions regarding better management of the National Health Service, but we doubt whether the hon. Gentleman's imaginative suggestions would be practicable and, indeed, fully effective in the circumstances with which we are concerned.

I am sure that the hon. Gentleman appreciates the difficulties. I certainly undertake to consider carefully the details of what he said. I also undertake to write to him again on this subject. However, I am bound to conclude that, on first hearing his further exposition of these points, I cannot see that health checks for doctors over 65 would fully avoid the hazards which have arisen in this case.

The House will know that next week there is to be a censure debate on the Government's record on unemployment. It might, therefore, be thought inappropriate that I should use this opportunity of raising that very matter so far as it relates to Scotland; but I make no apology whatever for doing that very thing.

The censure debate next week will be thoroughly deserved, and this debate is thoroughly justified by the atrocious figures of unemployment for Scotland and other parts of the United Kingdom which we had yesterday. The scourge of unemployment, with all its waste, misery, degradation and poverty, will be debated in this House and outside at every available opportunity.

Yesterday, Mr. Vic Feather of the T.U.C. demanded a General Election on this issue. It is well known that no General Election ever takes place on one specific issue, but, come what may, whenever the next General Election may take place, this monstrous betrayal and deception by the Government will be a predominant theme.

We all know the expressions which were used at the last General Election: getting rid of unemployment and price rises "at a stroke"; the new imaginative regional policies which were to work wonders; the Chancellor of the Exchequer's constant expressions of confidence that we were about to turn some corner or other; the Prime Minister's "Better Tomorrow" which never seems to come and is further off now than when he first used that stupid phrase. We had the great reflationary measures taken in July and the Chancellor promising results in a month or two. We are now getting them. These are the bitter fruits which we are now reaping from the dogma and deception of this Government over the last 18 months.

There has been an increase in Scottish unemployment in the last month of 5,000, and there is no sign of any fall anywhere. There is not a glimmer of light anywhere to be seen. On the contrary, all the signs are that we could well reach 200,000 unemployed in Scotland in February or March of next year, depending on the severity of the winter. Last winter unemployment in Scotland went up by about 23,000 between November and March. If that is repeated this year and we get a winter as exceptionally mild as last winter, the Scottish figure will be not less than 165,000 by next February or March. I guess it will be worse than that.

Nearly 107,000 men are wholly unemployed. Taking men and boys together, the total is 114,000. That is 6·3 per cent. against 4·6 per cent. a year ago.

Whilst the percentage rate for unemployment in Scotland rose in the last month from 6·3 to 6·6 per cent., in Britain as a whole it went up from only 3·9—I say "only", because in the context of what we have been suffering in the last 12 to 15 months that is a low figure—to 4 per cent.

Taking various parts of Scotland, in Dundee the figure is now 7·8 per cent. In the Greenock—Port Glasgow area, about which my hon. Friend the Member for Greenock (Dr. Dickson Mabon) will no doubt speak, the current figure is 8·3 per cent. In North Lanark it is 8·9 per cent. Worse figures have not been seen in Scotland since the 1930s.

These figures have been growing constantly month by month; yet what do we discuss in this House of Commons? What are we going to discuss and what have we been discussing in the last few weeks? Next week I shall be on a Committee which starts discussing local commercial radio to provide profits for a few speculators. One day next week we shall be debating the selling off of Messrs. Thomas Cook and Son, again to private profiteers, because it is a profitable public undertaking. We shall be debating the Housing Finance Bill which seeks to put up the rents of council house tenants throughout Britain. And the prissy Secretary of State for Education and Science announced last week that she will be handing out £2 million to the middle-class parents of children who go to direct-grant schools. All the time that is going on, the numbers in the dole queues go up, and up, and up, and show no signs of coming down.

I was amazed to read Mr. David Wood's column in The Times this morning. It never ceases to amaze me by its appalling mixture of ignorance, inaccuracy, distortion and, sometimes, downright lies. It says that the Opposititon Chief Whip

"last night urgently approached the Government's business managers to cancel the unemployment debate and stand on the original programme".

That is, to discuss the Scottish Housing Bill.

I have never in my life heard such unadulterated rubbish. We do not want anything to do with the Scottish Housing Bill next week or the week after, or at any time at all, because the effect of it will be at least to double the rents of most council houses We would be willing to debate unemployment every day next week and the week after and the week after that. As The Times said this morning in its editorial, there is little room for optimism on any point. It goes on to make some pertinent criticisms of the Government, and to put forward pertinent suggestions for the solution of the problem, and then says:

"When the last war was declared in September, 1939, there were in the United Kingdom 1,395,600 men and women registered as unemployed. By May of 1940 the numbers had fallen below a million to 947,800. With the exception of the one fuel crisis month of February, 1947, unemployment has been lower in every month for 31½ years until this month."

That is, until this month of November 1971.

It goes on to say:

"What should be done now that total registered unemployment in the United Kingdom is within about 30,000 of one million, the unemployed percentage in Britain has reached 4 per cent. and the seasonally adjusted hard core total has topped 850,000—all for the first time in thirty years?"

The next paragraph says that:

"it is morally, economically, socially and politically intolerable that unemployment should remain at its present level",

and it then poses certain alternative courses which the Government might adopt. After saying that it would be unwise to reflate the economy—I do not take that view; I think we need some further reflation, but that is by the way—the editorial continues:

"This does not, however, exclude the possibility of selective action in the development areas and of a kind which can be relied upon to act directly on unemployment in the very short-term without adding unduly to general demand in 1973."

Then comes the paragraph to which I hope the hon. Gentleman and his hon. Friends will direct their attention both today and between now and the debate next week:

"The collapse of significant regional policies under the present Government, although understandable in terms of their measured search for a new regional strategy, has been particularly unfortunate. The simultaneous loss of the regional employment premium, effective investment incentives and a determined industrial development certificate policy has been too much."

I could go on at length, but I shall not do so. It is an editorial that is well worth examination.

I now turn to our own Scottish newspapers.

Before my hon. Friend refers to the Scottish newspapers, may I refer him to the South London Press which appeared this morning, and which says:

"The local Young Conservatives have embarrassed their party officials with a series of attacks on issues including colour, unemployment and education."

It is not only The Times editorial which is manifesting dissatisfaction. Even in Dulwich the Young Conservatives are dissatisfied.

Anybody in the country with a social conscience must condemn not only the current unemployment figures but the policies which have led to them, because they have been policies deliberately intended to create this situation. It has not happened just by chance.

Let me give just one example. By deliberate policy council house building has been cut back throughout the country.

Not in my constituency.

Local authorities are cutting back house building because of the Government's policy as set out in the Housing Finance Bill. Local authorities know that if they continue to build houses the Government will impose rents—local authorities will not have freedom to charge what they regard as proper rents—which will mean that they will not be able to let their houses. That is one example of the Government having sought deliberately to create a situation in the hope thereby of disciplining the trade unions; but, of course, it has not worked.

My hon. Friend the Member for Brixton (Mr. Lipton) is right. The conscience of the nation is rightly aroused by the obscenity with which we are faced of the dole queues lengthening day by day and week by week even in areas which at one time were regarded as prosperous, such as London and the Midlands.

And Swindon.

And Swindon, as my hon. Friend says.

Today's Scotsman says in its editorial:

"There are reports that the Government are considering further measures, like speeding up investment by state industries and more spending by local authorities. This is unlikely to be of immediate help, but, as far as Scotland is concerned, what is more worrying is the lack of long-term plans."

And there are no plans. There is no strategy, long-term or short-term. The Government have said that they are pouring millions of pounds into the economy now. The Chancellor produced his mini-Budget last July, but none of these things is going to affect, other than adversely, the unemployment situation in the next 12 months.

The Scotsman goes on to say:

"Incentives for development areas, even in better times, hardly keep pace with the labour losses in contracting industries. Mr. Campbell may have visions of far-reaching developments at Hunterston and in the West of Scotland, but Mr. Davies and British Steel show no signs of being impressed by the Scottish Councils ideas. Ministers are counting up the jobs in prospect for the East coast with the exploitation of North Sea oil, but they are very cool about proposals that the proceeds should be used to transform the Scottish economy."

My hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh, East (Mr. Strang) will probably say something about that.

I now propose to quote from another newspaper. I went through as many as I could when I realised that I might have a chance of getting this debate. The paper from which I propose to quote is the Daily Telegraph. One can imagine the writer of the article sitting in his plush editorial chair, in his lush office, secure in his job—or at least as secure as newspapers can be today under this Government—saying:

"What is wanted now is patience …".

