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

The Bill is simple in its purpose and I trust that my speech will also be simple. What I am asking the House to agree to do is to allow the recruitment of women to the Ulster Defence Regiment.

In these enlightened days it may seem odd that a Bill is needed to remove this measure of apparent discrimination, but in the very different circumstances of 1969 the Ulster Defence Regiment Act, which set up the regiment following the Hunt Inquiry, specially excluded women.

At that time, no operational need to employ women in the regiment was foreseen. I am sure that the House will agree that the establishment of the regiment—the newest regiment in the British Army—and its success in contributing to the support of the security forces have been one of the more satisfactory features of the Northern Ireland scene during these past three years. Nevertheless, it is now clear that the exclusion of women from the regiment is a disadvantage.

There is certainly a place for them in the regiment, and if Parliament approves the Bill we shall be able to take them on. The immediate need is for women searchers to help the Ulster Defence Regiment battalions when conducting checks on people who might be carrying explosives or other arms. Since only women should search women, and we do not have enough members of the Women's Royal Army Corps or the RUC, there is a gap in our security arrangements. The object of the Bill is to enable us to close the gap.

The House needs no reminding of the acts of terrorism in Northern Ireland, but in support of the Bill I add that there is considerable evidence that women are actively engaged in such acts. They have planted bombs and have been involved in hijacking and armed robberies. Women are also known to have acted as couriers and weapon carriers for male terrorists, for example, under the guise of travelling from the South to Belfast by train for shopping. They have also been used by the Provisional IRA to plant bombs in selected targets, for example, bombs have been planted in railway stations and shops by women who have concealed the explosives on their bodies on the pretence of being pregnant.

The security forces make every effort to bring offenders to justice, and since Operation Motorman, last summer, 66 women have been charged with terrorist offences and 19 have been convicted. Four women have been served with interim custody orders and three have been detained following examination by the commissioners under the terms of the Detention of Terrorists (Northern Ireland) Order 1970.

The House will also be aware of the part played by women in luring three British soldiers to their deaths at the hands of terrorists on 23rd March. All of this, I suggest, is ample evidence of the need to strengthen the security forces in the way which will be possible when this Bill becomes law. We hope that 700 women can be recruited into the UDR to undertake these search duties. The Bill will, however, also allow us to engage other women members for other types of duty if we so wish, for example, as clerks, telephone or radio operators, and so on, thus freeing men for operational duties.

The recruitment of women will not require any amendment to the present limit of 10,000 prescribed in the Ministry of Defence Vote A (Army). Women who join the regiment will do so on the same basis as men, although they will be paid women's rates. They will primarily be recruited for part-time service, but with a liability to serve on a full-time basis during times of emergency. They will be subject to the same vetting arrangement as men applying to join the regiment.

So much for the first two subsections of Clause 1. Clause 1(3) extends to women in the UDR the advantages already given to men in the regiment—as to other Service men and women in Her Majesty's forces—by the Disabled Persons Employment Acts. These Acts provide that disabled persons who have served whole-time in the Armed Forces should he given preferential treatment for vocational training, industrial rehabilitation and assistance towards employment.

This House has frequently discussed the fortunes of the regiment since it was first formed in 1970. On all sides there has been unstinted praise for the untiring and devoted service given by members of the regiment towards maintaining security. The Bill offers similar opportunities to women in Northern Ireland to undertake duties for which they are undoubtedly needed. I ask the House to support it wholeheartedly.

The Opposition support the Bill. There is agreement on all sides that the regiment has played its part in restoring law and order. However, it is a tragedy that this step is necessary. The figures given by the Minister show that, unfortunately, women are actively engaged in terrorist activity in Northern Ireland. The figures show that 66 women were charged and 19 convicted in a limited period. That is a sad reflection on what has happened. We trust that one day, through the efforts of people in the Ulster Defence Regiment and our Armed Forces, we shall have law and order completely restored to this part of the world.

I am sure no one would deny that this is a necessary measure. Many of us remember that during the last war our women made a major contribution in the Services, and I see no reason why this little bit of discrimination should not now be removed.

The Minister said that the Bill was simple in its purpose. It is to allow the recruitment of women. He also mentioned the figure of 700 women, and I was rather surprised to see in the Explanatory and Financial Memorandum that

"One additional civilian will be employed on account of the increase in work due to the recruitment of women into the Regiment."

This is not a realistic figure. I am certain that experience will show that we shall need more than one civilian to help out.

What more can be said? The Bill is necessary. We believe in the establishment of law and order. The regiment is the youngest in the Army and has a fine record. We wish it luck. The women who will make their contribution will be helping us all.

The right hon. Member for Workington (Mr. Peart) asked "What more can one say?" Under the rules of order it would be possible to have a wide-ranging and substantial debate about internal security in Northern Ireland and the rôle which the Ulster Defence Regiment plays, or ought to play. I do not think that this ought to be the occasion for that kind of debate, but I put on record that there is a distinct need for such a debate in the near future. In the light of all the matters we have been discussing this week I believe it will be generally acknowledged that we shall have to look again, and very soon, at the methods to be employed for reducing the military commitment if we can get any kind of settlement.

This debate is useful for enabling us to put on record the intense admiration that we all have for the work of the men of the Ulster Defence Regiment. It may not always be appreciated in the calm and quiet atmosphere of this House just what kind of task these men have to perform. We greatly admire the work of the soldiers too, but in the end the Regular soldier, if he survives, and the vast majority do, returns to his home somewhere other than Northern Ireland. The members of the Ulster Defence Regiment live there among the community. They become marked men, marked by those who admire them as doing an heroic job in the defence and the security of their native land, but also marked by their enemies.

The casualties suffered by the regiment so far show that. The member of the regiment goes to his home every night, which can sometimes be in remote parts of the Province. What we owe to the members of the regiment is almost incalculable. We are now proposing to introduce women to the regiment. That is right and proper. All of us welcome the Bill.

Perhaps I may ask my hon. Friend a few questions. Can he tell us the present strength of the UDR? The latest figures I have are those of 24th January, which show that the strength was 352 officers and 8,524 soldiers. It would be interesting to know the up-to-date figures and whether, in the light of casualties and so on, recruitment is being maintained at a desirable level.

I do not believe that my hon. Friend said anything about whether there would be an officer structure for women. It would be helpful to know how the women's section will be operated. My hon. Friend said they will be used for searching women suspected of being terrorists. Can he say a little more about whether they will be employed on road patrols? Will they go out with local platoons and sections, and, if so, what protective measures will be taken? Will they be trained in the use of self-defence and will they be armed? I understand that my hon. Friend the Member for Ormskirk (Mr. Soref) will develop this question.

In another place Lord Carrington said on Second Reading:

"I cannot bring myself to believe that even those who are murdering British soldiers and members of the UDR and RUC in Northern Ireland will bring themselves to murder women of the UDR."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, House of Lords, 11th June 1973; Vol. 343, c. 386.]

I cannot share his view. Any one who has watched the indiscriminate destruction of the lives of innocent women and children in Ulster as a result of bombs callously and casually thrown without regard for human life could not possibly believe that the people who are brutally murdering UDR men will scruple to murder UDR women if they feel that it is in their interest to do so. I hope that my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary of State will make a better case for the non-arming of UDR women.

I could develop and sustain a long debate on the general subject of the employment of the UDR, but I will content myself with saying that we welcome the Bill and hope that the recruitment of women will go ahead and that the women will be available to do the job. We wish them well in the job they are being called upon to do.

I believe that this Bill is long overdue. The Ulster Defence Regiment Act 1969 failed to foresee the operational necessity of employing women. As I see it, this epitomises and underlines so much that has happened in the tragic history of Ulster, with the wishful thinking and baseless optimism which have characterised the murderous struggle.

In that context, I agree with the characteristically courageous words of the hon. and learned Member for Northampton (Mr. Paget) yesterday. We are in the throes of a struggle with an armed and international conspiracy which virtually seeks to create a Cuba-type republic on our own doorstep. It is the greatest threat that our nation has faced since Hitler.

One cannot exaggerate the threat which confronts this country and Ulster. The situation is so serious that there is no possible enormity, no killing, no murder, and no torture that hon. Members could be surprised at reading about this afternoon or tomorrow. We are almost immunised against the horror because of its frequency.

It is the intention of the IRA, both Provisional and Official, with the support that these groups receive from Communist countries, to pose a direct threat to the United Kingdom. An essential by-product of the IRA's activities is to lower the effectiveness of the Rhine Army and tie down a large part of the United Kingdom's mobile forces.

In the light of the violence, murders and bombings that have taken place, I believe that it was a cardinal error to abolish the "B" Specials. It had 11,500 men, with a superb intelligence service, and it is significant that it was a Liberal Prime Minister who, in 1920, knew what he was doing when he established that force. It was a mistake also to disarm the Royal Ulster Constabulary—for that we are paying the price. Hon. Members who have spoken have praised rightly the activities of the Ulster Defence Regiment, which has largely replaced the "B" Specials.

It is worth considering that the total complement of Ulster Defence Regiment plus the RUC at the moment is rather less than the number of police engaged in London defending the American Embassy at the time of the attack by anti-Vietnam war demonstrators. Ten thousand police were used in London for that relatively simple task. It illustrates the enormity of what is going on in Ulster and the under-strength situation of the defence forces. I endorse the words of the right hon. Member for Workington (Mr. Peart), that the added force of women is likely to prove totally inadequate for the task.

I was arguing about civilian personnel. I thought that one civilian was unrealistic, but I accept the general force.

It is my view that this force, like the total forces in Ulster, will be found to be inadequate, particularly when one considers the endurance and hardships and the provocation facing members of the Ulster Defence Regiment. My hon. and gallant Friend the Member for Down, South (Captain Orr) has indicated the trials and tribulations of these people. They have other jobs, and are a constant prey to those wild men who will stop at nothing. I have a strong feeling that the women who will be their comrades in the near future will be no less a prey.

The Ulster Defence Regiment, like Cromwell's New Model Army, "knows what it is fighting for and loves what it knows", the only difference being that it is not provided with the opportunities that it would seek of fighting back as much as it would wish. In the view of my hon. and gallant Friend the Member for Down, South, we shall need at some stage to consider the future of this regiment. It may be necessary to develop it into an anti-guerrilla intelligence force or into riot police. That necessity exists because there is a vacuum in that area in Northern Ireland.

Thirty-four members of the regiment have been killed. However, to my surprise I find that there is no division of the figures of those who have been injured. It appears that of the 1,298 Army and UDR members reported to have been injured, there is no clear demarcation. One does not know how many UDR men have been injured. These are people who have been assassinated and ambushed in their homes. Not only do they need protection themselves but their women colleagues will be in even greater need of protection because they also will be in uniform and identifiable. They, too, will be a ready target for the IRA.

The whole of the Ulster Defence Regiment not only suffers many of the disadvantages afflicting members of the Regular Armed Forces, but is confronted with additional problems. Unlike the Regular Army, its members can never take the initiative; they are a prey in front of their own homes and families. They live with their families, not in barracks, and are on duty after a day's work. They have no identifiable termination of their tour of duty. It is open-ended, unlike that of members of the Regular Forces serving in Ireland. They are an easy prey to the assassin's bullet

It is inevitable that there will be an intensification of the campaign of violence and intimidation in Northern Ireland, which certain foreign countries and the international guerrilla movement will promote. There will be additional Russian automatic weapons readily available. Therefore, one has to consider whether women should be able to bear arms and be trained in their use.

There is a great deal to be learnt from the recent experiences of the Israeli Army, in which women play a necessary and vital rôle, particularly in fighting guerrillas. The women recruits in Northern Ireland will shortly and inevitably be subjected to the most foul barbarism. They should, therefore, be protected in advance, and I ask my hon. Friend to consider this.

I strongly agree with what my hon. and gallant Friend the Member for Down, South said about promotion to the commissioned ranks. Will there be equality in the pay, pensions and conditions of the women volunteers?

The women are in a vulnerable position. This is the first war—and it is a war—in which traitors are not shot and in which forms of activity not accepted by the Geneva Convention are perpetrated by those who claim to be members, of an army fighting the legal forces. This position is exaggerated by the fact that undue concern is shown for what is called world opinion, which is a spurious and selective display more often of immoral than of moral standards. More concern should be shown for public opinion in Britain, which seeks to end this campaign of murder and destruction. This can be achieved only by ruthless action against those who are prepared to destroy our society.

I fully support the Minister in bringing forward this measure. As a back bencher and an Englishman, I always feel reluctant to intervene in debates on Northern Ireland. I am reluctant to stick my snoot in, but I feel I must do so on this occasion.

We are not here discussing guerrillas in Vietnam or the works of the Rhine Army. The hon. Member for Orsmkirk (Mr. Soref) referred to women in the Israeli Army bearing arms. That is nothing new. I remind him that during the last war, long before the Israeli Army came into existence, women fought as guerrillas in all the Nazi-occupied territories, including Yugoslavia, France, Italy, Poland and Romania. In every one of the countries occupied by the Nazis, women played their part in organising, fighting and bearing arms.

In Britain in the last war young ladies were employed in the Armed Forces on anti-aircraft guns locating aircraft. They were just as responsible for shooting down German aircraft as were the chaps who, put the shells in the Bofors guns. The idea of women bearing arms and fighting is not new.

The Ulster Defence Regiment is not like Cromwell's army. Cromwell's army was of a particular faith, whereas the Ulster Defence Regiment is open to anyone, and that is its greatest asset.

I was referring to Cromwell's New Model Army, which was not based on a single faith. I was not referring to Cromwell's army in Ireland.

The hon. Gentleman referred to Cromwell's army and compared it with the Ulster Defence Regiment.

I referred to Cromwell's New Model Army.

The Ulster Defence Regiment is open to anyone who wishes to serve the cause of peace and law and order.

The hon. and gallant Member for Down, South (Captain Orr) in referring to the present recruitment into the UDR said that there were 342 officers and 8,000 soldiers. I remind him that there are not only officers; there are warrant officers, senior and junior NCOs and privates. In differentiating between officers and other ranks the hon. and gallant Gentleman might mention the senior and junior NCOs and the warrant officers.

The hon. Member for Battersea, South (Mr. Perry) said that as an Englishman he felt reluctant to take part in debates on Northern Ireland. I assure him that hon. Members representing Northern Ireland constituencies welcome hon. Members representing constituencies in Great Britain taking part in debates on the problems in the Province. Indeed, we should be glad to welcome them on visits to Northern Ireland to help them to understand better what is happening over there. I know that the hon. Member for Battersea, South approaches every problem with an open mind and with great reasonableness.

I reiterate what the hon. Gentleman said about the Ulster Defence Regiment being open to anyone who wishes to serve the cause of law and order. I hope that there will be a ready response to this new venture of opening the UDR to women, but I feel that the Government have set too low a ceiling on the number. Women suffer from the hardships of a terrorist campaign more than do men, and I am sure that many women would be prepared to serve Northern Ireland.

The hon. Gentleman castigated my hon. and gallant Friend the Member for Down, South (Captain Orr) for referring only to officers and men. I am a military expert, having served in the Territorial Army Intelligence Corps and risen to the rank of corporal! I feel not only that I should be congratulated on that promotion but that I am entitled to speak for all persons in the UDR up to the rank of officer. I understand the hon. Gentleman's concern.

I advocated this measure some time ago. I am sorry that there are not more members in the UDR and that the Government will not create local platoons. I add my own tribute to those already paid to the regiment. It plays a courageous and valuable rôle in Northern Ireland.

I regret that the members of the regiment, when mobilised, are financially penalised by their employers, including the Post Office, which is a semi-Government concern. That is wrong. I hope that this mean treatment will not be extended to women who volunteer and that when the Government review the situation all members of the regiment in employment will have their pay made up.

Apart from women members of the UDR being used to search women and so relieve the burden on the women military police, they could play many other active roles in manning road blocks and doing security checks all along the border. The border is still wide open. No matter what may be stated in Press releases from the Eire Government and by their Prime Minister, there is still little response from the Eire Government to the threat posed by the IRA, which is using the Irish Republic as a sanctuary.

We all recognise the difficulty of patrolling a border with a land frontier of 300 miles. It is a difficult task for the Army. I have advocated to my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland that radar should he used and that more helicopters should be brought into play. This addition to the strength of the security forces, if used in border areas, should help to close some of the gaps in the existing security arrangements. We shall never get peace in Northern Ireland, we shall never defeat the terrorists—the gunmen who cross the border into Northern Ireland, carry out their obscene killings and then return across the border into the Irish Republic—until strong measures are taken against the IRA.

At the time the Bill was first published I expressed the hope that women members of the UDR would be armed. I am saying not merely that they should have personal arms for their own protection—because we know that ordinary members of the UDR are subject to threats of all kinds, and figures have been given of the numbers of UDR members who have been murdered by the IRA—but that the Minister should make sure that the women members of the UDR are given full military training, including training in the use of arms.

It is no use saying that we should not arm the women members of the UDR, and that if they are not armed they will not be attacked. As my hon. and gallant Friend the Member for Down, South said, the IRA has already committed some heinous offences against women, and once they are dressed up in military uniform they will be the target for the IRA and will need to be given every possible protection.

Finally, I think that women members of the UDR could take over from the police and soldiers when children are being harassed by IRA terrorists, and indeed, when the Army and police all too frequently are being attacked by children provoked into such action by the IRA. The presence of women members of the UDR might help to pacify the children in a difficult and trying situation in the Province. A number of police and members of the security forces have been killed when engaged on the "lollipop patrol", as it is called. It is possible that women properly protected and properly armed could play a useful rôle.

I welcome this measure. It is a necessary piece of legislation, and I hope that there will be a quick response and that it will act as an incentive—I hope that this is not misunderstood—to other people to join the Ulster Defence Regiment.

I should like to say how pleased I am to see present today and taking part in the debate my hon. Friend the Member for Ormskirk (Mr. Soref) and the hon. Member for Battersea, South (Mr. Ernest G. Perry). This is an important subject for Northern Ireland. There are some in this House who, when Stormont was suspended. felt that total integration and the winding up of the Northern Ireland Parliament would help to achieve a settlement in Northern Ireland. But the attendance in the House today shows how few of our colleagues among the United Kingdom Members are concerned with affairs of Northern Ireland and prepared to come and debate the matter. They feel strangers in these matters.

For this reason, I was opposed to the prorogation of Northern Ireland Parliament, and I am glad to see the Assembly reformed. In the context of this Bill I would like to see the control of the UDR vested in Northern Ireland where the control of the old "B" Specials lay. I feel that the best use can be made of the new women recruits to the Ulster Defence Regiment.

I wish to criticise what was said in another place by the Secretary of State for Defence when dealing with the likelihood of attacks on women members of the Ulster Defence Regiment. It shows how little he understands the position in Northern Ireland when one considers the number of women from Republican areas who have been viciously attacked, covered with paint and had their heads shaved because they have committed minor indiscretions. The Provisional IRA does not draw the line in attacking women and children. Within the last 24 hours a woman has been killed in crossfire in Northern Ireland. That was an attack launched by the IRA on the Army quite regardless of the safety of others and, as a result, a woman living in a Republican area lost her life. There have been many such cases in Northern Ireland.

I join with my hon. and gallant Friend the Member for Down, South (Capt. Orr) in praising the work of the UDR. I ask my hon. Friend what the rôle of the women will be. When the regiment was formed it was suggested that their rôle should be simply to guard vulnerable points in the Province. Are these women to carry out searches on the border, or will they be used in sit-ins, to protect the centres of cities and to search persons suspected of carrying arms? Many bombs have been placed by women terrorists. About a year ago two women left a parcel on the doorstep of Unionist headquarters and that bomb caused severe damage. It is obvious that women and, indeed, children are being used by the IRA to place these bombs.

The rôle of the women in the UDR is important, but I suggest that it is a rôle more akin to supporting the police than part of a defence regiment controlled by the GOC. If the rôle is a supporting rôle for the police, surely this underlines the point made in passing by my hon. and gallant Friend the Member for Down, South that the entire function of the UDR is more that of militia support for the police in Northern Ireland than of a regiment of the Army, whose rôle in ordinary times—and I hope that we shall return to peace in Northern Ireland—is more confined to garrison duties and protecting the border.

I ask my hon. Friend what the precise rôle of these women is to be. I endorse what my colleagues have said in this debate about protection of these women. If their rôle is to be primarily in the country areas and they are to be recruited strongly from those areas, the question arises of the steps that should be taken to protect them. We in Northern Ireland are well aware of those gallant members of the Ulster Defence Regiment living in remote areas who have been attacked in their homes, when going to work or when ploughing their fields. They have no means of defending themselves. A number have been deliberately assassinated. Should women be asked to take on this rôle without some form of weapon training'? It is inconceivable that each woman should be protected by an armed guard. They must be in a position to defend themselves.

The hon. Member for Battersea, South drew attention to the fact that members of the UDR are drawn from people of every religion and section of the community. In case there is any implication that members of the old "B" Specials were not, let me remind the hon. Gentleman that the position was exactly the same. It is true that there was a very small minority recruitment to the "B" Specials, but that was more the fault of the minority deciding not to come forward. In that connection, perhaps my hon. Friend can say what is the present recruitment position. The UDR was set up to be a broadly-based body. It is a matter of regret that so few members of the minority have come forward. However, perhaps that is understandable when one considers the polarisation everywhere in Northern Ireland——

My hon. Friend will probably agree that on one occasion about a year ago a member of the SDLP was telling the minority not to join the regiment. This is a matter that we all deprecate.

My hon. Friend is advancing my argument. I was about to say that I hope that a fair proportion from the minority will join. However, because of the polarisation, women living in Republican areas will be subject to great pressures. Therefore, we must see, first, that proper measures are taken to protect any who come forward and, secondly—as my hon. Friend the Member for Ormskirk said—that they are adequately remunerated for the onerous job that they take on, including the risk element, if they have the courage to join the regiment.

There has been some feeling in Northern Ireland—especially over the election period when members of the regiment have been on duty for long hours—about the fact that they have lost their pay from their civilian jobs and have not been adequately recompensed by their pay from the regiment. These are part-time soldiers, and they must be adequately remunerated.

Recruitment has fallen sadly recently because of redundancies. At a time like this, when, in the past day or two, we have seen riots in our prisons and bomb attacks and riots in Londonderry and Belfast, we need to build up the strength of both the Ulster Defence Regiment and the police. I welcome the move to bring in women but I suggest that at this time, above all, the regiment should be made very attractive in order to build up its strength.

There should be no regard for the pay freeze and other matters which prevail in the Government's mind. The Government's main function is to preserve law and order. For that reason, considerations such as pay policy should be put in the background in fixing the remuneration of UDR members.

I do not wish to detain the House any longer. We could engage in a wide-ranging debate. I look forward to hearing replies to the specific points that I have raised, especially those with regard to pay and protection and the question where the women are to serve. Finally, we must know the Government's intention about the control of the Ulster Defence Regiment in the long term.

This has been a useful debate. It has been remarkable for the complete unanimity of everyone who has taken part in it in paying tribute to the Ulster Defence Regiment and in supporting the proposals in the Bill. I welcome that very much and I heartily endorse the tributes that hon. Members have paid.

The debate has also been notable in the sense that not only hon. Members representing Northern Ireland constituencies have taken part. My hon. Friend the Member for Ormskirk (Mr. Soref) and the hon. Member for Battersea, South (Mr. Ernest G. Perry) have also contributed. I welcome their participation.

The right hon. Member for Workington (Mr. Peart) commented that the estimate was that only one additional civilian would be required as a result of the Bill. Perhaps I might explain how that could be done by saying that, generally speaking, the proposal is that the women who are taken on will be attached to the existing companies of the UDR. Speaking from memory, there are 59 companies in the 11 battalions. The additional women will be attached roughly proportionately to each of those companies. Therefore. there ought not to be a large additional administrative burden.

My hon. and gallant Friend the Member for Down, South (Captain Orr) referred to some rather wider aspects of internal security in Northern Ireland. He will not expect me to go into those matters now, since they go rather wider than the scope of the Bill. However my hon. and gallant Friend made the point that the activities of the men of the UDR have been different from those of the regular forces both in the sense that they remain in the Province permanently and to that extent are permanently in the danger area, and also that they are taking on tasks in addition to their regular jobs. It is quite remarkable how they do this. I believe that they do it out of a sense of duty and of wanting to serve their country, to preserve law and order, and restore peaceful conditions to Northern Ireland.

My hon. and gallant Friend asked about the strength of the regiment. It is now about 8,000. This represents a drop from the position some months ago. But the House should not be distressed about the drop. It has come about as the result of a number of factors. Some men have come to the end of their three-year engagements. The regiment was set up in 1970. A number of men have found that their jobs have made it difficult for them to continue and for that reason they have not renewed their engagements. That is not altogether surprising. However, the principal factor has been the deliberate policy, on the part of the regiment, of inviting those who have not been able to attend regularly to leave it. It is felt that it is better to have a smaller, somewhat slimmer regiment, all of whose members are active and able to take part in their regular duties—they are required to turn up at least a couple of times a week—rather than a larger one, where men may not be able to keep up to the standards of attendance set by the majority.

My hon. and gallant Friend asked whether there would be an officer structure for the women. I can assure him that there will be a normal officer structure.

My hon. and gallant Friend also asked about the training of women. The principal duties of the part-time women members of the regiment will be to act as searchers in support of patrols and at vehicle check points. They will be attached to sections or platoons of the regiment and will assist them in their tasks both in the countryside and in the cities, wherever those tasks happen to arise. Generally speaking, therefore, they will not operate on their own. They will be with the male members of the force and when they are in that situation will rely for their protection on the male members of the force, who will be armed.

Their basic military training will be what is necessary to allow them to fulfil that rôle. I am speaking now of those who will be performing part-time duties. We hope that a sufficient number will come forward for them to fulfil full-time duty as clerks, telephone operators, and so on. The training for the women doing those duties will consist of drill, how to report incidents, field craft, first-aid, anti-ambush procedures, procedure at and composition of vehicle check points and personnel check points, as well as procedures for searching.

Will searching include border and border road searches?

The searching will take place wherever the existing units of the regiment function. If they function in the countryside and near the border the women will be operating there. If they are in the cities, the women will be operating there.

I agree with my hon. and gallant Friend that the arming of these women is a difficult question. The intention is that they will not bear arms. As I have explained, when they are on duty with the sections or platoons of the regiment they will be able to rely for protection—for example, when they are searching at a checkpoint—on the armed men who will be with them.

Does not my hon. Friend see some danger to a patrol if some of its members, instead of being able to concentrate upon their job, are conscious that they have an unarmed woman member with them? Would it not be much more sensible if such a woman member were at least trained in her own self-defence.

It is a difficult question. It will be for the judgment of the local commander, not whether the women should be armed but exactly in what rôle they will be employed. I believe that they will be more often employed on static vehicle checkpoints than on patrols in country lanes.