How easy for a man in that situation to say that. Patience for the million on the dole? Patience for over 7 million pensioners who are literally facing the prospect of starvation in the next two years? For the families whom this Government are preventing from getting homes by cutting back on the housing programme? It will soon be Christmas and we shall be wishing peace on earth, goodwill to all men, including those at the employment exchanges, the 7 million pensioners, and the million on the dole and their wives and families. What kind of Christmas will they have?

Why not give the pensioners an immediate increase? This would at least get rid of a little of the misery which the Government have created. Why not give local authorities carte blanche to get on with their house building? At least a quarter of the unemployed in Scotland are building trade operatives who are idle while we have thousands of people waiting for houses. There are thousands of acres, particularly in Scotland, of dereliction caused by the first Industrial Revolution. Why cannot the Government give local authorities a 100 per cent. grant to clear up this unsightly mess?

I am very interested in the hon. Gentleman's remarks, particularly in the fact that 25 per cent. of the unemployed in Scotland are in the building trade. Purely as a matter of information—this is not a partisan point—what is the state of the building trade in the private sector in Scotland? Is that doing as well as it is in other parts of the country, or is it flat?

The hon. Gentleman has no right to make a non-partisan point; that is not what this House is for. That is not what I am here for, anyway. I am here to get this Government out and mine in. No doubt my hon. Friend the Member for Greenock on the Front Bench, will be able to answer better than I, but I know that, by tradition, there has never been the proportion of private house building in Scotland that there is in England. Under the Labour Government the proportion of houses built for private ownership went up faster than under the previous Tory Government, but it is still a very small proportion of the total Scottish house building programme.

The answer to Scotland's housing problem is not in the private sector but predominantly in the public sector, through the Scottish Special Housing Association, the local authorities and the new town corporations. Wages are so low and employment prospects so insecure that relatively few people want or are able in Scotland to take on a 25-year mortgage.

I want to return to what the editor of the Daily Telegraph, sitting cosily in his chair, said:

"Neither the Labour Government nor the trade unions can prevent the Government's economic strategy from working; but the Government can certainly do so if it loses its nerve."

What strategy do they have? The situation is now out of control. Whatever the Government do now will not stop us from having well over one million unemployed in the next few months.

Probably the worst feature is the unemployment among our youth. In Cowdenbeath, in my constituency, 55 youths were unemployed in October, 1969, and 87 in October, 1971; in Kirkcaldy, in the neighbouring constituency, the figures were 40 in 1969 and 93 in 1971; in Airdrie they were 267 and 704; in Bellshill they were 56 and 297; in Hamilton 46 and 235; in Motherwell 110 and 409; in Rutherglen 60 and 141; in Kilmarnock 27 and 142. Even in Edinburgh the figures were 187 in October, 1969, and 427 in October, 1971. In Bridgeton, in Glasgow, the figures were 22 and 156; in Springburn they were 174 and 605; in Glasgow, Southside, they were 188 and 509. These figures are appalling and indefensible.

When the Scottish unemployment was 134,000, the Chancellor was reported in the Press as having said in the House on 28th June:

"On the basic problem of unemployment, I have repeatedly said, taking account of the Budget's measures, I expected that the rate of increase in unemployment would after a time slow down and then stop."

He went on:

"That has been happening, as is apparent from the figures published in recent months."

We have seen how they have been going down; we have seen the accuracy of the Chancellor's forecasts.

One need not quote Ministers. We know how inaccurate and misleading they have been. Instead, let me quote what Mr. Lindsay Aitken, the industrial policy manager of the Scottish Council for Development and Industry, said about the figures announced yesterday:

"The figures are disturbing however they are measured. They represent not just a single situation but an accumulation of trends in manufacturing and other fields. These trends have been growing since the summer of 1969. There may be no easy solution in the short-term, but the trends cannot be allowed to continue. A new look at regional policies as a whole is required."

The C.B.I. for the Scottish area said more or less the same:

"We are very disappointed that the actions which the Government have taken are not biting".

The Glasgow Herald said in an editorial this morning:

"Short-term factors apart, the chronically high level of unemployment from which Scotland has suffered since the war looks like becoming chronically worse, not better. Short-term measures like public works schemes and naval orders for the Clyde are welcome in that they keep the dole queue shorter than it would otherwise be, but there is an urgent need, as the Scottish Council emphasised yesterday, for the Government to take a new look at regional policies as a whole. This is not merely a question of replenishing the begging bowls; it is primarily a matter of exploiting to the full such economic advantages as each of the regions of high unemployment possesses. In Scotland the Clyde's potential as a deep-water port is unrivalled in Europe. This is the catalyst that could eventually rid of us our unemployment problem. Any British Government who turn their backs on this reality do so at their peril."

Wherever one looks—at any paper in the political spectrum; on the Right or Left, in the centre or with commentators with no political persuasion at all—the answer is the same: the Government's policies have failed, are failing and will continue to fail unless they reverse the policies they have been pursuing in the last 15 months.

Is the hon. Gentleman aware that there is a factor which he should bring into his speech if he is to give a balanced view, and that is the types of person unemployed? For example, how many unfilled vacancies are there? He is implying that it is total unemployment.

From memory, 20 men are looking for every one situation vacant in Scotland. Indeed, the position may be even worse. I was about to say that I had given the hon. Gentleman a conservative estimate, but I cannot do that because I hate the word whether it is spelt with a small or capital "c".

One of the most disturbing features is not that the majority of the unemployed are unskilled or even semi-skilled but that unemployment is working its way through to teachers, highly skilled professional people and business executives. In other words, the spread is much wider than it was. I have the figures of vacancies for youths, men and women, but I have no doubt that the Minister will wish to deal with that aspect.

The intervention of the hon. Member for Walthamstow, East (Mr. Michael McNair-Wilson) stresses the fact that the problem facing the Government and the nation is one of the greatest social evils and challenges of our time, if not the greatest. The mood of the people is angry and ugly. The right to work is a basic human one which any Government deny at their peril, and the dogmatic assertions of hon. Gentlemen opposite, before, during and after the General Election have led directly to the present fury and sense of betrayal in all parts of the country.

The Government have made matters worse by seeking—indeed, they are still doing this—to put the blame on other shoulders, including the former Labour Government and the trade unions. Hon. Gentlemen opposite pretended that they had immediate solutions to the problems that are now plaguing our people—on prices, unemployment and industrial efficiency. We have had all the shibboleths hurled at us about lame ducks and the need to stand on one's own feet, not to mention non-intervention by the Government.

What of all the talk about the need to get back to the free working of market forces? Now, nearly 1 million chickens are coming home to roost. But they are not chickens. They are bitter, angry, determined, dignified men and women about whom the Government have said, "They do not matter".

Not only are we deeply concerned; we have reached the point when we can do very little about it. We look around our country and see public squalor in every corner. We see squalid housing with millions of people living in terrible conditions. They are better off in some of their huts in African villages than are some of our people in the slums of Britain today.

We have slum hospitals staffed by ill-paid nurses. We have slum schools, and I do not mean only primary schools. When the "headmistress" comes here and says that she is dealing with the primary schools, she should reflect that she is telling local education authorities throughout the country, including Scotland, that they cannot do anything about their secondary schools, a lot of which are in a deplorable condition and more than a century old.

I have talked about the dereliction in my constituency. I suggest that without exception the same can be said of the constituencies of every hon. Member here today. Environmental pollution is taking place on a massive scale, and we have with it the fact that millions of our people are starving, unwanted, rejected and desolate—but nevertheless determined to fight for their rights.

All this means a complete revision of the Government's priorities. It means an admission of failure from them. It means that there must be greater Government intervention than hon. Gentlemen opposite either promised or threatened the electors in June, 1970, or have even contemplated since then. The country is not prepared to put up with the kind of policies that have divided the nation in a way that I have not known since the 'twenties and 'thirties.

I remember the 'thirties well. Indeed, that memory makes me the kind of fellow I am today. I shall never forget those days when I lived in the area of Tynemouth. I regret that its parliamentary representative, the hon. Lady the Member for Tynemouth (Dame Irene Ward), sits there asleep in the corner.

Order.

Whatever I am, I am certainly not asleep.

That situation will not be allowed to repeat itself, and as soon as the Government care to go to the country—on their record, on unemployment, on prices, on the social services or on the division of the national wealth—they will get their answer. In the meantime, we demand action that will seek at least to stern the flood which now seems to be uncontrollable—this tidal wave which has been creating and will create untold misery for millions of innocent men, women and children.

I assure my hon. Friends that my rising to speak does not imply that I shall monopolise the time or that I do not want to hear their contributions. I should explain to the House that, unfortunately, there has been a serious incident in my constituency in which a number of people have been killed or injured, and I should like to leave the House at 3.15 p.m. so as to get there as quickly as possible. I hope that the Minister who replies to the debate will forgive me if I am not here when he does so.