Having carefully considered whether these women should be armed, we take the view that, in view of the past pattern of terrorist activity, the possession of arms would make these women more likely to be targets than if they were unarmed. So the balance of judgment lies in not providing them with arms.

If my hon. and gallant Friend is considering the question whether they need self-protection at home, I stress that any woman member of the regiment who considers herself to be particularly at risk may, in common with other citizens of the Province, apply to the civil authorities for permission to carry a firearm.

My hon. Friend the Member for Ormskirk took a rather apocalyptic view of the situation. It is possible for people in this country to misjudge the real nature of the IRA. To that extent I concede that there is something in what my hon. Friend said, but I think that he is unduly pessimistic. He expressed the view that the total force in Ulster, including the members of the UDR was inadequate. We have repeatedly said, and I repeat it, that we will adjust the level of the force to what we regard as the needs of the situation.

My hon. Friend asked how many members of the force have been injured. Since the inception of the regiment, 49 of its members have been injured.

My hon. Friend asked about pay and pensions for the women members of the force. The part-time women members of the force will qualify for Regular Army rates of pay at women rates when attending annual camp and for all other qualifying periods of duty and training. The women members of the permanent staff will be paid at rates which are related to those of their male counterparts. Those rates are slightly below. We are moving towards equal pay for women, as we have a duty to do, but we have not got there yet.

There have been complaints that members of the regiment, when called out, sometimes lose money because their employers are not prepared to make up the pay that has been lost. My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland and Ministers in his Department have been talking with employers about this matter and there has been some improvement. I hope that other employers who have not yet moved in this direction will take note of what has been said in the House today.

My hon. Friend the Member for Down, North (Mr. Kilfedder) expressed the hope that there would be a ready response to the possibility of women joining the regiment. Indeed, I hope that there will be. Even before we have passed the Act, as I hope it will soon be, the regiment has had about 60 letters asking whether women may join. As it has not been open to women to do so, that is a promising figure.

I was asked about the question of benefits for women and what would happen if they were injured on duty. Full- or part-time women members injured whilst serving with the regiment will continue to receive full military pay, less any national insurance sickness benefit payable, for a period of incapacity of up to six months.

Awards in respect of women members who are killed or are permanently disabled will be made under the war pensions Royal Warrants administered by my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Social Services, on the same basis as those awarded to women members in the regular Services. In addition to any awards from that Department, women members of the regiment who are invalided as a direct result of terrorist activity in Northern Ireland may qualify for ex-gratia awards of up to £400 a year, depending upon their degree of disability.

As for superannuation benefits, women members of the non-regular permanent staff will qualify for pensions and gratuities in the same way as their male counterparts. I do not think I need go into the details of those benefits, unless the House wishes me to do so, but for those who do not serve long enough to qualify for pensions, gratuities will be available.

This may seem to be a small Bill when compared with some of the major issues about Northern Ireland that the House has debated in the last few weeks, but it is, as we all agree, an important Bill and I believe that it will be welcomed in the Province for three excellent reasons.

First, it will add significantly to the effectiveness of the rôle which the Regiment is already playing. Secondly, the UDR symbolises the determination of reasonable, peace-loving citizens to work out their future without violence. Thirdly, the Bill allows us to acknowledge, albeit in only the most limited way, the unbounded debt of Northern Ireland and, indeed, of Great Britain to the women of the Province who have borne such a terrible burden and strain in the present emergency. We know that some of them want to be allowed to play an active rôle alongside the men in the work of the UDR. Let us give them the chance to do so.

I beg to move, as a manuscript amendment, in page 1, line 26, to leave out subsection (2).

This is a purely formal amendment to take out something that had to be put in in another place for reasons of Privilege.

I beg to move,

That the Enterprise Ulster (Northern Ireland) Order 1973, a draft of which was laid before this House on 19th June, be approved.

Hon. Members will need no reminding that one of the problems of Northern Ireland is high unemployment. Opinions differ on the extent to which the problem has contributed to the present troubles; but there is no doubt that those troubles have not made the solution to the problem any easier to find. In the long term it must lie in increased manufacturing investment—the attraction of new, and the expansion of existing, industry. In the short term, however, the Government have decided that the policy of industrial expansion, which must still be vigorously pursued, should be complemented by other measures. Consequently, last year they announced their intention of setting up an organisation, run by a board drawn from the community at large, with the specific task of creating employment by undertaking or promoting a wide range of amenity schemes. The order before the House today seeks to establish such an organisation as a statutory body and to provide it with the necessary powers to achieve its objectives.

Article 3 of the order formally provides for the establishment of a body corporate to be called Enterprise Ulster—a name already widely known and accepted throughout Northern Ireland as a result of a successful pilot scheme and a considerable amount of preparatory work undertaken in recent months.

Article 4, which sets out the functions of this new body, is the cornerstone of the order. It provides that, for the purpose of creating employment in Northern Ireland, Enterprise Ulster may do anything which it

"considers to be of environmental, amenity. cultural, community or social value".

This general provision is supported—and sometimes qualified—by more detailed provisions in the remainder of the article. Taken as a whole, however, the provisions confer on Enterprise Ulster wide and flexible powers to enable it to achieve its primary objective of creating employment. I am sure that hon. Members will agree that that is the right approach.

In practice, I see the new body fulfilling the rôle of a large employer operating throughout the Province—that is, recuiting workers direct, training them in a variety of skills and offering them the prospect of advancement. Continuity of employment will be the keynote but the organisation should also be a valuable recruiting ground for private industry. Enterprise Ulster will not be just another unemployment relief exercise offering temporary employment for a few months at a time. If a worker leaves Enterprise Ulster I would hope it would not be to return to the dole queue, but rather because his training and experience with Enterprise Ulster had enabled him to advance his career outside it.

What kind of schemes of work will Enterprise Ulster undertake? I expect that in the early part of its life it will concentrate on small amenity schemes such as the construction of play grounds, car parks, picnic areas, riverside walks, linear parks and so on. These are the types of labour-intensive projects in which the pilot scheme has already afforded some experience and which can be mounted quickly. I imagine, however, that as Enterprise Ulster builds up its organisation and technical capacity, much more ambitious schemes will be tackled.

In addition to undertaking schemes direct itself, Enterprise Ulster will be able to help create employment in other ways. Where specialised techniques or facilities are required, it may employ contractors. It may delegate work to others. It may give financial assistance to others who undertake works which accord with the objectives of Enterprise Ulster. In short, Enterprise Ulster will be able to exploit, in the way most effective in the particular circumstances of a case, employment opportunities as they arise and will also be well placed to encourage a wide variety of other bodies to identify suitable schemes which will help in the task of job provision.

There is one further provision in Article 4 which perhaps I should mention. The creation of a direct labour organisation drawing its workforce mainly from the unemployed should afford an opportunity—and this is important—to study the nature of unemployment more comprehensively than has hitherto been possible. Paragraph (2) of the article consequently empowers Enterprise Ulster to

"conduct. promote or assist research or investigation"

into unemployment in Northern Ireland.

The remaining articles are concerned on the one hand with giving Enterprise Ulster the necessary supporting powers to carry out its functions effectively and, on the other, with securing its accountability, through the Ministry of Health and Social Services, to Parliament.

I hope I have said enough for the House to appreciate that Enterprise Ulster is, first and foremost, a community enterprise. As well as offering the unemployed the opportunity of steady lobs it should, through the amenity schemes it undertakes, be able to improve the quality of life for everyone in Northern Ireland.

This is a worthy scheme. It is one of those schemes which any Minister would count it a great pleasure to bring before the House. It has worthy and practical aims, and I ask the House to give its support to the order.

This morning the House appears to be experiencing a pleasing consensus. Over the last few weeks, in a number of debates on Northern Irish matters, the reception on this side of the House for Government proposals has sometimes been less than fulsome, but today I am in the happy position of being able to offer this order an unqualified welcome.

Enterprise Ulster is a direct labour scheme which brings together two problems and offers a mutual solution. First, there is the problem of unhappy unemployment in the Province. It has been falling in recent months, partly for seasonal reasons and possibly for other reasons too, but even in June of this year it was as high as 5·8 per cent. That is not the whole story, of course, because for male unemployment the figures are much higher, and it is not spread evenly throughout the Province. There are some areas in which unemployment is much higher, particularly West of the Bann.

The second problem is that Northern Ireland has its share of environmental difficulties. Of course it boasts some of the most magnificent scenic beauty in the world. I have some happy memories of Mourne landscapes and of journeys through the glens of Antrim, but in many of the towns there is clearly a need to improve the amenities, visual and otherwise, as well as to repair some of the ravages of the unhappy terrorism of the last few months.

Even in the country, I can recollect only a few years ago discussing with a local angler in Kilkeel the question of pollution in the river. Even there, there are environmental problems to which the authorities might well turn their attention. So it is a sensible course to bring the two problems together. The Government are very much to he congratulated upon the order.

If I may say so without introducing a controversial note, the Opposition are delighted at the Government's late conversion to the benefits of direct labour and public intervention in the employment situation. I only hope that the Under-Secretary and the Secretary of State will have a word with their right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Employment and with some Conservative local authorities.

There are three matters on which I would welcome what I hope is simply the Minister's confirmation. Probably, the answers are self-evident. First, we assume that in the early stages Enterprise Ulster will concentrate on the localities of greatest need. I do not need to enlarge upon that.

Second, the Under-Secretary said that he hoped that Enterprise Ulster would be a recruiting ground for private industry. May we take it that that means that one of the functions of the commission will be to introduce basic training for new skills among those who will obviously benefit in both the short and the long term from that training?

Third, the Minister enlarged upon the possibilities of conducting research into the nature of unemployment. In relation to something a little less ambitious, will each amenity enterprise be not just a once-for-all enterprise in a particular situation but used to stimulate further employment—for example, the building of parks, sporting facilities and so on, which themselves will offer further employment?

Also, what funds are likely to be available for this purpose in each year, particularly the ensuing year? Has any estimate been made of the number of jobs which may become available in the first year in consequence of the order?

These are questions to which we should obviously like answers, but I repeat that we warmly welcome the order. It is an exciting departure, particularly being run as it is with participation from all sections of the community. May it represent a new beginning both for individuals and for the Northern Irish community.

Like the hon. and learned Member for Rowley Regis and Tipton (Mr. Peter Archer), I would not wish to be less than fulsome, to use his felicitous phrase, in welcoming this measure. When one thinks about Northern Ireland and the various matters that we have discussed this week, it is very agreeable to turn to something concerned with putting people to constructive work for the community as a whole. We warmly welcome this. Of course, it is not something precisely new. We are reconstructing work which is already being done in Ulster.

I understand that this is a development from the Ulster 71 movement and the Young Ulster movement, and that 20 schemes are already in operation, doing very useful things. Perhaps my hon. Friend can tell us what scale of development is likely during the coming year.

As for employment, I understand that the existing schemes employ about 500 people. Like the hon. and learned Member, I should like to know what is likely to be the development over the next year. I understand that the kinds of scheme already operating are the building of play centres, playing fields, various things in rural areas, like rural walks, and footbridges. I presume that that is the kind of task which will be continued.

I have one question about something in the nature of a demarcation matter. The hon. and learned Member spoke about the Mourne area of County Down. Useful schemes are already being done by the Northern Ireland Ministry of Agriculture, which for a long time has been streets ahead of the Ministry of Agriculture in this country. The Northern Ireland Ministry has been a pioneer in this kind of environmental work. Perhaps we can be assured that there will not be overlapping, that there will be co-ordination with the Ministry of Agriculture.

As for the money, I understand that it is proposed to provide about £15 million for the next five years. I hope that money will not be the decisive matter and that the availability of facilities, the actual physical development of these schemes, if it is possible to extend the work, will not be diminished for lack of money.

If one is concerned with private interests of any kind, one is bound to ask about the powers under Articles 6 and 7 which are being made available to the corporation. One is always jealous of powers of any newly-created statutory body to acquire and to enter upon land and things of that sort. I hope that my hon. Friend will assure me that these are not unusual powers, and that they will be exercised responsibly.

Subject to those few remarks, I warmly welcome this order. I congratulate all those involved in schemes already operating on the work they have done, and I wish this new enterprise every success.

I congratulate my hon. Friend on the introduction of this order. When one looks around Northern Ireland at the moment and sees the damage that has been done one realises the scope there is for such an order. In other words, its advantages are not just those of taking the unemployed off the streets of Northern Ireland. A very valuable task has to be performed in restoring part of our damaged property as well as building up facilities and amenities in Ulster.

Can the Under-Secretary tell us what scale of salaries will apply to members of the Ulster Enterprise and how its membership will be formed? What sectional interests will be represented there? Will members of the new Assembly in Northern Ireland be entitled to serve on the corporation, and what do the Government intend with respect to the control of this body once the Assembly gets under way. Will control be transferred to the new Northern Ireland Assembly or will that control rest here at Westminster? As substantial sums of money are involved, will an annual report be made to this House or to the Assembly in Northern Ireland showing how the money is being expended and what the corporation has done during the preceding year?

Having asked these questions, I am very pleased to welcome the order. It will provide for a valuable function to be performed, not only in offering jobs to the young unemployed—particularly the unskilled—in Northern Ireland but in providing the training which may be useful for all unemployed in Northern Ireland.

My hon. Friend the Under-Secretary said that the Ulster Enterprise corporation will promote research into unemployment in Northern Ireland, and I hope that it will co-operate closely with the Youth Employment Service Board in investigating aspects of unemployment among young people. Individual youth employment officers have already done a lot of useful investigative work of this sort. I am sure that their findings will be available to the corporation, and I hope that the corporation will ask for those findings and make good use of them. The youth employment officers have played a very notable part in Northern Ireland, and I hope to refer to them in the debate on the appropriation order if I get the chance.

Unemployment in Northern Ireland is endemic in certain families and recurs in each generation. One finds families in which the men have been unemployed for two or three generations. It is a very sad state of affairs. Unemployment of this kind involves great suffering and hardship for the individuals concerned and their families.

I am concerned that there is so far no evidence of the work of Enterprise Ulster in my constituency. There is a tremendous volume of work to be done there, particularly in cleaning up the foreshore all along the coast. I believe that my constituency has more coastline than has that of any other hon. Member. The hon. and learned Member for Rowley Regis and Tipton (Mr. Peter Archer) referred to the glens of Antrim, but County Down is one of the most beautiful of our counties. Indeed, leaving aside the areas which have been blighted by terrorism, nearly every part of Northern Ireland is beautiful and can compare in tourist attractions with any other place in the world.

The foreshore of my constituency has become a depository for all city rubbish, when some people returning to the city after the weekend dump their weekend rubbish before they go home and litter our coastline with it. In some places the situation has become quite intolerable. In addition, we have the problem of rubbish thrown overboard from passing ships. Beautiful parts of our coast are ruined by old mattresses littered about, empty tin cans and non-returnable bottles. Something must be done about these non-returnable bottles, otherwise we shall be submerged by them. A tax should be put on them, to be paid by the manufacturers. We also have the problem of indestructible plastics.

Will the corporation be entitled to exercise functions under the Development Services Act 1948 under which the Stormont Government carried out unemployment relief schemes and could pay up to 80 per cent. of the cost of such schemes undertaken by local authorities?

Article 7 (2) deals with the power of entry on to land. It states that such entry shall not be exercisable until

"…after at least twenty-four hours' notice … has been served on the occupier or owner of the land"

unless, of course, consent has already been given. The trouble with orders of this kind is that we cannot amend them, but would it not be more sensible in this case that the independent statutory body should be required to give 72 hours' notice? That would give the owner or occupier of the land time to consult his solicitor and, through his legal adviser, to talk with the corporation, and find out why the corporation wished to enter on to the land and learn of any difficulties which might be presented thereby? This is not an unreasonable request, and I hope that my hon. Friend may be able to meet it.

The order gives the corporation power to acquire land. Is this advisable? Would it not be better for the power to rest with the supervising Ministry—in this case the Ministry of Health and Social Security? I hope that I may have an answer to this question. As the corporation may be wound up in, I think, 1978, I wonder why this power is being conferred on it.

Paragraph 12 of Schedule 1 states:

"The Corporation may borrow, by way of temporary loan or overdraft from a bank or otherwise, any sum which it may temporarily require for the purpose of defraying expenses pending the receipt of revenues receivable by the Corporation …".

It then lays down conditions. As the corporation's revenue comes largely from the Ministry of Health, I should not have thought it beyond administrative ingenuity to devise a system which would ensure that the corporation always had sufficient money to meet its commitments, without having to borrow. Should we give borrowing powers to a body of this kind, which in any event may be wound up in 1978?

I welcome the order. I am sorry that today, again, when we are debating measures which may help toward the introduction of harmony into Northern Ireland. no representative of the Opposition in Northern Ireland is present. That is a sad reflection on the way that they approach these matters.

On the question of employment, the corporation may run into difficulties of discriminating against one or other section of the population if it recruits its staff otherwise than through the employment exchange. How does the corporation intend to go about finding workers? Will they be taken deliberately from a particular area or in the ordinary way from those registered as unemployed?

My hon. Friend the Minister has said that Enterprise Ulster will concentrate on small amenity schemes which are labour-intensive. He said that when a worker leaves he will not return to the dole queue—at least, that was my hon. Friend's hope, which we all share—but that his training will advance his career outside Enterprise Ulster.

That raises two matters. First, there is no point in creating, for instance, play centres, for which there is a great need throughout Ireland, and particularly in North Down, or other amenities, unless there is regular maintenance. Will this maintenance be provided annually after such schemes have been completed? It is no use creating a play centre if, after the workers leave and when Enterprise Ulster has withdrawn its help, such a centre degenerates. They can easily be damaged or deteriorate. We see it happening in this part of the United Kingdom. What provision has been made for Enterprise Ulster to provide regular maintenance of play centres, or other amenities which are created, so that they are kept up to a proper standard?

Secondly, will the Enterprise Ulster corporation work closely in co-operation with those engaged in similar work to that which the corporation will undertake? Instead of competing with private enterprise, the corporation should work closely with its representatives. The hon. and learned Member for Rowley Regis and Tipton spoke about the conversion of the Government to direct labour. The Government have been adopting much Labour policy in respect of Northern Ireland, such as the idea of referenda. But the Government have adopted the referenda and other ideas which they would not put forward in England. Here they are advocating direct labour, which they would not advocate in Great Britain.

I welcome any way in which we can reduce the problem of unemployment in Ulster, but I do not want to see difficulties created or a conflict between the Enterprise Ulster corporation and private enterprise. I hope that the corporation will seek the advice of private companies which are already engaged in similar work, from builders to nurserymen and landscapers. I hope that the corporation will not only seek that advice but will have regular meetings with representatives of private companies. I am not sure about who will be on the board of the corporation. If we do not have representatives of builders, landscapers and nurserymen on the board, I ask my hon. Friend to ensure that the corporation has regular meetings with their representatives and takes the benefit of their advice, which would be invaluable.

One example is the Society of Landscapers in Northern Ireland. I spoke to the chairman of the corporation just before it got under way about the problem presented to the Society of Landscapers because Enterprise Ulster would take over some of the work which members of the Society are doing; in other words, public money may be used to rob private enterprise of work which would have been given to it by Government Departments. I hope that that will not happen.

Does Enterprise Ulster have a nursery'? Is it correct that, instead of buying plants from nurserymen in Northern Ireland who provide employment and training, the corporation will be growing its own plants and shrubs? That is an important question.

The subject of nurseries is very delicate. The answer is that this is not so. The corporation does not have its own nursery.

I am grateful, and surprised, that my hon. Friend was able to answer that question so quickly.

We want to avoid unfair competition. We all want the corporation to succeed. But to succeed it needs the support and good will of private enterprise. Do the Government have any plans beyond 1978, when the corporation may come to an end?

Order. We have not reached that date yet. We must contain our remarks today to the contents of the order before the House.

I was closing on those remarks, Mr. Deputy Speaker. I merely want in conclusion to welcome the order and to wish those who operate it every success.

I am very grateful for the most generous welcome given to the order by the hon. and learned Member for Rowley Regis and Tipton (Mr. Peter Archer), and to all hon. Members for the way in which they have welcomed it. They have asked a fair number of questions, which I shall try to answer.

First, the hon. and learned Member for Rowley Regis and Tipton stressed the needs of the towns. He said that much work needed to be done in the towns and cities. He is absolutely right. The whole idea of the corporation is to do just that—to do a sort of cosmetic operation as well as providing amenities for some of the sorely pressed areas.

The hon. and learned Member is correct, too, when he says that the corporation deals with two problems at once. which is a good thing—unemployment and amenities. Both are covered and both will benefit. The hon. and learned Member and other hon. Members were right when they asked whether this effort will be directed to areas with the greatest need. Certainly it will. I understand that already in the Bogside a start is being made, and West Belfast will he considered fairly shortly; indeed, all the difficult areas will be dealt with. I shall deal later with what my hon. Friend the Member for Down, North (Mr. Kilfedder) said about his area, but I can give the House the assurance that the areas of greatest need will be helped.

The hon. and learned Member spoke of training by the corporation. Training in new skills will be given, but encouragement of the basic skills is also important. Many young fellows and others have never had a job, and it is hoped to train them in the basic as well as the new skills.

I give the assurance that there will be a fall-out from the work of the corporation; in other words, others will benefit. Hon. Members have rightly referred to the continuation of work. It is not much use creating a park or any other amenity if it is not to be kept up. This means a fall-out from the work of the corporation, so that, for instance, park keepers and groundsmen will be needed. It is rather like the ripples from a stone thrown into a pond—there will be an immediate benefit for the unemployed and in the provision of amenities, but the effect will spread and others will benefit.

It is envisaged that for a start the corporation will have £15 million for five years, £3 million a year.

Hon. Members have been concerned about the number of jobs. There has been a pilot scheme and 500 people are now employed; it is hoped to raise that figure to 1,000 by the end of the year. We hope to go on and employ more people, but it must be done gradually. It would be unfortunate if a large labour force were built up without proper training being given.

My hon. and gallant Friend the Member for Down, South (Captain Orr) welcomed the corporation and rightly said that good schemes were already in operation. We wish to continue them and gradually build up this work as the areas and problems are identified. My hon. and gallant Friend mentioned demarcation. A number of principles have been agreed between Enterprise Ulster and other Ministries about who does what. I think that this is the best way to deal with that matter, for we do not want any overlapping.

As my hon. and gallant Friend said, the Ministry of Agriculture, with which I have had the great privilege of working, has done a tremendous job. I have seen this for myself in the work done in the forests and alongside the rivers, in fish farms and in picnic areas. The Ministry has done remarkable work, and that was one of the major discoveries that I made when I first started work in Northern Ireland. Many people have been employed in this work, and I understand that the Ministry of Agriculture has put 8,000 people on this enterprise. I cannot praise it too highly. I have enjoyed fishing in the rivers and picnicking.

It is not for me to criticise other parts of Great Britain, but I should have thought that anybody who wanted to see what could be done about improving amenities would want to see what was being done in Northern Ireland. There should not be any overlapping, for Enterprise Ulster will be concerned mostly with the urban areas.

I understand that the powers in paragraphs 6 and 7 are not unusual for corporations of this sort and they will be operated responsibly and carefully. Paragraph 7(6) provides for compensation cases to be referred to the Lands Tribunal.

I was glad of the welcome for the order voiced by my hon. Friend the Member for Belfast, East (Mr. McMaster). I am not able to help him at present about the scale of the salaries. Once it has been set up, the Assembly will take control and there will be an annual report from the corporation which will be a subject for debate, when criticisms and so on may be made.

My hon. Friend the Member for Down, North mentioned research. This will be an important part of the work. I am certain that there will be co-operation among all the Departments and particularly by the Youth Employment Service Board. We want to gather as much information as we can from all research so that we can solve the problem.

Great strides are being made in Northern Ireland in dealing with the unemployment problem, but more needs to be done. We have to identify the difficult cases where perhaps generation after generation has not had a job for one reason or another, and perhaps this order will make it possible for the younger members of a family to be trained and started in a job for the first time.

My hon. Friend was quite right in what he said about the beauty of Northern Ireland, but I would not go so far as to say that it is more beautiful than my own part of the world, Devonshire.

My hon. Friend spoke of co-operation with URIC. I have already mentioned demarcation, but we shall make sure that there is no overlapping.

Paragraph 7 has been mentioned. I understand that it is standard procedure to have 24 hours' notice of intended entry. It is not unusual to have borrowing powers of this sort for corporations of this kind. They need short-term borrowing powers for overdrafts and so on.

My hon. Friend mentioned finding workers. I assure him that there will be no discrimination. Men who are registered unemployed at the employment exchanges will be needed. It is important to get those who have never worked or have not worked for a long time. We want to give them basic training so that they may become skilled.

My hon. Friend the Member for Down, North queried the fact that no work was being done in his constituency. At Ballymacormick Point, Bangor, a coastal wharf is under construction, and we should not forget the Ulster Folk Museum. One of my usual walks is to go through a part of my hon. Friend's constituency, and I agree with him that the amount of filth, rubbish and bottles in the lough is disgraceful. That is something to which the corporation can turn its attention.

However, my hon. Friend's constituency is in a low unemployment area, and we want to deal with the bad areas where amenities are sadly lacking, as in Belfast, for instance. But I am certain that my hon. Friend will be making strong representations to the corporation and that it will take his views carefully into account.

This is a worthwhile order. Enterprise Ulster has a great future, and I hope that people will seize the opportunity. I wish it well, as I know that the House does. This is a community enterprise. It will improve the quality of life in Northern Ireland and help to solve the unemployment problem. For those reasons, I commend the order to the House.

I beg to move,

That the Appropriation (No. 2) (Northern Ireland) Order 1973, a draft of which was laid before this House on 12th June be approved.

We now come to something a little different. This is the second Appropriation Order for Northern Ireland in 1973. Hon. Members will recall that in March last the House approved the first appropriation order, which voted sums on account totalling £203,630,000 required for the year ending 31st March 1974. Today's order deals with the balance of the Estimates for 1973–74, that is, the total as shown in the Estimates volume that hon. Members have had an opportunity to consider, less the amount previously voted on account. The order also provides for the appropriation of three amounts that rose as excess Votes in the financial year 1971–72. I shall refer to these again shortly.

As hon. Members can see from the Estimates volume, the total of the Northern Ireland Estimates for the current year is just over £561 million and as my hon. Friend the Minister of State mentioned in our consideration of the previous order, this is £95 million more than the total Estimates figure for 1972–73. I should stress that this figure is reached before consideration has been given to any Supplementary Estimates. As the figures upon which these Estimates are based were prepared at the end of 1972, in the normal course of events we would expect to have Supplementary Estimates both in the autumn and in the spring of 1974.