This Adjournment debate, fortuitous though it may be, is nevertheless very welcome. While we do not expect the Under-Secretary of State for Home Affairs and Agriculture at the Scottish Office to be here with a complete brief to answer the debate, we should like him and his hon. Friend, the Under-Secretary of State for Employment, to take away our inquiries and questions and the points of substance which we should like answered—not for answer today, because that may be too much to ask, although we should welcome replies if possible—and to have these questions answered in the great debate next Tuesday.

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Fife, West (Mr. William Hamilton) on his enterprise in obtaining the debate. He was able to make perfectly clear the erroneous report by Mr. Wood that in some way or other we on this side of the House did not want a debate about unemployment and that we wanted the abominable Housing (Financial Provisions) (Scotland) Bill in its stead. I am glad that my Chief Whip is present now to confirm that what my hon. Friend said is the understanding of us all—that we do not want that Bill at all and would much prefer to keep this debate on Tuesday.

If the debate on Tuesday is successful in the sense of putting at least some assurance in the minds of those who are unemployed, or who may fear that they may become unemployed, it will be a useful debate. I hope it will not be entirely polemical, from either this or the other side of the House, and that it will aim to be constructive. The only way to succeed in that is for the Government to make positive announcements. The emotive phrase "one million unemployed" is something that the party opposite cannot live down if it happens. A figure of 970,000 is bad enough but to get any higher than that is a most serious political error for the Tory Party to have made. In the post-war years we have never had extremely high unemployment, except for occasional bad weather conditions and in 1963. Then we had very bad unemployment; but nothing like this. The Tory Party looks as though, voluntarily or involuntarily, it is drifting towards a situation where it is now the party of unemployment again. If it does not want that albatross hung around its neck again, it will have to do something urgently.

When I read newspapers and am told that Ministers are worried, I believe that. If I were a Minister now—God forbid—I should be sick with worry. I could no longer shove the blame for this situation on my predecessors. First, the people would not believe it. Second, there have been three Budgets. There are the declarations of Ministers on these occasions that unemployment is being tackled. The Government have run out of excuses on the matter of inflationary wage rates being the main cause of unemployment. That is fast disappearing.

Very few people, apart from one or two dedicated Conservative Party men believe that that is true any more. The Government have had 17 months. No Government can continue to tell the people, "It is not our fault because we have only been in office for 17 months." No one will believe that.

I want seriously to imprint on minds of hon. Members, both those present and those who may read this debate, that it is essential for the Conservative Party to realise that it is in government, that it is responsible and that it must act. If it does not act and we top the million mark and go even to worse figures than that, I warn the Conservatives that they will be dubbed, as they were before the war, the party which causes unemployment.

I will not recite the figures of unemployment in my constituency, because it gives me great agony. But I should prefer the Under-Secretary to tell us the figures because, in so doing, his party will believe the more what we are asserting.

There are thousands unemployed in my constituency. It is one of the most difficult constituencies in the country in which to bring down unemployment. In our best years since the war, the lowest unemployment rate in Greenock has been 4 per cent. So I readily concede that it is not a representative constituency in that sense; it is like some highland areas or chronically bad areas of Scotland in which, for various reasons—not mainly the people's fault—there is a chronic incidence of unemployment. But when there is an acute phase of unemployment in Great Britain the Greenock picture changes alarmingly and rises very substantially.

The Minister may say that the Government are helping to provide jobs in Greenock. That is true. We have a most successful series of shipyards grouped on the Lower Clyde which has an enormous amount of orders. It is one of our best order books for years. We now have the advantage of the naval orders announced by the Government. They are not new orders, but at least they have been brought forward in the programmes. By the way, this is not all good for future naval programming because they have been simply brought forward. If this unemployment situation is not cured, in the long term we may have to face a difficult period of shortage of orders later.

But that is not true now in the Lower Clyde. We have 8,000 shipyard workers and we hope to raise that figure to 10,000. The Minister may say, "That is marvellous. What are you worried about? Your unemployment figure will drop." But that is not true. Constituencies are not islands. As John Donne said, "no man is an island"; and no constituency is an island, and there are at least 4,000 experienced shipbuilders with long years of craftsmanship behind them, not unskilled men but good shipbuilders, who will be unemployed very soon in the upper reaches of the Clyde some 18 to 19 miles away. Some of them on the other side of the river, on Clydebank, will now have the advantage of the new Erskine Bridge to come across the river more directly and work in our yards. So in my constituency we cannot expect to get those additional 2,000 jobs.

Local factories are anxious to expand. Although I have been arguing the general case, I have been trying for a long time to give specific examples of firms in my constituency where as few as 10 or as many as 200 jobs could be provided if local industry were helped. I wrote a letter to the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry about a firm that hopes to get 300 to 400 new jobs if it can get the same incentives as those allowed the incoming firms in the special development areas. The Government have not yet refused this. They have not said that it is not on the cards, or "Do not agitate any more about this because you are not having any".

All along the Government have encouraged us to believe that if we can provide evidence that jobs will be created by local industries, they will consider seriously a way of bringing them up to the same level of advantage as those outside firms coming into our area—and very welcome they are—to create more jobs for our constituents.

The Prime Minister wrote to the Scottish Labour Members only a few days ago saying that he was considering this. The Secretary of State for Trade and Industry has agreed that he will consider this, and, as I said, I have written to him today giving another positive example of a firm in my constituency, with all its documentation. He will have the letter tomorrow. All the documentation shows that this expansion would not only benefit the firm and exports but provide jobs in this locally bad situation.

Therefore, I hope the Government will stop hesitating over this issue. I read some awful news in a good article in The Guardian about eight days ago saying that the Government had postponed their decision on new regional policies for another year. I should like that to be denied on Tuesday, if it cannot be denied now. I should like it confirmed that the Government intend very quickly to announce some modification of the present incentives to local firms, modification that will make the situation better for areas not in special development areas which are now being adversely affected. I should like their position to be examined. Let us look also at the position of Kilmarnock and of Troon in Ayrshire, outside the special development area and yet very much in need of this kind of assistance. Cannot the boundaries of the special development area be extended? What about Dundee and Tayside?

The Government have said: "We are asking the chambers of commerce in Glasgow, Paisley and Greenock to collect all the facts and figures, and then we will decide whether we extend special development area incentives to local firms." I know that much information has been submitted, but I do not know whether people will put up with this much longer without getting a decision. The Government are just dangling us along. I know of at least five cases in my constituency proving conclusively that if this is done there will be success in some measure, certainly in the short-term, in providing jobs. In the urgency of these crisis debates—and it is not an exaggeration to call the present unemployment situation a crisis—we tend to run for short-term solutions. The Government's emergency public works programme is an example. We must have short-term measures, it is true, but long-term solutions are perhaps more important.

In the Daily Mail, which is a very good friend of the Government, there is a report that the Cabinet yesterday made important decisions about the nationalised industries and, more specifically, about steel and the railways. I do not know how reliable the Daily Mail is on this score, but it put that information on the front page. If the report is reliable, this action can be seen as the first fruits of the demand made by my right hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Stechford (Mr. Roy Jenkins) in the unemployment Amendment to the Address, when he called for higher investment in the nationalised industries.

I do not expect the two Ministers present who, however hard they work, are still junior Ministers, to make substantial announcements now, but we want announcements on Tuesday, and I hope that hon. Gentlemen on the Treasury Front Bench will tell their seniors of our anxiety.

The Scottish Labour Members are to see representatives of the British Steel Corporation next week having in mind not only the redundancies at Falkirk, which are quite substantial and which are happening now, but the possible redundancies looming up in the administrative headquarters of the tubes division in Glasgow. But, while we welcome the chance to discuss these things with the Corporation, we should like to be told by it that the Government, after very long consideration by the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, are allowing a very substantial investment in the steel industry.

Redcar is waiting to know whether there is to be a brown field site development for that important area of England, while we in Scotland are waiting to hear whether we are to get the £1,000 million green field site investment at Hunters-ton. Such an investment would make Hunterston a reality as a deep water port. While what is being done by the Hunters-ton development corporation is welcome—though why it was not done in this way I do not know—it is far too slow, and not a few people believe that it is a blind, a piece of window dressing to conceal the fact that no decisions about Hunterston are being made. The greatest single message of joy and hope for Scotland in these bleak days would be an announcement by the Government next Tuesday that we are to have this steel plant on that peninsula.