At the present time, however, it is difficult to be as precise as we would normally wish about this as the Northern Ireland Estimates will be affected to a considerable extent by the provisions of the Northern Ireland Constitution Bill. Under the Bill, certain items of expenditure will certainly be transferred to the Vote of the Northern Ireland Office at Westminster. Northern Ireland's own requirements will then be somewhat reduced though Supplementary Estimates will still probably be needed.

I should also like to take this opportunity of drawing the attention of hon. Members to the financial statement for Northern Ireland for 1973–74, which has recently been published, and from which Members will see the Estimates for supply expenditure have been included at the levels mentioned in this order. Due to the uncertainties caused by the Constitution Bill it is difficult to be precise about both income figures and the amount of grant in aid assistance required from Westminster during 1973–74. but hon. Members will no doubt notice that the estimates for the grant in aid under the provisions of the 1972 Act for the current year has now reached a figure of £137 million.

My hon. Friend mentioned, when presenting the appropriation order earlier in the year, that one of the main reasons for the increase in expenditure for 1973–74 as opposed to 1972–73 was the reorganisation of local government. bringing with it the transfer of several services from local to central government at 1st October 1973.

I reiterate that approximately £60 million of the increase is due entirely to reorganisation and represents purely a transfer of expenditure from one part of the public service to another. All this is explained in some detail in the memorandum at the front of the Estimates volume.

Also from 1st October 1973 rate income will be payable directly to the Ministry of Finance instead of to existing local authorities and this will increase the Government's income by something like £13·5 million for 1973–74. The rate income will be paid directly to the Exchequer and is not therefore shown as an item in this Estimates and appropriation order.

It would not be fair to hon. Members to take up too much time introducing this order and I shall therefore not comment on specific points in the order on the Estimates at the moment but I will do my best to answer, either today or if need be by letter, any points which may be put to me. Before closing, however, I should mention the question of the excess Votes for 1971–72 which are included for appropriation in this order. These excess Votes have been considered and accepted as reasonable by the Public Accounts Committee here at Westminster. Details of the Votes are set out in the PAC Paper 188 of 8th March 1973.

There are many technical and difficult points in the order. I can assure the House that we want to get these matters right. If necessary I will write to hon. Members to see that the whole thing is clarified. I ask the House to accept the order.

The House will be grateful to the Under-Secretary for having combined brevity with clarity in introducing the order. We last debated an appropriation order on 28th March. Nothing has happened since which gives me any reason to retract what I said then. The ancient principle that enables hon. Members adequately to speak for their constituents is that of redress of grievances before supply.

That is effected in this House in relation to England, Scotland and Wales by the Consolidated Fund Bill and the Appropriation Bill. We are able to have long debates in which hon. Members raise the grievances of constituents. A debate on an order lasting for an hour and a half is not normally an adequate substitute for that opportunity. I said in the last debate that it was unfortunate that such debates often took place late at night or in the small hours of the morning, when the House sometimes wears a rather bare look. No doubt the Government listened, because they have rectified it. We are not debating this order late at night, but on a Friday.

The hon. Member for Down, North (Mr. Kilfedder) said that certain of his Northern Irish colleagues were absent. Friday is not a day best calculated to secure the attendance of hon. Members who have constituency engagements. Last Friday an hon. Member commented that a compromise between having a debate and not having a debate is to have one on a Friday. Perhaps the question may not arise frequently in future.

We are grateful for the guidance of the hon. Gentleman as to the probable effects of the Constitution Bill. Does it mean that this is probably the last occasion when the House will control expenditure by this procedure and that in future Northern Ireland will be considered during the Consolidated Fund debates? If that is so it may make our deliberations this morning a little easier.

There is only one item about which I want to ask a question. This relates to Class III, item 2, which shows that a sum of £15½ million is granted for police services and £7,600 is granted as an appropriation in aid. Not for the first time in debates on appropriation measures there may be some reason for exploring exactly what items are contained within that figure.

The police in Northern Ireland have a thankless job, for reasons which we in this House know only too well. One thankless job all too often leads to others. An article in a recent issue of New Society shows a remarkable increase in crime rates in Northern Ireland between 1968 and 1971. During that period in Great Britain, crime generally increased by just over one-quarter. In the same period in Northern Ireland crime almost doubled.

It seems that this does not represent merely an increase in terrorist crimes, in scheduled offences under the Northern Ireland (Emergency Provisions) Bill. It is true of theft, burglary and shoplifting. In his annual report for 1970, the chief constable used these words:

"I am afraid that this is proof, if proof were needed, that riot and civil commotion, in which law enforcement is challenged, inevitably lead to a general lowering of moral standards as reflected particularly in crimes of dishonesty such as theft."

That is a proposition open to debate, but I shall not trespass on the time or the patience of the House. The authors of the article point out that there may be reasons for the increase in crime more directly connected with terrorism. The chief example given is the diversion of police resources to deal with acts of terrorism. On any showing it seems that there is need for an increase in the numbers of police, and possibly at the same time a need for an increase in those measures of public relations which are likely to increase understanding of the difficulties of the police among the population generally.

That is underlined when one considers that the crime detection rate has fallen from 58·2 per cent. in 1968 to 21 per cent. in 1972. In the circumstances of Northern Ireland, it is inevitable that the police are sometimes subjected to criticism of a political nature. There cannot be any area in the world where it is more true to say "You just cannot please everybody."

Some of us have received recently a publication entitled The Black Paper, published by the Central Citizens' Defence Committee of Belfast. It might be argued that the committee is not wholly objective or impartial. But it is able to quote passages from reports of such an authoritative nature as those of Lord Cameron and Sir Leslie Scarman—reports which, in some measure, were critical of the police.

History has moved on since those reports, but it is clear that the police force does not command the understanding and confidence of all sections of the population—as witness the appearance of The Black Paper itself This may not be the fault of the police. I understand that it is virtually impossible for any police force so to behave that there is never criticism from any quarter in the kind of conditions prevailing in Northern Ireland. But The Black Paper quotes a comment—a very perceptive comment—from Lord Hunt, who was asked to advise on this matter by the Ministry of Home Affairs and reported in 1969. He said:

"Policing in a free society depends on a wide measure of public approval and consent. This has never been obtained in the long run by military or para-military means. We believe that any police force, military in appearance and equipment, is less acceptable to minority and moderate opinion than if it is by clearly civilian in character…".

I seek today to stress that the Government must find ways of making police forces more widely acceptable to greater sections of opinion in Northern Ireland. If they do not, the police force will not be able effectively to perform its rôle. I am not seeking to apportion blame. It would be improper for me to enter into any controversy of that kind.

The Opposition recognise the courage of the police in dealing with difficult and dangerous situations. I suggest that there are two matters which are self-evident. First, it is important that the police force, like any other public service, should constantly scrutinise itself to see whether there are grounds for legitimate criticism and, if so. rectify what is at fault, or, alternatively, offer an explanation. Secondly, the police must require the assistance of the political authorities to provide the necessary resources for them effectively to carry out their work and to offer those explanations and expositions which are necessary to good public relations. I hope that within this item we shall make provision for both those measures. I invite the Minister to tell us the Government's reflections on these matters.

I agree with the view of the hon. and learned Member for Rowley Regis and Tipton (Mr. Peter Archer) about the great courage and splendid work done by the police in Northern Ireland. I fervently believe that from 1968 onwards the IRA deliberately set out to defame the police, and succeeded in that propaganda battle. But to me the police are a noble body of men and women who, in difficult circumstances, are trying to serve the community. I should like to see an increase in the number of police, and we should constantly take the opportunity to praise them.

There may well be not much between the hon. Gentleman and myself. Is he suggesting that the Central Citizens' Defence Committee of Belfast is an IRA-oriented body?

I look upon the committee as an organisation that, in the past, has been, and even at this time is being, used by the Republican movement—the IRA—to push its propaganda battle, and in this way it is contributing to disorder in the community. I would not place too much reliance on anything coming from that body because I have seen statements which it has made in the past. I shall not bore the House with those statements. In any case I would have to repeat them from memory and I might quote them incorrectly. But statements by the committee in the past have attacked the British Army as well as the police and have tried to discredit all the security farces and the judiciary as well.

Item 6 of Class II provides £30,000 for the secret services. That seems a small amount in the Northern Ireland situation. Information from the public is vital to the success of the campaign against the terrorists, and the more information that can be obtained through the civilian secret services the better. We should not be slow in spending money on the secret services. The amount proposed is too small compared with the threat posed by the terrorists to the life of the Province.

I am glad that the police are having more success in bringing these evil men before the courts, and I commend the work they have been doing. I hope that they will get more support from people in the Republican areas than they have received in the past. In Republican areas they have little support. In this respect the confidential telephone plays an important part. I regret that these cruel men can use the telephone to direct members of the security forces to a particular house at which they have arranged a booby trap. Good police work depends on the co-operation of the public generally, and we should constantly remind the public in Northern Ireland of this.

Class IV Item No. 2 refers to industrial training, in which Ulster has a first-class record. We have made enormous advances since the Industrial Training Act came into operation. Is not the time opportune to examine the relationship between the gross expenditure of the training board and the actual cost of training? There may be a cheaper way to achieve the same result. Is my hon. Friend satisfied that the present system is the right answer? May not the levy arrangements work as a disincentive to the middle-sized firms in the Province, some of which do little training on their own account but rely on staff trained by bigger firms?

Will the Government re-open with the Northern Ireland trade unions negotiations on the length of apprenticeships? Apprenticeships of four to five years are too long nowadays bearing in mind the one-year intensive training course which is available at Government training centres. Would it not be possible to reduce the on-job training to one or two years, especially in the building trade, in which there will be a great shortage of workers when we start to repair all the damage caused by the terrorists? The shortage of building workers could hold us back from restructuring the economy once the IRA has been defeated, as one day it will be defeated.

In our debate on the Enterprise Ulster (Northern Ireland) Order I referred to the Youth Employment Service Board. I take particular pride in praising the board. The youth employment officers have given sterling service during a difficut time. Although the offices have been bombed, the officers have not been deterred from advising young people on job opportunities and careers. The Youth Employment Service ignores the sectarian division of the school system. I have repeatedly said that I should like to see the religious division in education brought to an end as quickly as possible. Whatever their religion, the Youth Employment service officers are welcomed everywhere. The Youth Employment Service in Northern Ireland could well serve as a model for the Youth Employment Service in England. The service is efficient and does a splendid job. In Ulster it is run by an independent statutory body responsible to the Ministry of Education. It does not pay unemployment benefit and is left free to concentrate on its main activity of providing jobs advice for school leavers and other young people.

I refer my hon. Friend to Class VIII Item No. 2. I hope that he will personally look into a serious situation which has arisen as a direct result of the water shortage. About 150 houses in the de Wind Estate at Comber in my constituency have lavatories which are served directly from the water mains—against all planning laws. When the water is cut off at 8 o'clock every night the people living in these houses, including many young children, cannot flush their lavatories. When I inquired into this I was told that the people could fill their baths with water, yet the point of cutting off the water at 8 o'clock is to stop the waste of water. Baths filled with water present a hazard to young children. Is it not possible for the people in the de Wind Estate to have their water cut off at a later hour? Perhaps my hon. Friend will let me know, not necessarily now, what he will do about this?

Class I Item No. 5 of the appropriation order refers to the Parliamentary Commissioner for Administration, and Class IX Item No. 2 refers to the Northern Ireland Commissioner for Complaints. I do not know why the allocation is separated, as the same person occupies both positions and the same officers are employed on both duties. There may be a simple answer to this, and I hope that my hon. Friend will give it.

On Class IX Item No. 1, will my hon. Friend say when the House will be given a full report of the grants paid under the Social Needs (Grants) Act (Northern Ireland) 1970? Available resources, for political reasons, so often are directed to troubled areas, whereas neighbourhoods which have remained quiet in the face of Republican provocation are ignored. Areas like North Down which have remained quiet appear to get no benefit from the legislation. Great efforts have been made by local people to get the various authorities interested in community schemes in North Down.

In the village of Moneyreagh local people have for a long time been trying to get a children's playground and a community hall, for which there is a great need. The RUC Community Relations Branch has shown sympathy and concern, but, unfortunately, that has not been reciprocated by other Government interests involved. The local representative of the Community Relations Commission has also been helpful, but still no progress has been made. The local people have come up against a blank wall of red tape which I intend to break through, no matter how long it takes, and I hope that my hon. Friend will assist me in getting help for these people. Had this been an area in which young people were involved in baiting the police and soldiers, money would have been poured in, but it seems that because North Down is relatively quiet it can be ignored.

I am personally interested in this and other worthy projects in North Down. There should be no need constantly to be engaged in a battle with Government Departments for the provision of necessary amenities for young and old. I was dismayed to hear yesterday that the proposed youth wing of the Glastry intermediate school has been turned down. I referred to this matter on the last occasion when we debated the appropriation and I got nowhere. I do not accept the Government's refusal to help. The Glastry intermediate school, which has a splendid reputation and serves a wide part of the Ards peninsula, has been turned down on the ground that priority is given only to those schemes situated in growth or key centres. North Down is a growth area, the Ministry of Development regarded it as such and it has stated this often enough. The people who live there know that it has been designated as a growth area. But the Minister or those advising him must be ignorant of the fact that it is a growth area, and this seems to display an appalling ignorance of the situation.

I ask the Minister to go to the Ards peninsula and have a look around. He will then see what needs to be done in that area. We are expecting a further and larger influx of population from Belfast. I cannot see why the youth wing has been rejected. The reason must be that North Down gives no real trouble to the Government at present and, therefore, can be ignored. I hope that we shall not repeat the mistakes of the past by making no provision for recreational facilities for young and old alike. Acres of new houses have been built in my constituency but there is a dearth of open spaces with proper facilities for children. and quiet restful places for the old. We need to plan more parks and amenity areas close to the areas of population. Furthermore, the area could also be made more of a tourist attraction. The people of Belfast need to get out of the smoke and dirt of the city into the countryside, and we must ensure that there are proper amenities for them.