We would also like to see more investment in the railways. In the Adjournment debate the other night on the future of many railway workshop employees in Troon, and around Troon, and Kilmarnock, and elsewhere, resting on the future of the Barassie railway workshops, we were told that everything hinged on the creditworthiness of Yugoslavia, and whether its contract would be guaranteed. The Government promised to do something about it. Within the last fortnight Her Majesty the Queen has been welcoming President Tito while at the same time we are told that Yugoslavia's creditworthiness is in doubt. This contract means a lot to these workers, and by failing to bring work to railway workshops and guaranteeing their future we are again prejudicing the position of these workers not yet in the dole queues. I therefore urge the Government to look into investment in the State industries and realise that both in the long-term and in the short they can do a great deal.

I am very worried about what the Government have so far done to reflate the economy, because so far it has not proved as effective as they said it would. I welcome the series of decisions taken over several months not only to reflate the economy but to introduce an emergency public works programme of some substance, but all the reports I receive, not from politicians but from employers and trade unions, is that the programme is not being taken up at the rate the Government hoped. We must find out why this is so, and remove what obstacles there are to a full take-up of the programme. I am sure that the Government will not quarrel with me on that score.

The other day representatives of the Federation of Civil Engineering Contractors came to the House to see several hon. Members, including myself. They told us that unemployment in civil engineering, in Scotland in particular, though it must apply to other regions as well, is growing. If one examines the Government's roads programme—and there is a roads element in the emergency public works programme—one finds a considerable slippage on major road schemes over the last six months.

I have compared what is said in the July 1971 and the January 1971 editions of the S.D.D. review—and no doubt on another occasion I shall be able to give positive examples—and I find in the Highlands, in the south-east, in the central belt, and elsewhere, examples of major road developments being pushed back. I do not necessarily say that it is being done deliberately but it is a reason for saying that the Government should advance other items in their programme.

If the Government cannot prepare large programmes, which tend in any case to go to large contractors—and, alas, we in Scotland do not have as many large contractors as we would like—let them prepare smaller programmes. As it is, many smaller men are being employed by the large contractors as sub-contractors. We know that work in any form is better than none, but it would be better if our own contractors could be put to work on smaller schemes which could be done quickly. It would be good if these men were given a chance to tender now for such schemes, so as to get them going in the spring, and summer of next year—because we all know that schemes like this need a good deal of preparation.

I urge the Under-Secretary of State to ask his right hon. Friends the Secretaries of State for Trade and Industry and for Scotland to look at this charge quite solemnly made by the Federation that there is not enough of the kind of work its members can do quickly, and that the road programme is slipping. I will not be put off by statements that this year we have been spending more rather than less. That is all right for the long-term but I want to see specific contracts going out now if the Government are to realise their own objectives.

The same argument applies to other public works such as reservoirs, sewerage, and many others that are directly under the Government's charge. And do not let us embarrass local authorities. Local authorities have been arguing that the only kind of programmes they can adopt are those where they get so much of the cost from the Government but have to raise the rest from the rates. This, after all, is just an accident of time. The rate support grant has been calculated, has been passed through Parliament, and cannot be amended. As things are, therefore, local authorities will find that while their expenditure will now be higher, they will not get the compensation through the rate support grant for undertaking these schemes which, in other circumstances, they would get. The Minister should promise that in the next rate support grant order there will be money compensation in the first year for the expenditure incurred but not paid through the support grant in this current financial year and in the next.

Meantime, there is a certain irritation among local authorities about this question. Perhaps this is why unemployment is steadily rising in the building trades. Yet the Government are supposed to be encouraging the new house building programme. It has fallen by 16 per cent. of the June, 1970, figure. We are supposed to be embarked upon the best housing improvement schemes in double quick time. The coming into operation of the new Act has deliberately been spaced over two years to take up unemployment. Therefore, judged by the Government's own policy and by yesterday's figures, it is not working.

Hon. Members will agree that I am not arguing an exclusively partisan case. I am arguing also about bad administration. Perhaps the truth is that the Government are not trying. If they do not pull up their socks and make their declared policies work, no one will believe them.

I welcome the little that has been announced by the Government about remedying unemployment, but the proposed action is not enough. I want to see more done quickly.

This debate will have been of some use if these two Ministers, whose presence we welcome, will impress upon their colleagues in the Government the need to make Tuesday's debate significant, not only in that present measures will be supported with fact but also that substantial future measures will be announced. If the Ministers do not do that, they will fail as Ministers. If they do that and their colleagues do not listen to them, they should take my advice and leave the Government. This is a Government which, if they allow this situation to drift further, will go down in history as the Government of neglect of the common people.

I welcome the chance to make a brief intervention in this debate. I congratulate the hon. Member for Fife, West (Mr. William Hamilton) on his assiduity or whatever it was which enabled him to secure this Adjournment debate. The present unemployment situation is the most vital and catastrophic situation which has faced the country for many years, if not since the end of the last War.

I need not repeat the sombre and disturbing picture painted by previous speakers of the present situation in Scotland. Suffice it to say that today's Glasgow Herald has pointed out that the figure of unemployment in Scotland is now 120 per cent. beyond the limit of the tolerance which was laid down by Beveridge.

I do not wish to be an apologist for the present Government, but I realise that the unemployment level had started to rise under the Labour Government. However, what is disturbing and unacceptable is the way in which this Government are standing by with apparent indifference and apathy. In the light of the progressively worsening situation in Scotland, the Government's attitude makes fiddling while Rome burns look like a fairly rational way of passing the time.

It has been said that this Tory Government resemble more than anything else the Tory Governments of the 1920s and the 1930s. There is great substance in that charge. However, there is one difference. Just as the second World War could not have been fought by the methods used during the first World War, because the people would not have stood for a repetition of the Battles of the Somme and Passchendaele, so the Government will find that, if the situation is allowed to drift, people will not stand for a repetition of what the Tory Government said in the 1920s and the 1930s. The Government should be warned now before the matter becomes any worse.

The Government say that increasing unemployment is due to increases in wages. This silly canard should end as regards Scotland. According to official figures. Scotland has lower average wages than the whole of Britain and double the unemployment; so there is nothing in that tale. There is nothing in it even in an English context.

I regard myself as being mote entitled to speak on unemployment than is any other hon. Member. There is 25 per cent. unemployment in my constituency, though I do not claim that hon. Members who represent constituencies with unemployment levels of 6 per cent. or 8 per cent. are not having a hard time. Scotland is on the way to a level such that, if it ever got halfway to it, the Government would be swept aside by methods which would be unacceptable to all of us.

There are several places in Scotland known to me, and no doubt known to Ministers, where huge quantities of bricks are piling up, where bricklayers are on the dole, and where there are waiting lists for houses. Is it beyond the wit of the Government to marry these three factors and to get something done about unemployment and housing at the same time?

I will not go into details as to what the Government could do. As Sir Winston Churchill said, what I am demanding is that the Government address their minds to the point and take the necessary action. This situation cannot continue for much longer. The Government must grasp this nettle now and ensure that action is taken to end the appalling catastrophe facing the unemployed in Scotland.

I am glad to have the opportunity to take part in this debate. The hon. Member for the Western Isles (Mr. Donald Stewart) has rightly drawn our attention to the gravity of the situation in his part of Scotland. Because the vast bulk of the population of Scotland lives in the central belt, we tend sometimes to forget just how serious the problem is up there. It was therefore appropriate that the hon. Member was able to take part in this debate.

I add my congratulations to those which have been tendered to my hon. Friend the Member for Fife, West (Mr. William Hamilton) on the ability and constant vigilance which enabled him to obtain this Adjournment debate. As my hon. Friend said, our overriding responsibility as Scottish Members must be to expose the Government's policies, constantly to attack the Government for their relative indifference to the unemployment position and, if possible, to drive the Government from office. On this issue the Government are massively unpopular in Scotland.

We know the figures. They have been referred to by my hon. Friend the Member for Fife, West and by others. It is interesting to see the extent to which hon. Members from the West Midlands and from the South-East are now raising the problem of unemployment. A comparison of their unemployment figures with ours does more than anything to bring home the present tragic situation in Scotland.

In passing, perhaps I may mention the position in Edinburgh. There was a time when Edinburgh was much more prosperous than the rest of Scotland. Indeed, when the last Government decided not to include Edinburgh within the Scottish development area, although I was not happy with the decision at that time, I could see some justification for it, because the employment situation in Edinburgh was much better than in the rest of Scotland. In fact, it was comparable with that in the United Kingdom as a whole. The people of Edinburgh, although not happy about it, could see the argument then. But that argument has gone.

I want to drive home to the Under-Secretary of State—I hope that he will impress it upon his right hon. Friends—that male unemployment in the Edinburgh area is now 7 per cent. By no stretch of the imagination can it now be said that Edinburgh is such a prosperous area that it should be given treatment different from that given to the rest of Scotland. At the absolute minimum, we must now be included in the development area.