I demand that the Government should immediately review the situation in North Down to see that it gets a fair deal. It is not getting a fair deal at the moment. It is a rapidly developing area, and I shall not be put off by the usual bureaucratic excuses for inactivity in a relatively quiet part of the country which has not taken part in acts of civil disobedience such as the rent and rate strike.

I wish now to refer to Class VIII of the Draft Appropriation (No. 2) (Northern Ireland) Order. A great deal has been achieved with regard to housing in Northern Ireland, but much still remains to be done. There are more than 3,000 substandard houses in North Down which are beyond repair. Many people living in North Down desperately need houses but cannot obtain them. I have been told that the people in Belfast in riot areas are on a priority and emergency list and must be housed first in North Down, and in many cases local people have to go to the wall. I could take the Minister to houses in North Down which he would regard as a disgrace. In a number of streets in Newtownards there are dark, damp, mouldering houses. After some years they will be demolished and replaced by other houses, but families are living in them at the present time. People should not have to live in such dreadful conditions. Those conditions can be found in other towns and villages in North Down.

In our affluent society of 1973, in this highly technological age, there is no excuse for people being allowed to live in such deplorable conditions. North Down appears to be regarded by some people, including some civil servants at Stormont, as a prosperous area, and, therefore, it is felt that it can be ignored. But it cannot, and must not, be ignored, and I do not intend that it should be ignored.

Elderly people in North Down are in an even worse plight than young married couples, who have my deepest sympathy when they try to make homes out of a few rooms. At least the young have energy, drive and hope to do something about their living conditions, but the old are often the silent victims of the bureaucratic system. Elderly people living on pension and facing ever-rising prices do not have the money to furnish their homes with even ordinary creature comforts.

The high hopes that I once had for the Northern Ireland Housing Executive have not been fully realised. I appreciate that the executive has taken over a tremendous number of houses from councils throughout Northern Ireland, but I believe that it is now in a complete shambles and cannot cope with the amount of work which it has taken on. This must be the explanation for its insensitive approach to people's basic needs. There are individual exceptions among the staff of the housing executive, because I have had the pleasure of dealing with them, but decisions made at the top show an indifference towards people.

Who, for example, decided that the Northern Ireland Housing Executive office, once situated in the centre of Bangor, should be moved to the outskirts of the borough? Some people have to take two buses to get there and no bus actually passes the door of the office. Therefore, if people want to raise some query with the executive or want to approach officials for advice, they have the greatest difficulty in getting to the office by ordinary transport. This is indicative of a callous indifference to ordinary people.

Surely in this day and age we should not make it more difficult for people who wish to complain or seek advice about matters which are of deep concern to them. This is a time when we should be paying more concern to people's welfare: we should be going out of our way to help them. The example I have quoted of the inaccessibility of the housing executive is a disgrace, and it is repeated in other parts of North Down in other instances—and, indeed, it may be repeated throughout Northern Ireland. The executive should be situated in the town centre so that it may be accessible to all.

Absence of democratic control over the Northern Ireland Housing Executive has meant that bureaucratic efficiency, administrative neatness and executive convenience have come to occupy the primary position of concern in the minds of those who should be serving the great cause of providing a house for every family which requires one.

I turn to Class VIII, Item 6. I should like to deal with the question of planning, for I believe that there is a need for a new look at the complex planning laws in Northern Ireland. So often the planners seem to become bogged down in detail, while whole areas of the country are desecrated by so-called development. How absurd it is that a planning appeal can be won and yet the applicant can still be turned down by the intervention of the local authority. This actually happend to one of my constituents. All he wanted to do was to build a lavatory and bathroom to his house. After he took the matter on appeal to the Ministry for Development, the local council intervened and rejected his proposal because it infringed a local byelaw. Cases of that kind indicate the great need for my hon. Friend and his colleagues to look at Northern Ireland's planning laws.

More attention should be paid to the restoration and rehabilitation of existing cottages and houses which are attractive in appearance. Many beautiful villages in North Down are likely to be ruined by careless and thoughtless development. My hon. Friend knows the town of Hillsborough, where the Governor of Northern Ireland resided. I shall not go off on a tangent to express my feelings of utter regret that the Government decided that we should no longer have a Governor in Northern Ireland. But Hillsborough is a famous town. The area will not be enhanced by the decision of the Northern Ireland Housing Executive to build about 200 houses in an area of natural beauty just a few miles outside the town when the local housing need could be met by better planning and the renovation of existing houses in this historic town, thus helping to retain its character.

Another instance concerns Donaghadee, a delightful seaside resort where the planners intend to remove a row of well-maintained Victorian cottages on the seashore that provide a pleasing vista not only for those who live in the area but for visiting tourists. Worst still, the planners propose to run a main road right along what is at the moment the esplanade, bringing cars and car parks right to the very part where peace and beauty should be retained.

The planners will destroy the attractive areas of Northern Ireland unless something is done. The people of Donaghadee are angry. There are cases in Bangor as well. Something should be done by the Ministry for Development. The planning laws should be looked at again with a view to seeing that the natural beauty of Northern Ireland is preserved. If the planners paid less attention to preconceived notions of what the community needs and more attention to what makes a particular area live and what gives it character, they would perform a great and lasting service to the community.

All too often the planners are regarded by the people as the officials who direct their lives and override their wishes. Provision ought to be made by the Government through the Ministry for Development to ensure that all persons directly affected by planning decisions had not only prior notice about what planners intend to do, or what they were thinking of doing, but have their legal expenses paid so that they might pursue reasonable planning appeals. It is wrong that a citizen should have to suffer the sanction of bearing the costs of legal advisers and of counsel at a hearing of this kind when he is performing a public duty in making an objection to a plan.

I want finally to refer briefly to Class III subhead 4, in respect of the expenses of prisons and borstal institutions and certain grants in aid. I want briefly to refer to the question of Kiltonga House. I fought against the establishment of Kiltonga House as a remand centre in Newtownards. I lost. But I am assured that it will not be used as a remand centre after a period of four years. However, it is a pity that people living in the area were not properly consulted before the Ministy decided that Kiltonga House was the best place for a young offenders centre.

I ask my hon. Friend to consider as a matter of urgency the provision of a new prison in Northern Ireland. Crumlin Road and Armagh are out of date. We need a new prison. It is no use allowing civil servants to ponder and to think deeply about the provision of a new prison in Northern Ireland. We must have one There is no disputing that. As a matter of urgency the Government should say, "Yes. We shall have a new prison and we shall announce the places where we are thinking of establishing it so that all the people in those areas can make representations to the Minister if they wish to object against the establishment of a prison in their area." We need a new prison urgently. I hope that my hon. Friend will take my words to heart and see that action is taken on that matter.

I shall not detain the House for very long. I am aware that other hon. Members have been waiting for a long time to take part in the next debate.

I must draw attention to the fact that the order which makes provision for the expenditure of some £358 million, bringing the total for this year up to £561 million, has been put on today's Order Paper at the end of a long week spent on Northern Ireland affairs. We have debated the Northern Ireland Constitution Bill at great length, finishing its Report and final stages. The Northern Ireland (Emergency Provisions) Bill went on until a very late hour last night. Today we are considering one Bill, which has gone through all its stages, and two important orders. I feel that the Government's business managers might have considered it better to put down this important measure for discussion at some other time. The expenditure of £358 million is no small matter.

What is more, as the hon. and learned Member for Rowley Regis and Tipton (Mr. Peter Archer) said, this is an occasion when all types of grievance may be raised affecting the rest of the United Kingdom. It is the one occasion when hon. Members have a duty to do so. As this House is still in complete control If the affairs of Northern Ireland, this is an occasion when we should have been able to deal with all the matters covered by my hon. Friend the Member for Down, North (Mr. Kilfedder) in what I thought was a magnificent speech.

Another matter on which I ought to comment is that there are only half a dozen hon. Members present to take part in this debate, and I think it is fair to say that some of them are waiting for the next debate.

Many of the matters raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Down, North touch on points which I had intended to canvass in respect of my own constituency. I have in mind especially my hon. Friend's remarks about housing. In Belfast on the Newtownards Road there has been a great deal of slum clearance, but there has been very little progress in providing adequate houses for those who have been dispossessed and in clearing up the entire area in what is an important part of the centre of Belfast.

I hope that my hon. Friend will be able to deal with the plight of the elderly. I receive many complaints from elderly people who cannot find adequate alternative accommodation. Some of them are occupying houses in which they have lived all their lives. Elderly widows and widowers are in houses with three and four bedrooms when small flats would suit their needs. However, because they are unable to find flats, whole houses which might be provided to married couples with young families are rendered almost sterile.

Another matter of great concern to me is the Black Paper which was referred to by the hon. and learned Member for Rowley Regis and Tipton. It was issued by the Citizens Central Defence Committee, a body which at one time spoke for the Republican movement in Northern Ireland. I believe that some of its officers were members of the Provisional IRA. Any statement made in that document must be treated with great care. I am sure that the hon. and learned Gentleman did not intend to do so himself, but this propaganda medium has been used skilfully in the past to undermine our police force and in that way undermine established authority in Northern Ireland.

No criticism of the Royal Ulster Constabulary can be sustained. The force has performed a most difficult rôle in the face of constant attack over the pest three years. I can speak with close personal knowledge of my own area, and I know that the force deserves the highest praise. It is commonly accepted now that Lord Hunt's recommendations were misguided. Who in present circumstances, and with the benefit of hindsight and knowing of the casualty list in the security forces amounting to 250 deliberately killed by the IRA, would have dreamed of disarming the police? Unfortunately, the disarming of the police has resulted in many assassinations and attempted assassinations of members of the police force. The police perform their rôle diligently and with complete impartiality. The attempt in the Black Paper to undermine them is to be deplored.

I ask my hon. Friend to enlarge on Class VII Item 2, expenses of the Ministry of Commerce. There is a great deal of industry in my constituency of East Belfast. Large sums are involved in the Vote. Also, large sums are being made available for housing and education. How much of this is to be devoted to attracting new industry because of the high unemployment in Northern Ireland?

The question of training has been mentioned. How much is devoted to assisting existing industries? A great deal of fuss is sometimes made about the need to attract new industries from outside, but for the expenditure of a smaller sum many existing industries could greatly increase their prosperity and, consequently, provide more employment, with all the spin-off resulting for other industries in Ulster. I do not wish to criticise the work of the Finance Corporation, which is making money available to attract new industry and devoting much time and effort to it.

We have had an interesting debate. As the years pass these appropriation orders become political colanders in which every local problem can be caught, exposed and dealt with, but——

That is the point of them.

I hope that my hon. Friend will allow me to finish. I see these orders as political colanders, but I regard this as of great importance. Anybody who doubts the importance of the House need only reflect that in these debates small problems can be highlighted. My hon. Friend the Member for Down, North (Mr. Kilfedder) mentioned lavatories. This is democracy in action. It will be a sad day when we cannot discuss these matters.

I take the point raised by the hon. and learned Member for Rowley Regis and Tipton (Mr. Peter Archer) about the timing of debating these matters. I would much rather have these debates during the day than late at night, so this is an improvement.

As regards the future, the hon. and learned Gentleman will appreciate that under the order it is a matter of urgency. The last order took us up to July. This order will take us a stage further. Later it will be for the new Assembly to deal with these matters, where a full debate can take place, more so probably than now, and where various local points and difficulties can be raised. Much will depend on the date of the devolution orders under the Constitution Bill and until then we must carry on.

On Class III(2), it is important to understand the extreme difficulty under which the police force works. I wish to pay a sincere tribute to the police, as would anyone who has observed them on duty or has been with them, as Ulster Ministers are constantly, surrounded by four security men and with the local police force operating. One then realises how difficult it is for the police and one appreciates the sincerity of their fears and those of their wives. The whole setup is so difficult for them, and they perform their rôle magnificently. Wherever I go I am confident that I am secure and that the police are playing a real part.

Of course the police would like to turn from security work back to the prevention and detection of crime, which is their primary function. However, it must be accepted that in the emergency their priority must be to deal with the terrorists.

We should like to see an increase in the numbers of the police. A great recruiting drive is under way. Recruitment should be broadly based, with recruits being drawn from the minority community as well. Only then will the force be really accepted. We are trying to achieve this. As new recruits come forward, more money will be provided.

It was very unfortunate that the Black Paper should have been brought out at this time—not by the hon. and learned Gentleman, but by those who published it. It has been refuted by my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State. The police force is as sensitive as anybody to criticisms, and complaints are investigated carefully. It is no good looking back into the past. In the difficult situation in Northern Ireland the police need to be strengthened and encouraged. They should know that they have our confidence in the difficult task they have to perform. This is in no sense any criticism of the hon. and learned Gentleman. He wanted to know the Government's views.

I welcome what my hon. Friend the Member for Down, North said about the police force.

On Class IV (2), great efforts are being made with various schemes to train people. My hon. Friend was right to mention the building trade. Much will need to be re-built in the Province. It will be necessary to use modern methods of building construction. This means new techniques and men being trained in those techniques.

My hon. Friend was right to mention the Youth Employment Service Board and its work in seeking to show job opportunities for young people. I have heard of, and I know, the good work that it does in helping school leavers to find jobs.