The response and attitude of the Secretary of State for Scotland to this issue has been rather surprising. He does not seem to be aware of the changed situation. It is not enough to say that part of Edinburgh has been given intermediate area status. Let Ministers talk to their own friends in Edinburgh, to the Chamber of Commerce, and the like. They will soon hear what their friends think about the present discrimination against Edinburgh.

On the central issue, the Government try to make out that the present level of unemployment is not their fault. At the beginning, they said that it was the Labour Government's fault. Then they told us that it was the unions' fault Neither of those excuses were true, and they are so plainly untrue now that the Government can no longer kid the public.

When they came to power, this Government had two overriding considerations in their economic policy. First, they would win the battle against inflation by damping down the economy, by not allowing it to expand. They took a deliberate decision to try to contain wage inflation by creating and maintaining a high level of unemployment. We know that. The Chancellor of the Exchequer did not use those words, but, casting our minds back to his Budget, we recall the effect of what he said and did.

Many of us on this side argued that what the Chancellor was doing was not enough, that we must have more expansion, but he and the economic experts in the right-wing quality papers said that the Government could not afford to do that, that it would encourage more wage increases which would lead to more inflation.

That argument was not accepted by the trade union movement, and industrialists I spoke to did not accept it, either. They did not for a moment believe that by creating unemployment the Government could contain wage inflation. In fact, by holding down production, they made it harder for industrialists to cover their costs because, with production cut down, and with the same overheads, it was almost unavoidable that industrialists would have to pass on wage increases by putting up prices.

But the Government were trying to force the workers to accept a cut in their standard of living. They insisted that they accept increases of less than 10 per cent., which obviously meant a cut in their standard of life. They wanted to intimidate the workers in an effort to solve the inflation problem. That is why we have a such a serious situation now.

The second major economic policy consideration in the Government's mind was their obsession with the need to cut the level of public expenditure. They have gone back on that to some extent, but the fact remains that the most important policy documents which the Government published were their forward estimates of public expenditure. One can see it in almost every issue one cares to read. I was speaking this week at a meeting of scientists some of whom work at Government research stations. They are affected by this philosophy. The Government's housing policy is part of the same philosophy—the need to cut public expenditure. Virtually every sector of the economy is affected by the Government's obsession to cut the level of public expenditure, which means reducing the level of demand, reducing the number of jobs, and putting people on the dole.

My hon. Friend the Member for Fife, West was right to point out the absolute nonsense of the Government's legislation and their plans for Scotland in the context of the problems which we now face. I recall that the Secretary of State had a piece in the Scotsman six months or more ago, at the time when we were debating education in Scotland. He was speaking not about education but about the Scottish economy, and one of his arguments about how he would help the Scottish economy was that he would give freedom to the local authorities to do what they liked in education, and that this would encourage people to come to Scotland. We have heard this before. The idea is that, with fee-paying schools in Edinburgh, business executives will want to come in and run new industries.

The House will recall the Education (Scotland) Bill, that total irrelevance. My right hon. Friend the Member for Kilmarnock (Mr. Ross) referred to it last night. Incidentally, if all the Labour councillors had been in their places when the crucial vote was taken in the Edinburgh council, we should not have had fee paying in Edinburgh, and all the hours of work and effort which the Scottish Office put into that irrelevant Measure would have been nullified. As it happens, however, it looks as though we shall have some fee paying in a few schools. But look at all the effort that the Scottish Office and the House put into that Bill and compare it with what is needed to tackle our present problems.

Today—the Scotsman makes it very clear—school milk is to be the Government's big issue in Scotland. They intend to force Midlothian and other local authorities to stop giving school milk to young children. This is to be their next big diversion to take attention away from unemployment.

The Government's whole philosophy is a disaster for the people of Scotland. We have the most divisive Government since the 1930s, a Government obsessed with the need to sell off chunks of public enterprise to their friends. That is what it comes to. It is government by gangsterism. The first thing they did was to sell off the State breweries to the private breweries. Now, it is commercial radio. Next week, we shall have legislation providing for the sale of Thomas Cook & Son.

The Government's excuse amounts to this: "We are sorry about unemployment, but we have done a lot. We have been taking action". They have produced three inadequate Budgets. They have created the Scottish special development area. This will have very little impact. Everyone knows that, unless there is economic expansion, it cannot have much impact, and it is no good citing that as a big move to help Scottish employment.

The winter works programme is welcome, but it is only a matter of the Government's going back a little on their basic philosophy of cutting public expenditure. It is not just a winter works programme; it stretches into next year. It is nothing great. The Government have simply decided that they cannot go ahead as quickly as they would like with cutting public expenditure. They have been forced by economic circumstances to let up a bit. The jobs provided are only temporary.

There are two big issues on which the Government could take decisions now to help the Scottish economy. The first concerns Hunterston. It is all very well for the Government to say, "It is up to the British Steel Corporation", or, "It is up to this or that body. We are prepared to give planning permission." The fact is that they have already intervened more in the activities of the British Steel Corporation than previous Governments did. They have become responsible for the Corporation's investment programme. If the Government made up their mind that the unemployment position in Scotland was so disastrous that we must get the Corporation's investment in Hunterston, we would get it. The Government have only to take that political decision. They need not kid themselves or try to pretend to us that it is something to be decided by the Corporation, independent of them. At the end of the day it will be a political decision. If we could bring home to the Government the gravity of the situation, they could respond by saying, "All right. We are going ahead with Hunterston flat out", and they could tell the Corporation that.

The second issue is North Sea oil, on which an interesting debate was obtained by my hon. Friend the Member for Clackmannan and East Stirlingshire (Mr. Douglas). The most striking thing about the debate was the appalling concluding speech by the Under-Secretary, whose whole approach was to say, "This is happening. This is the way it would work. We welcome what the Scottish Council and the Aberdeen Corporation are doing. We are glad that some Scottish capital has become involved."

Let me give a small example of the hon. Gentleman's approach from near the end of his speech. It is a small point, but it is symptomatic of the Government's whole approach. In replying to the debate, the Under-Secretary of State said:

"The question of the supply of pipes has been mentioned. This, of course, is a matter for the oil industry and the pipe producers in the light of commercial circumstances but I know that the British Steel Corporation has had difficulties in supplying pipes of the required specifications. It is working strenuously to overcome those difficulties in the face of strong overseas competition."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 8th November, 1971; Vol. 825, c. 799.]

According to the Government, this is a matter for the oil industry and the pipe producers, nothing to do with the Government.

The Government have failed abysmally with North Sea oil. They have responsibility for evolving a strategy and they should be taking charge. I do not mean that they should put in all the capital, but they should decide how to exploit North Sea oil to the best advantage of the Scottish people and how to get the maximum amount of investment in Scotland. But they are standing back and saying that the things which are happening have nothing to do with them, when they should get in and take the lead.

It is not just the Labour movement which is saying this about Hunterston and North Sea oil; the industrialists have completely lost confidence. They want a lead from the Government and, if they could get a lead, they would follow with investment. The main indictment in Scotland of the Government is that they are always saying, "It is their responsibility and nothing to do with us."

An example much closer to the Under-Secretary of State who will be replying to the debate is the sugar beet factory at Cupar. The hon. Gentleman will, no doubt, say that the Labour Government took this decision. My Government did take the decision, although I did not agree with it at the time and said so. But we have come a long way since then. A private consortium wanted to take over the factory. The appalling situation in Scotland now bears no comparison with the position when the Labour Government took their decision, although I am not trying to defend that decision.

The basic case for retaining the sugar production was the agricultural case. But we cannot now afford to lose a single job in Scotland. Quite a number of jobs are involved here, not just in the factory but in ancillary undertakings related to sugar beet. What is the Government's approach? Again, they are standing back when they should intervene and see that this sugar beet production proposal goes ahead and is viable, at least in the short term. They have the power to do this if they want to, but they are not prepared to intervene.

Would my hon. Friend care to comment briefly on this point? It is alleged that the B.S.C. is asking for almost £750,000 for the factory in Cupar, whereas the Plessey Works, with much more sophisticated machinery, were sold for £600,000.

That is a good point. That is the bone of contention in the negotiations between the British Sugar Corporation and the private consortium. There is no doubt that the Government could sort this out, but it is part of their non-intervention philosophy not to do so. The agricultural industry in Scotland is appalled at the way in which the Scottish Office has handled this issue.

I come to what I think the Government should do to help the position. First, there should be a freeze on redundancies in the public sector. This will involve difficulties. Neither British Rail nor the National Coal Board will like being told that it cannot reduce the number of jobs. The British Steel Corporation will not like being told that it cannot put any more men out of work while unemployment is at the present level.

Of course there will be difficulties, but this issue is so serious in terms of the misery and hardship it causes that there must be intervention. We must not think of unemployment only in terms of figures. We must think of it in terms of the hundreds of thousands of men in their late 50s who have been made unemployed and who have little hope of ever working again. We must also consider the younger men who have been subjected for the first time in their lives to the demoralisation of being in the dole queue. Many young people are permanently scarred by the fact that on leaving school they find that society has no place for them; they are sometimes unemployed for a year until they finally get their first job.

The Government must take a decision right away. They are intervening in the nationalised industries to tell them to hold their prices, and they realise the difficulty of British Rail in trying to stick to a figure of 5 per cent. in relation to costs. Therefore, they can intervene on this issue if they are prepared to face up to the problem of unemployment.

The Government's decision to replace investment grants by tax allowances has been an absolute failure. This is not a partisan point since the great majority of industrialists in Britain believe we should carry on with investment grants.

indicated dissent—

The hon. Gentleman disagrees with that, but I am convinced that the majority of Scottish industrialists are in favour of grants as opposed to allowances. We have already put forward all the arguments on this matter, but the Government have not assessed the situation to see whether allowances will help to ease the situation. The Government took a crude, doctrinaire decision. If they now decide to change their minds and to stick to grants rather than allowances they will not be running any political risk. It would show that they were prepared to put the solving of this problem before their pride.

Thirdly, they could double the regional employment premium in Scotland and continue it for a longer period. Many of us may have reservations about the premium, but we now have a disaster situation and it would help if the premium were doubled and were allowed to continue until at least 1978. The Government may not be fond of such an approach and I have had slight reservations about the premium; but in the present situation it would help the employment position and therefore they ought to do something about it.

My fourth point is that they should grant special development area status to the whole of Scotland. They could also give the maximum encouragement to firms to come to Scotland, no matter where they wished to go. This is surely relevant when we realise that there is high unemployment all over Scotland. I have given the figure in Edinburgh, a so-called prosperous area, where male unemployment amounts to 7 per cent.

The Government should also institute a public works programme and make changes such as have been suggested to the Minister in this debate. Let us get away from the idea of a winter works programme. It was never all that successful in creating jobs when Labour were in power. Let us go for a big, sustained policy of public expenditure on the construction of roads in Scotland. We have a fantastic slack in the building industry in Scotland which will not be taken up merely by a winter works programme.

Thousands of building workers are unemployed in the Edinburgh area including electricians, joiners and other craftsmen, and the unemployment figures do not apply only to building labourers. These skilled men in Edinburgh could be used to clear the slum areas and to create new houses, to build new hospitals, and to rebuild the atrocious school buildings which need to be tackled. The Government are allowing these men to stay on the dole when the country is crying out for buildings which they could construct. One does not have to be a Socialist to believe that there is something wrong with a system which can allow that to happen.

My next point relates to investment which has already been mentioned by my hon. Friend the Member for Greenock (Dr. Dickson Mabon) and is a subject I raised in Scottish Questions earlier this week. Winter works programmes are all very well, and we welcome anything that we can get. We want anything that will give us a few jobs in the short term, but if we want new permanent jobs in Scotland we must have a massive upsurge in the level of investment in Scotland.

The Government can control the nationalised industries. They can say, "We shall support you. Invest." I have referred to Hunterston, but there are many other ways in which the Government can use the nationalised industries in Scotland massively to increase the level of investment in Scotland and thus create jobs. I hope that we shall get something along these lines. It would appear from the Press reports that the Government are coming round to this thinking. We hammered away for a winter works programme because it was better than nothing: we asked for the small thing first. We have that. We are now hammering away for a massive increase in investment in the nationalised industries in Scotland, and I hope that we shall get it. I trust that the Government will respond to that plea more quickly than they responded to the last plea.

There was a series of interesting articles in the Scotsman about three weeks ago on the regional problem in Scotland. I wish to make two points on it. First, if we are to solve Scotland's regional problem we must have tight controls on expansion in the rest of Britain. If the Government get the expansion which they talk about getting in the Midlands and other areas, they must be prepared to operate strict controls on industrial expansion. One of the articles in the Scotsman was by a man called John Donnachy. I assume he is not a Labour man; he is associated with a private firm. He made the point that the only time that we in Scotland have had a large share of industrial investment in the United Kingdom was between 1945 and 1950, when we had 20 per cent. of new investment in Britain.

Mr. Donnachy concluded that on the basis of what had happened, much as industry talks about the need for a carrot to get expansion in the regions, we also need a big bit of stick. The problem is that this is alien to the Government's philosophy. Their philosophy is to stand back and let big business get on with it. They say, "Let them make profits. People can come next." They put profits before people. They had better start thinking of changing that philosophy. If they do something about helping private investment in Scotland, they had better be prepared to tighten their approach to industrial development certificates.

The Government should be more flexible in getting involved in specific deals. The Southern Ireland Government have been enterprising in this respect. They are prepared to select industries and say, "We think you can contribute something to the country, so we shall help you to do it." People object to this, saying that it is not fair. There is a stereotyped reaction from private enterprise, which says "You should not single this lot out." Jobs are important, and private industry has no right to expect everything to be made easy for it.

Industry exists to serve the people. If it is in the interests of the people, the Government should be more prepared to do specific deals with industry, as local authorities such as Midlothian have been doing in Scotland. There are people in local authorities who are on good terms with industry, but they are limited in what they can do to help. The Government could adopt the approach I have suggested; it would be feasible.

This is a debate on Scottish unemployment. My hon. Friend the Member for Fife, West was quite right when he said that we must keep hammering away at the Government on this issue. Indeed, we would debate this matter every day if we had the chance, because this is the issue in Scotland which transcends in importance all the other issues together.

A junior Minister, speaking in England somewhere—I am not sure what the local unemployment situation was there—said that people are getting too obsessed with unemployment. What a commentary that was on that Minister's approach to this social problem.

We, in Scotland, are obsessed with unemployment. We are obsessed with the need to get the Government to pursue policies which will solve that problem. We are obsessed with the need to rid this country of a Government who are addicted to their private enterprise philosophy, their free enterprise doctrinaire approach, of, "Stand back and let industry do what it likes." Profits before people; this is where it has got us. It is our responsibility to get them out as quickly as we can. I hope that this debate will succeed in making a small contribution to doing just that.

I, too, congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Fife, West (Mr. William Hamilton) on his assiduous attention to matters of interest in his constituency and, indeed, in Britain by raising this subject today. I sincerely hope that he will not mind an English Member intervening in what is really a Scottish debate. I hope that he will understand that my connection with and interest in Scotland is not only that I have a Scottish Lowland name. I assure him that people in the South of England have an interest in what is happening in Scotland. It is extremely serious, because what is happening in Scotland affects the whole country. I am glad, therefore, that he has raised this matter, and I hope to show a relationship between what is happening in Scotland and the rest of the country.

I take, for example, my constituency, Swindon. There was a time when people could with confidence move from various parts of Scotland to Swindon and be assured of a house and a job. We welcomed people from Scotland. The diversity of accents in the town makes it a far more interesting and lively place.

But what is the situation now? We can still offer people houses in Swindon, although, after two years of Tory local government, they have to wait 18 months instead of six weeks. Nevertheless, eventually we can offer people houses. What we cannot do—I regret this very much—is to offer them jobs.

Taking account of the numbers on short-time working in Swindon, there are 20 men looking for one job. Even if we do not take into account men on short-time working, there are in Swindon, which is in the south of the country, 16 men looking for one job. So we have this relationship between what happens in Scotland and what happens in England.

Swindon also has the British Rail workshop—

Order. I do not want to be unduly restrictive, but there is to be a general debate on unemployment next Tuesday. I considered carefully the rule about anticipation but decided that a debate on unemployment in Scotland would be in order. The hon. Gentleman should be careful how far he goes.

Yes, Mr. Speaker. I was about to relate that situation to the position in Scotland. Swindon has a connection with Scotland in that we, too, are tied up with the policy adopted by British Railways and the proposed closure of the Barassie Works. As in Scotland, the people of Swindon are faced with the prospect of between 800 and 1,000 redundancies. The situation at Barassie and in Swindon has arisen because of the Government's attitude to the nationalised industries generally, and the railways in particular. If the Government want to assist, they can help the Railways Board with its cash flow problems and enable the works to which I have referred to be kept open and work at full stretch on renewing wagons and locomotives which ought to be repaired.

There can be no doubt that the position in Scotland is serious indeed. I agree with my hon. Friends that the situation there could have been avoided had the right measures been taken at the right time, but the Government have been so obsessed with cutting back public enterprise works and allowing the market to do the job that they have failed to take the necessary action.