My hon. Friend referred to the houses where the water supply is cut off. This is not a laughing matter. I must be careful what I say, but at the place where Ministers stay the water supply is cut off and we have to fill a bath. The most practical way of dealing with the problem is to have a plastic bucket. That is how one has to operate when the water is cut off. I appreciate the problem, and particularly as it relates to the 150 houses that are connected direct to the mains. Perhaps my hon. Friend is saying that they have no facilities for the storage of water.

That is so.

It is odd that there is no storage tank in the house to give them a certain amount of water, and I shall look into that problem.

The next matter raised was that of the Parliamentary Commissioner for Complaints and the Parliamentary Commissioner for Administration. He is the same man, and he gets one salary. The other moneys are for his staff. That is the position as I understand it.

My hon. Friend referred to the Social Need Act and to the efforts that have been made in North Down to obtain a grant but so far without success. He made a serious complaint about the youth wing. We shall look into that, but I remind my hon. Friend, though I do not suppose he will like me for saying this, that it is a question of priorities. I can understand an hon. Member fighting as hard as he can for his constituency—that is the correct thing to do—but in the circumstances in Northern Ireland so much money is needed for areas that are even worse off than that of my hon. Friend's that I think he will agree there must be a system of priorities. However, I shall look into the matter.

My only point is that there are a number of young people in the area who get into trouble with the police, and that is why it is essential to have this youth wing.

I have promised to look into the matter.

I note what my hon. Friend said about houses, and I trust that what he said will be noted by the housing executive and the various authorities. Things are difficult over there. It is a question of priorities because of the extreme difficulties under which they are trying to work.

I must correct what my hon. Friend said in connection with the new prison. I do not agree with his criticism of civil servants. It is the duty of civil servants to think, though my hon. Friend suggested that they should not do so. My view is that they should look at the picture as a whole and give Ministers the best advice that they can, and I am sure that that is what they do.

I am full of praise for the civil servants in the Ministries in Northern Ireland with which I am concerned. We must pay a tribute to them because they do a first-class job, and I must take my hon. Friend up on what he said. It is important to realise that there may be some delay in finding the best site and seeing whether the site that is eventually selected is the best one to meet future needs, and so on. All that is done by civil servants, and they do it extremely well.

I, too, pay tribute to the civil servants. Most of those who work at Dundonald House live in my constituency. The prison is urgently needed, and I hope that my hon. Friend can tell me what is to be done.

I am sure that my hon. Friend's views will be noted.

My hon. Friend the Member for Belfast, East (Mr. McMaster) is concerned about the elderly, and I think he is right to be concerned. This is a problem. These people are coming to the end of their lives, and the difficulties with which they have to contend must be an extremely heavy burden for them. I am sure that the Minister who deals with these matters will consider any specific problem which my hon. Friend is prepared to put forward.

Questions were asked about the Ministry of Commerce. Large sums of money are being used, but the money is being spent on important projects. It is being used to attract new industry and launch new schemes and new factories in order to get things under way. I agree with my hon. Friend when he says that it is a question not only of introducing new schemes and bringing in new people and new industries but of looking after the existing industries, and I am sure that the Ministry of Commerce will take note of what has been said.

We have had an interesting debate, and I conclude by asking the House to approve the order.

I beg to move,

That this House takes note of the Quirk Committee Report on Speech Therapy Services.

It is generally agreed that "speech therapy" is not a particularly felicitous description. The head of one of the schools of speech therapy told the Quirk Committee that

"the term 'speech' is wholly inadequate and 'therapist' wholly misleading".

Indeed, the phrase may have suggested to some hon. Members—and I congratulate them on their patience in waiting for a considerable time for this debate to begin; it shows the interest which they have in this subject—that this debate was going to provide useful information about the more effective use of one of the tools of our trade, namely, public speaking, but we have seen from the previous debate that that is unnecessary.

More narrowly, the speech therapist conjures up to some the picture of an elocutionist in a white coat. "Therapy" emphasises therapeutic functions and ignores diagnostic ones, and "speech" strictly refers only to the executive or motor functions of the vocal organs, whereas the speech therapist is concerned with all forms of language, including gesture and writing. Even now, insufficient attention is paid to the importance of communication between people in the development of personality, and in this normal speech and language are crucial factors.

Speech itself is an extremely complicated process and, although the small profession of speech therapists played a pioneer rôle in this field, many other professions are involved in the assessment and management of speech disorders. The normal development of speech depends upon hearing, and on linking sounds, written symbols and the expression of language in spoken words.

Many complex nerve pathways are involved, as well as the psychological and emotional aspects of the desire to listen and the wish to communicate. There are plenty of opportunities for things to go wrong, and it is perhaps surprising that most of us develop speech, as it seems, almost automatically. When something does go wrong, doctors, audiologists and psychologists as well as speech therapists have a part to play in the full assessment of disordered speech.

Why did four Departments—my Department, the Department of Health and Social Security and the Welsh and Scottish Offices—decide in 1969 that an inquiry into speech therapy services was required? The prime reason was the severe shortage of therapists. The 1951 Cope Report on Medical Auxiliaries, which included speech therapists in its remit, found a need for at least 750 in Great Britain as compared with a practising strength of about 290, and by the beginning of 1969 the supply and the demand had both increased substantially. The supply also was not evenly distributed. The shortage was particularly acute in the north-east Midlands, the West County, Wales and northern Scotland.

Nor did numbers working bear a satisfactory relation to numbers trained. The majority of freshly-qualified therapists left full-time service after working for only two or three years, many on the occasion of marriage or pregnancy. Of these, only one fifth appear to return to service later. In addition, isolation, lack of opportunities for promotion and poor working conditions were all discouraging factors.

The second main reason was the precarious position of a small autonomous profession poised between education and medicine, claiming affinity with both but refusing to be dominated by either. The search for identity was complicated by the existence of two types of service, an education service provided by local education authorities, as part of the school health service and a hospital-based service forming part of the National Health Service. About three times as many therapists are in LEA employment as in the hospital service. Therapists in the two services tend, as the Quirk Committee found, to develop different attitudes, thus reinforcing a dichotomy in the profession. At the same time, both in the hospital and in the education service inter-professional co-operation has often been impeded by lack of understanding of what a speech therapist can and cannot do.

The third factor which led to the appointment of the Committee was that the pattern of training needed review. It had largely been unchanged since 1945, apart from the establishment of a degree-level course at Newcastle in 1964. Courses tended to be fragmented rather than integrated, and to be overloaded with doubtfully relevant pieces of information. The shortage of speech therapists, particularly the lack of senior appointments, had also led to a shortage of suitable placements for students undertaking clinical practice as part of their training.

The Quirk Committee in less than three years produced a thorough analysis of the problems confronting the profession and made some far-reaching proposals for dealing with them. A rapid expansion of the profession was considered necessary. The committee regarded the present full-time equivalent staff of 820 as quite insufficient and set a target of 2,500 speech therapists as a long-term aim. These would be backed by a new class of aides, who would undertake the more repetitive and routine work under supervision and thus reduce the number of therapists needed by about 1,000 from 3,500 to 2,500.

The present output of trained therapists would need to be more than doubled over the next 20 years, from 160 to 350, to achieve this target, and the Committee recommended an energetic publicity campaign directed at both school leavers and women who left the profession on marriage. A broad-based training at degree level which brought both students and staff into contact with other faculties was regarded as essential.

The committee had no doubt that the present divided structure of speech therapy services was wasteful of resources and had hindered the development of the profession. Despite the difference between work with children and work with adults, they were convinced that there was a fundamental unity in the work undertaken by therapists in the education service and by those working in hospitals. Further, unification would help to secure continuity of treatment from the pre-school years through school days to, if necessary, adult life, and it would make possible a better career structure and opportunities for specialisation, thus increasing the attractiveness of speech therapy as a career.

In addition to recommending that the organisation of speech therapy services should be unified, the committee recommended that they should in future be organised under area health authorities in England and Wales and under health boards in Scotland. They preferred this solution to organisation under LEAs or social services departments of local authorities, because they believed that speech therapy had much less affinity with remedial teaching or social work than with medical therapy.

They also considered that advances in speech pathology must proceed hand-in-hand with advances in related medical and other disciplines. Moreover, as a result of the reorganisation of the National Health Service, most of the speech therapist's colleagues in the school health service would come under the area health authorities. The committee recognised that special arrangements might be necessary to enable LEAs to employ speech therapists, for example to serve full time in special schools, though it hoped this need might be met by long-term secondment from the unified area service.

There were a number of other recommendations either linked to the key ones I have mentioned or dealing with other important topics, for instance, the establishment of a central council for speech therapy and the need for research. I will leave it to hon. Members to refer to any in which they are particularly interested. Perhaps I might express interest in the committee's conviction that

"a better balance between men and women is essential for the stability of the profession ".

We hear so often about professions that are almost entirely a male preserve; speech therapy is the reverse. In contrast to the position in some other countries, more than 99 per cent. of practising speech therapists are women.

Without subscribing to the old-fashioned view that men are needed to provide leadership, or even that it takes a man to cope with technical devices—I am sure that the hon. Member for Fife. West (Mr. William Hamilton), who I see hovering here, would put me right on that—I can see some force in the argument that men might provide more stability in the profession and introduce a career approach. But there is imbalance here. No doubt if he catches the eye of the Chair, we shall hear some reflections from the hon. Member on this issue. I suspect that the preponderance of women in this profession may not give him an unqualified occasion for rejoicing.

I am told that the work of the committee, of whose members about one third were drawn from speech therapy, education and medicine, proceeded with remarkable smoothness and that a common mind emerged on many issues at a comparatively early stage. I am sure that hon. Members would agree that much of this was owed to the leadership of the chairman, Professor Randolph Quirk, Quain Professor of English Language and Literature at University College, London. He combined a formidable capacity for work with an acute critical mind and the rare ability to produce bold and original ideas. He preferred to argue issues out rather than to paper over the cracks with a compromise form of words, as though he were negotiating some kind of Treaty of Gastein. It was largely due to his determination and to his skill and courtesy as chairman that a unanimous report was produced in a field of complex and highly contentious issues.

What is the Government's attitude to the committee's recommendations? I know that that is the question to which hon. Members would like to have an answer.

Hear. hear.

I am glad to have the support of my hon. Friend, although I fear that it will be only temporary. Unfortunately, this debate, although welcome, is a little premature. We have not yet concluded our deliberations on the highly complicated issues which are involved and which involve different Departments. Her Majesty's Government hope to be able to make a further statement by the autumn.

I say "a further statement", because my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State said in reply to a Question on 15th May that three other Secretaries of State and she had

"…now accepted the Committee's recommendations that speech therapy services should be unified and that they should in future be organised under area health authorities in England and Wales and under health boards in Scotland."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 15th May 1973; Vol. 856, c. 276.]

The bodies that made comment on these recommendations supported unification, and only four out of the 15 consulted by my Department opposed unification under health authorities, though some of the others were anxious to ensure that educational needs are adequately met.

It is quite understandable that educational bodies should have fears that the needs of the education service may be overlooked if control of the speech therapy service passes into the hands of health authorities. The same fears have been expressed in relation to the school health service—and the same answer applies—namely, that the need for close collaboration between health and education authorities is a fundamental principle of the new set-up, and it will be up to the education service to make its needs known and press for them to be met.

Further, unification of the profession within a reorganised National Health Service will help to develop the teamwork approach which is so necessary in the assessment and management of speech disorders, and will reduce the isolation from which many speech therapists have suffered in the past. The special expertise and skill of the therapist, both in diagnosis and treatment, should, with a team approach, be better appreciated by the other professions concerned, and the therapists themselves should understand better the roles and skills of those professions.

The acceptance of these two key recommendations establishes an organisational framework for the future. That, at least, has already been settled, and when the Government announce their decisions on the other recommendations addressed to them I am sure that the hopes of the Quirk Committee will be realised. A pattern of development will be set which will, in the words of the report

"be of use firstly in improving the outlook for those suffering from disorders of speech and language, and secondly in assisting the speech therapy profession and individual speech therapists who have, by their vitality and dedication earned the esteem of us all."

We welcome this debate. We shall pay careful attention to the views expressed by hon. Members on both sides, and they will be taken fully into account when we make our further and definitive statement later in the year.

The gift of being able to communicate is perhaps taken for granted by those of us fortunate enough to have the normal power of speech. The valuable report before us presents a depressing picture of a speech therapy service battling against acute staff shortages, unsatisfactory working conditions and inadequate professional status. The ultimate victims are deprived children and adults struggling against an invisible disability, and with nobody to help them.

It is fitting and appropriate that in this debate we have opening from the Front Benches respectively a spokesman for education on the one side and for health on the other. We welcome the proposed reorganisation and unification of the speech therapy service under the new area health authorities in England and Wales and under the health boards in Scotland, but it is to be hoped that this will be only a start. Alone, it cannot solve the serious problems revealed in the report. It is regrettable that we are being asked to take note of the report: we should like to see action taken upon the many recommendations in the report, and we eagerly await the Government's further statement. I know that Professor Quirk has publicly deplored the delay in the implementation of the committee's recommendations, and it is to be hoped that the Government will treat the report with a sense of urgency.

The Under-Secretary, answering a Written Question from my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent, South (Mr. Ashley) in May this year, said that the number of full-time speech therapists or the equivalent of speech therapists working in the education and hospital services in Britain was about 900. This would seem to be a shamefully low figure to serve the whole of Great Britain and is the most serious revelation in the report.