During the General Election people were told that if public expenditure were reduced everything in the garden would be wonderful. They were told that they would be able to get tax reliefs, and be able to do what they liked with their money. Many people have received tax relief. Many of them who are now on the dole do not pay any tax at all, and I suppose in that respect the Government's policy has worked.

Until the Government get rid of their doctrinaire approach to public expenditure they will never be able to run the economy on the basis of full employment, because it is from investment in the public sector—which is a vital and important sector of the economy—that activity generally is generated. Until the Government get rid of their doctrinaire approach to publicly-owned industries, and to public works generally, they will not be able to deal with the problem of unemployment.

I join my hon. Friends in appealing to the Ministers concerned to go back to the Cabinet and say that the Government must change their direction and be prepared to make money available for greater investment in public industries, and in works which are urgently needed all over the country, not only in Scotland. There are bad school buildings. There are bad hospitals. There are bad roads. There are all kinds of public works which need to be done, and now, when there are nearly one million people unemployed, is the time for these works to be carried out.

If that were done, two problems could be solved at once. Men and women now out of work would have a job to do, and at the same time we should get rid of public squalor. What is more, we should get rid of the fear and uncertainty of people now in industry that tomorrow they may be out of a job. I sincerely hope that that action will be taken.

I have only one or two more comments to make, because I understand that the House wishes to rise fairly shortly.

Order. It is not so much that, but the hon. Member has been rather out of order; perhaps he would continue for just a moment or two.

I think that my hon. Friends have taken the right course all the way along, and in particular in their call for a General Election and in their support for Mr. Victor Feather's call for an election. I hope that that call will soon be answered.

I am very glad to be able to answer this debate. One of the reasons why I am doing so is that my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary of State for Develpoment, Scottish Office, who normally deals with these subjects, is on a visit to West Germany with representatives of the Scottish Council. That demonstrates the kind of initiative the Government are taking to make sure that not only within Britain but also overseas the attractions of Scotland as a place in which to invest are fully brought home to those who may wish to take up investment opportunities.

I pay particular tribute to the work of Lord Taylor, who is leading the mission, and I am sure that I speak for everyone with a genuine interest in bringing new work to Scotland when I wish the mission every possible success. It demonstrates the kind of initiative the Government are taking to deal with the problem of the future strength of the Scottish economy.

On a personal note, may I extend on behalf of the House our sympathy to the hon. Member for Greenock (Dr. Dickson Mabon) on the accident in his constituency earlier today. He is not present now, but we should also like to extend through him our sympathy to the relatives of those who lost their lives and to the injured.

I do not begrudge the hon. Member for Fife, West (Mr. William Hamilton) the opportunity to bring the subject of unemployment before the House today. He is always very assiduous in taking opportunities to raise matters. I am pleased that he raised this subject, because it is one of concern not only to himself and his hon. Friends but equally to the Government and all on this side of the House. I am glad to have the opportunity to answer some of the hon. Gentleman's points.

We have been entertained to a characteristic degree of overstatement in much of what the hon. Gentleman said. In many ways he painted a lurid and subjective picture not entirely borne out by the facts of Scotland today, and showed a considerable lack of accuracy. I felt that I was listening to him in his capacity as a professional purveyor of woe; everything appears to be wrong, and nothing is ever right. That is not the kind of image of Scotland that I and those of us who believe in its future want to go out from Scotland, and it is not a true image. Whilst the present situation is worrying, the future picture is not the dismal picture that the hon. Gentleman tried to paint.

The hon. Member for Greenock spoke much more temperately. He pointed out some directions in which he thought the Government should take action, but he did not paint anything like the dismal picture of his hon. Friend.

The hon. Member for Edinburgh, East (Mr. Strang) raised many topics, and tried to suggest a large catalogue of solutions. Almost every one of his solutions would involve direct Government intervention.

What else is required?

From the philosophical point of view, he adduced totally and completely Socialist solutions in every possible respect, and that will be obvious to any who may read the OFFICIAL REPORT of his remarks.

I was glad that the hon. Member for the Western Isles (Mr. Donald Stewart) took part in the debate because I appreciate his concern for, and the problems of, his constituency. I visited the area last summer and saw for myself at first hand many of the difficulties his area is facing.

While, on the one hand, he knows that the biggest single problem is the general recession in the tweed industry, on the other he is fair-minded enough to admit that in certain respects there are some encouraging signs in his constituency. I saw these when I was there in the summer. I have in mind developments in, for example, fish processing and small industrial activities like seaweed processing, and fishing generally. While I do not belittle the problems his constituents face, it is clear that individuals in the area are showing a considerable degree of initiative. In other words, the situation is not one of unmitigated gloom.

The hon. Member for Edinburgh, East said that the Government were indifferent to the problems of unemployment. That is poppycock. We are by no means indifferent to them. We are particularly concerned about them, as I will show by citing some of the actions that we have taken. We have put in train steps which are in the long-term interest of Scotland in coping with some of these problems.

The hon. Gentleman raised, I suggest in an unfair way, the problems of the Edinburgh area. I recognise that problems exist, but if the hon. Gentleman is to be fair he must recognise that the roots of many of those problems rest with the former Labour Government, particularly in their attitude towards the status of the area and the help it should receive.

One example of this is an incident in the area next to where I live. In this area a paper mill has had to go into liquidation in the last two weeks. When it carried out its modernisation programme some years ago it was the only paper mill at that time not in a development area. It did not qualify for the help that it would have got had it been in a designated area. However, I hope that as a result of the negotiations that have been taking place in this instance some good will emerge and that the future will not be gloomy. That is only one example of a problem the roots of which go back to the Labour Administration.

A paper mill in my constituency closed and more than 300 jobs were lost. Its closure had nothing to do with development area status but with E.F.T.A. ending the tariff on imports of paper. The hon. Gentleman knows this and it is wrong of him to try to make out that the Labour Government were to blame. In any event, if he complains about our not giving development area status to the area which he has been speaking, does he intend to give it that status?

A combination of factors will affect any industry. We appreciate the difficulties being faced by the paper industry as a result of the E.F.T.A. action. Nevertheless, it does not help if a paper mill must carry out a big modernisation programme without help and at the same time bear the other burdens which were laid on it by the then Labour Government. Since we came to power we have altered the status of this area. We may not have gone as far as the hon. Gentleman would like, but we have moved considerably in the right direction—and the hon. Gentleman has admitted that he regards this as the right direction.

The hon. Member for Fife, West condemned the policies which, he claimed, had led to unemployment. If he chooses to talk on that basis, he must accept that the same charge can be laid against the former Labour Government. We do not change economic policy overnight. The seeds of many of the problems, the harvest we have had to reap over the last few months and the harvest being suffered by the unemployed in Scotland, by no means can he laid at our door, but they can be found in the policies of the previous Labour Government. I only wish that the hon. Gentleman had been more vociferous in debates of this nature under his Government in condemning the policies which have led to this situation. I deplore unemployment just as much as he does.

It is absolutely untrue—I refute it at once—that all the unemployment in Scotland today is due to this Government alone. Many of the problems that have emerged since the hon. Gentleman's party relinquished office were problems of his party's making. When we look at what the situation was earlier—I want this to be on the record—and at any question of a slowdown in the rate of economic growth and the development of the economy, we have to look at it historically and examine what happened under the Labour Government. The Labour Party took power in 1964 and the national growth rate, which had been 3·8 per cent. per annum in the six-year period up to 1964 under the previous Conservative Government, was reduced to 2·3 per cent. in the period 1964 to 1970. By the time we took office in 1970, that rate had dropped to 1·7 per cent. When we look at it in relation to the number of new jobs—this is the hon. Gentleman's particular charge and he made no attempt to admit this in any sense—in the period 1960 to 1964 we saw in Scotland a net gain of 30,000 jobs, but in the period 1966 to 1969, despite all the promises made by the Government of the time, there was a net loss of jobs of 45,000. It does not lie in the mouths of hon. Gentlemen opposite to make the kinds of criticism that they have made today.

I do not say that in any attempt to minimise the seriousness of what has happened in the last year, but simply to set the record straight. The record is clear. There were major economic problems facing us when we entered office which hon. Gentlemen opposite would have had to face had they been returned to power. We were faced by wage inflation and low growth in the economy, and many other serious matters which we have endeavoured to tackle at their roots.

It is abundantly clear to everyone that we can never have healthy growth, either in Scotland or in other development areas, until the economy as a whole is in a much better state. Our priorities over the last one-and-a-half years have been to get the national economy moving again, to provide a basis and support for healthy and profitable economic growth in Scotland, and to do everything possible to make additional employment available in the short term by authorising additional expenditure on public works. If hon. Gentlemen opposite would only look objectively, instead of subjectively, at what the Government have done to attain these goals, they will see that we have taken firm action in all these directions.

I reject absolutely the charge that we have done nothing to tackle the problems with which we have been faced. Looking at the national scene, prosperity for Scotland and other development areas can be based only on a sound national economy with which we can achieve expansion at a satisfactory rate. In the last 18 months we have shown that we can tackle inflation, and there are solid grounds for believing that we are having some success.

Let us look at what my right hon. Friend the Chancellor of the Exchequer has done. I do not pour on it the scorn poured on it by hon. Members opposite, nor do many people outside. We have had two cuts in corporation tax, totalling 5 per cent. Restrictions on bank credit have been relaxed. Bank rate has been cut twice, and is now at its lowest level for nearly seven years. Income tax has been reduced. Selective employment tax—that pernicious tax which drained the strength from the Scottish economy—has been halved and we have promised to abolish it by 1973. In July, my right hon. Friend announced a whole range of measures—which I am glad to say, in fairness, some hon. Members opposite welcomed—which will stimulate the economy.

All these are positive steps, welcomed by the country though for which hon. Members opposite may have been ungrateful because they are steps which in the long run will help to put the Scottiwh economy on a much stronger basis. What we have to do is to get the Scottish economy to a stage where industrialists can again, as they did before under Tory Government, contemplate expansion, and realise that capacity for growth which we believe exists in this country.

Turning now—

What about the short term?

I will come to the short term, if the hon. Gentleman will have patience. I have said that I wanted to deal with the country as a whole and then with what we have done by way of regional policy, and I will be pleased to deal in conclusion with what we have done in the short term.

We have a record of regional policy about which I am not in the least ashamed to speak here, because it is a policy which has been generally welcomed, which will prove to have been the right policy, and which will have good results. We have implemented this policy in many different ways. We have increased rates of building grants for new factories and extensions. These grants are now as high as 45 per cent. We are continuing indefinitely the 40 per cent. initial allowance for new industrial building. Had this not been done, the allowance would have been due to revert to 15 per cent. next spring. We are making much more flexible use of the powers to make loans—this is very important to new industry coming to Scotland—under the Local Employment Acts, and the powers under the same Acts to give grants towards basic infrastructure services and for clearing derelict land, a subject in which I know the hon. Member for Fife, West is interested.

We have introduced a system of free depreciation for various purposes in the development areas. This enables the whole expenditure on new plant and machinery to be written off in the year in which it is purchased. If free depreciation cannot be used against current profit it can be carried back against trading profits for the three previous years—another flexible measure—and allowances can be carried forward to later years.

One of the most important things we have done in regional terms is to extend free depreciation to the service industries in the development areas. These industries were always regarded by the Labour Government as the poor relations in industry, yet anyone who has studied the Scottish economy or lived in it as I have had to knows that the service industries are one of the major strengths of the Scottish economy. What we have done in this one respect has been to give encouragement to one of the most important sectors of the Scottish economy whose job creation potential was totally ignored by the Labour Party.

In all this we have demonstrated our aim of linking aid for industry far more closely to the creation of employment, and at the same time we have made it absolutely clear that we shall continue to operate firmly the use of industrial development certificate control on the location of industry so that as the growth of the national economy gets under way again, the needs of the development areas, and of the special development areas in particular, are fully recognised.

In addition, we have made West Central Scotland a special development area with the strongest package of inducements to attract new jobs that has ever been offered. We should be given much more credit for doing that than hon. Members have been prepared to give us. I have already mentioned the extension of intermediate status to Edinburgh.

We have backed up all these measures with the increase in Government support for training and retraining efforts. I am glad that my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary of State for Employment is listening to this debate. The question of training and retraining is fundamental if we are to have the right work force with the right skills for the future of Scotland.

The Government have direct responsibility for the acceleration of the naval shipbuilding programme in Scotland. This point was passed over very swiftly by hon. Members opposite. I do not think that hon. Members should be grudging about this. This extension is of major importance and was greatly welcomed by our shipyards in Scotland.

I turn to the question of the provision of more employment by the extension of the public works programme. On 13th July my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State first announced that local authorities and other local bodies would be encouraged to embark on additional public works in Scotland which could be started in the near future and substantially completed within 18 months. This is the critical point, because if a programme is to have impact it must take place in the reasonably near future to deal with the immediate problem.

Our estimate then was that the additional work might total about £33 million, including £8 million for roads. I was asked this afternoon about the response of the local authorities. The immediate response at that time enabled us to announce that in West Central Scotland alone the programme of road works would be £3 million more and the programme of school- and hospital-building about £7 million more than we had originally thought possible. The latest estimate of the work that we shall be approving for the whole of Scotland under this additional public works programme is £60 million.

This demonstrates the Government's concern about the situation in Scotland and the very positive action that we are taking to beat it. The response we have had from the local authorities in relation to what we have offered them does not indicate any hesitation on their part. I compliment the Scottish local authorities on their readiness to take up what the Government are offering.

It is worth noting that not one project which satisfies the criteria of starting soon and being finished by March, 1973, has been turned down. This demonstrates the Government's willingness to co-operate with local authorities to ensure that this public works programme goes forward quickly with the maximum amount of help that the Government can give.

In addition, we have increased the grants for house improvement by 50 per cent. This is an important matter, not only to those who want to improve their houses but as an injection of money and as a boost to the building industry. This is taking place over the next two years and I believe that it will do much to utilise the surplus labour in the construction industry.

In addition, we have promised Glasgow Corporation a grant of 85 per cent. of the cost of reclaiming the Queen's dock. We have told Glasgow that we are happy in principle to give a grant of three-quarters of the cost of the scheme for modernising the Glasgow underground. Glasgow Corporation has been offered help amounting to £5 million over five years for improving the amenities of the city.

This scheme has been extended to other parts of West Central Scotland and has had the effect of doubling the expenditure.

The expenditure on environmental improvement of one kind or another is not confined to the West of Scotland but extends to other areas, as I know that the hon. Member for Fife, West has in mind.

In the course of this debate I have tried to demonstrate—

Although hon. Members opposite have high-lighted the problems facing Scotland today, they have had very little to offer by way of positive remedies for the long-term future. This is not altogether surprising. At the same time, however, as I said at the outset, they have tried to paint a picture of unmitigated gloom in Scotland.

I have tried to dispel that picture. I have tried to paint a true picture by outlining what the Government are doing both in Scotland and on a national basis to put the economy on sounder lines. For example, there are our tax reduction policies, for which hon. Members opposite give no credit whatever. What we have done in regional policy demonstrates that we are a party of positive action. Moreover, as I have explained again, the Government have injected a huge amount of money into Scotland through the public works programme, and this also will assist in solving our present problem.

It comes very ill from the hon. Member for Fife, West, in particular, to make the comments he did about our public works programme, since in answer to a Question which he put to my right hon. Friend earlier this month he was given a detailed programme, local authority by local authority and class of expenditure by class of expenditure, which even he cannot call unambitious.

Chicken-feed.

My goodness!—it takes something to feed the hon. Gentleman. It shows how greedy he is. But perhaps that is not surprising.

I am above all concerned that it should not go out from the House that there is such a gloomy situation in Scotland that, when the national economy improves again, and we have the results of the initiative taken by my hon. Friend in Germany, for example, to get new investment coming to Scotland, people will think that Scotland is not a good place to invest in, that it is a country which has lost its confidence and does not know where it is going.

That is totally untrue. We have every confidence where we are going. The whole picture is not gloomy. I remind the House of the number of firms which have opened in Scotland in recent months, at Irvine, for example, and the other plans for new building. There are the discoveries of oil off our coasts which are having a substantial effect on the East Coast ports and the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Ross and Cromarty (Mr. Gray). There are enormous developments which are bringing jobs and opportunities which we in Scotland are glad to take up.

This is not a record of inaction. What I have said today gives the lie to the charge that the Government are not concerned about the high level of unemployment. Of course, we realise the personal hardships which the global figures conceal, but the measures we have taken show our determination to get the national economy and the Scottish economy moving again on a path of sustained growth.

We have every confidence in the long-term future of Scotland. What worries me is that the hon. Gentleman seems to imply, because we complain a great deal about the level of unemployment in Scotland, that we are somehow making things worse. It is our responsibility to do all we can to persuade the Government to do more. All we are asking is that the Government do more. We are not trying to make the situation worse. On the contrary, we are doing everything we can to help.

The hon. Gentleman has now made his third speech this afternoon. I am sure that he is sincere in his views, but if he believes that the kind of language he used does any good to the people of Scotland, including his own constituents, I suggest that he thinks again, and very deeply. We can do without that kind of thing in Scotland if we believe, as I do, that Scotland in the future will be a place of opportunity.