This acute shortage, which I am sure was already known to most hon. Members, affects certain areas more than others, as has been pointed out. The southern region, excluding London, had at the end of 1970, 91·8 educational speech therapists, whereas the northern region had only 21·4. Only a few weeks ago I received a letter from a constituent, the mother of a primary school child, who wrote:

"I am very worried at not being able to receive any speech training for my son as it is making it very difficult for him at school although the teachers are very good and help all they can, hut since he had to give up speech classes last year about November he has not got on very well. I was told that there would be another class held when it was possible, but what do we do in the meantime? "

I sent this letter to the Under-Secretary, the hon. Member for Barkston Ash (Mr. Alison), and I received a reply this morning which points out:

"In Halifax … at present only one part-time therapist is employed who works mainly with adult in-patients. The local health and education authorities have a joint establishment for two full-time speech therapists and both posts are currently vacant … one speech therapist left at the beginning of December 1972 and although the authorities have since been advertising these posts, they have been unable to fill them."

Meanwhile this primary school boy goes on at a critical time in his life without any speech therapy at all. I am sure that this situation can be multiplied in many constituencies.

The hospital story is no better. In reply to my hon. Friend the Member for Manchester, Wythenshawe (Mr. Alfred Morris) on 31st December last year, the Minister pointed out that of 102 hospitals and units which had at least one subnormal or severely sub-normal person under the age of 16, 61 had no speech therapist at all on their staff.

Some authorities are unable to recruit therapists after years of advertising, and the College of Speech Therapists had over 100 vacancies advertised in February 1972. Meanwhile there are these people, particularly the very old and the young, waiting for attention. There are geriatric patients, after strokes, unable to receive speech therapy, and people who have had surgery or suffered in road accidents. I know personally of a woman who had a stroke which left her almost speechless but was unable to get a speech therapist to come from the hospital. So the family paid £70 for a course of speech therapy privately. This is, clearly, discrimination against those who cannot afford £70 to pay to have their relatives treated. There are children growing up, particularly the mentally handicapped, lacking help, those who get no systematic screening and so get delays in treatment.

Then there is the hidden need which is mentioned in the report—a growing and ill-defined need which is unquantifiable. Thousands might benefit if the therapists were available and if the scope of what they can do was fully understood, but, as people know that the speech therapists are not available, they are not coming forward for treatment.

We feel that with speech therapy today we may be dealing only with the tip of a very large iceberg. As the hon. Gentleman has said, services throughout the country are under-staffed by about one-third and need to recruit at least 2,500 more staff. Yet what is being done in training?

The Under-Secretary of State for Education and Science in another Written Answer—he has written many answers recently—on 23rd May pointed out that

"Facilities for training speech therapists have also been expanded."

My heart rose. Then the reply went on:

"Six extra places are available on an existing course in England.'—[OFFICIAL REPORT. 23rd May 1973; Vol. 857, c. 91.]

That was over the last five years. Clearly, there is a great deal to be done in training more therapists.

How do we tackle this acute shortage in a vitally important profession? The hon. Gentleman pointed out that it is predominantly female. He has a high intellect, for which I have great regard, but he did not pursue this remark by asking himself or the House—perhaps he did ask himself—why it is predominantly female. Why are physiotherapists, occupational therapists, dieticians and speech therapists female? It is a question to which there is, clearly, an answer. When wages are inexcusably low, men always say that women are best suited to that type of work. The reason why there are not more speech therapists is that their wage is totally inadequate in relation to the responsibilities that they carry, their qualifications and the training needed.

More than 99 per cent. of speech therapists are women. The number of men in practice as speech therapists today is nine. I suspect that those nine may feel that they are so dedicated to the profession that they cannot think of doing anything else. But the basic grade pay for a speech therapist is £1,107 rising to £1,815. The large majority of speech therapists are earning the basic rate of pay. Only a very few go above that to the senior grade. So the maximum that they can expect is £1,815.

To illustrate further the point that speech therapy is female-dominated not by a natural process of evolution but because the pay is low, in America and other countries it is not female-dominated and there is a far more even sex distribution because of the simple fact that the pay is much higher. Is this career being projected as a career to men or is it regarded as one of the women's jobs paid with women's rates, which is what I suspect? Bearing in mind that in the last year the cost of living rose by 8·2 per cent. in this country, £1,107 is totally inadequate.

All these people are dedicated but exploited. That applies to so many who work in the health service, and to a large extent, in the teaching profession. A point which is forgotten when discussing women's wages is that many of these speech therapists are supporting parents or children as well as themselves. So if there is to be a greater recruitment and more people in the profession, there must be an improvement in the pay.

In Canada the commencing salary for a speech therapist is £3,000. As is said in the report, scores of speech therapists have taken jobs abroad. There is a brain drain, or a speech therapy drain. The Under-Secretary may say that this has nothing to do with the Government but is for the Whitley Council. But it seems to me that the Whitley Council needs a great deal of reform. The Labour Party is committed to reforming the Whitley Council. Certainly the speech therapists should organise themselves into some powerful trade union.

Two thousand of them?

They should join together with other similarly oppressed professions, such as the physiotherapists and the occupational therapists. These are all suffering from the same exploitation.

Then there should be an improvement of status. The report says

"At present circumstances are such that speech therapists cannot give a service of the quality that they feel to be needed, or of which they feel themselves to be capable."

There is a sense of professional frustration among many speech therapists. The lack of senior appointments is a frustration, because those appointments depend on the number of staff supervised. If there is a low number of staff anyway, one's chance of supervising a large number is accordingly diminished. There are heavy work loads, and the average therapists' current case load is 100 at any one time.

There are other examples in the report of had and unsatisfactory working conditions, and, if not discouragement, no positive encouragement from the medical profession. The doctors and consultants could give far more encouragement to speech therapists.

Then we come to the opportunities for part-time work. Over one third of speech therapists are working part time out of a total of about 1,280 practising, and those part-timers are, clearly, the therapists who are married. There seems a great need for more flexibility among local authorities to employ part-time speech therapists. Many authorities just refuse or make it so difficult that the women despair and do not try any more. Married women, as with so many married women teachers and doctors, need encouragement to return when they have left a profession for a few years. They want refresher courses, incentives and good working conditions. Again, we return to better remuneration and professional status.

Then there are those who practise privately. Nearly 300 speech therapists listed in the college's directory are engaged only in private practice. Why is that so? It is because the money is better. So we come back to the same thing again. Here we have married women, often part-timers, in private practice who should, in my view—perhaps not in the Government's view—be working in the National Health Service in the future. They are creating a situation where patients who are better off are able to buy speech therapy privately, when others go without.

In conclusion, this is a most valuable debate, but I say again that the House and the Government should not be satisfied with merely taking note of the report. They must secure the development of this vitally important and dedicated profession to its full potential. There is a growing need for speech therapy, which must be met urgently. This excellent report reveals the huge deficiencies in the existing service and recommends the actions which we must take.

I agree almost entirely with the hon. Member for Halifax (Dr. Summerskill), apart from one or two deplorable and cheap Socialist smears that she managed to bring in for the sake of her party. But the sense of her speech was, indeed, extremely good sense.

The most important point that we have to go for is paying speech therapists more. Unless we pay these dedicated people a proper salary, the profession will continue to bumble along at about a total of 2,000.

Not only is adequate pay vital; the significant point of professional status needs particularly to be examined. I should prefer to look at the matter of professional status from the moment of training onwards.

At present, these young people, who leave school and go into speech therapy training with at least two good A-levels, work far harder than the average university undergraduate for far longer hours and in a far more dedicated manner. They do their work on the fringe of the universities or teaching hospitals and come away with a diploma.

Some of them then wish to go for higher training, and their diploma is viewed as something that the university authorities do not understand and do not want to know about. The authorities merely ask them what A-levels they have and they then have to take a first degree in divinity, or some other totally irrelevant topic, in order to proceed for six years further for a higher degree in speech therapy. Let us get clear in our minds straight away the two crying needs—proper degree status for the existing courses, which are far harder than the average university course in any similar topic and, secondly, infinitely better pay.

The hon. Member for Halifax did the House a great service by pointing to the lamentably low wages of speech therapists. But that will continue until we get county councils and other employing authorities to take a far more generous view of their overall conditions of employment. Speech therapists are frequently expected to interview their children in a sort of brush cupboard, or in part of the staff room, or, if the staff have a meeting, who knows where? They are pushed away into the most unattractive working conditions.

In my part of the world, as in every part of this country, by law the agricultural labourer gets a three-weeks' holiday. How long a holiday do speech therapists get? In most employing authorities they get two weeks' holiday. This is inconceivable in the professional situation in which we want these people, to work.

If numbers are to be increased, not only must they have a proper career structure but they must have Opportunities to control other staff. It is no good talking about controlling other staff unless some staff exist. We do not want a world in which there are all chiefs and no Indians. At present, there are perishing few Indians, and we want a great many more. I think that the hon. Lady was wrong when she said that there were nine men in practice; I believe that at the moment there are 11. But whether there are nine or 11 is scarcely here or there.

I deplored the hon. Lady's rather cheap attack on those therapists who are doing valuable work in private practice. Had her attack been directed at the local authorities that are too inflexible and too unintelligent to offer a part-time career structure to those willing to work part time I should have appreciated her remarks.

I was not attacking the therapists; I was attacking the system that forces those married women who want to do part-time work into private practice because the wages are so abysmally low elsewhere.

Precisely. That is the point I am making. It is because of the lamentable conduct of the local authorities. That is what we should be attacking.

I hope that my two hon. Friends and my five right hon. Friends who are involved with this profession in one way or another will collectively have a go at the local authorities. If we are promised Government action in the autumn, let us have a go at the employers before we get to that position. The hon. Lady mentioned her party's desire to put a bomb under the Whitley Council, but this profession is so small that it is time for Her Majesty's Government to speak firmly on the topic and say that if the profession is to be increased it must be properly paid. The sort of salary now considered is about 80 per cent. too low.

I turn from the subject of pay and conditions to the vital topic of research. I pay tribute to Professor Gimson and his team in the National Trust for Speech Therapy Research. They are doing an extremely good job. They have met hon. Members on both sides of the House and explained what they are trying to do.

It is exceedingly difficult for a voluntary body to have to go begging for private money for research unless the Government come clean about their intentions. I hope that my hon. Friend will give us some idea of what the Government mean to do towards helping with research. If we cannot have an answer this afternoon, perhaps those interested in the topic may have a written explanation later. I hope that in the autumn, when the policy is announced, generous provision for research will be made.

It is essential that the would-be part-time therapists mentioned in both opening speeches should have their lot made easier. It is not only pay; it is not only annual holidays; it is the general flexibility and the understanding of the problems of the school-age mum, the problems of highly trained people whose services are now being lost to the nation.

So far we have been speaking perhaps too much of school children and their needs. Looking around and counting heads—although counts are out of fashion—I believe that by the law of averages one of us now present ought to be seriously injured in a motor accident this year. It is a gloomy thought, but that is the national average.

This mythical accident in which one of us is statistically to be involved may deprive him of his speech. We are a windbaggy old lot in this honourable House and if any of us was deprived of his speech, it would be deplorable to him, however agreeable to his family. The fact must remain that unless there is a far greater increase in speech therapy services available to adults injured by accident, and deliberately by the surgeon's knife, many people will be deprived of the most primitive but necessary method of communication with their fellows.

My hon. Friend who is to conclude the debate is the Minister responsible for old people, just as my hon. Friend who opened it is the Minister responsible for young people. I hope that the geriatrics and the road accidents will be considered, but they can be considered only if the therapists themselves are considered.

I agree with virtually all that the hon. Member for Maidstone (Mr. John Wells) has said. I commend to the House the excellent work that he does elsewhere in this Palace for those in whom I know him to have a keen interest. The only part of his speech with which he would not expect me to agree was his opening comment about the excellent speech and the excellent Socialist sentiments of my hon. Friend the Member for Halifax (Dr. Summerskill). However, this is mainly a bipartisan occasion—a consensus across the back benches. I cannot extend that courtesy to the Front Benches.

We all have a personal interest in this subject. If only hon. Members on both sides of the House would not mumble so much, it would not be so difficult to hear what they are trying to say. If the House gets an occupational health service, as I hope, I also hope that one of the first things it will have will be a speech therapist. For some hours I have had to listen to the hon. Member for Down, North (Mr. Kilfedder) talking about Northern Ireland, but I have found it difficult to hear what he has been saying.

I accuse the Government of being dilatory. They have a shocking record here. I acquit the Under-Secretary of any bad diction in opening the debate. He read his brief admirably. It was only when he turned round from time to time to address his hon. Friends behind him that we lost what he had to say. I confess that his complacency appalled me. I am delighted that the Government are to accept the recommendation of the Quirk Report to take this subject away from education and give it to area health authorities. We may get more of a sense of urgency from the Department of Health and Social Security than we have had from the Department of Education.

The Government are indicted and stand guilty in this area, as in all the professions supplementary to medicine. It is amazing that this should be so when the Secretary of State is so much aware of the problems of disability, the mentally handicapped, long-stay hospitals and the problems in medicine generally. This morning we read that £15 million is to be given to the doctors at the drop of a hat. The doctors always get their money at the drop of a hat, yet, as my hon. Friend the Member for Halifax rightly said, not only speech therapists but psycho-therapists, physio-therapists and all those people without whom a good deal of the Health Service would almost certainly grind to a halt, are neglected. The Government have a blind spot about them.

This is the most under-nourishsed, even starved, area of the Health Service. Unless the Government do something about it fairly rapidly it will die of starvation. That will affect many other areas of health and education. Let me give some examples of the kind of invaluable and devoted work which speech therapists do. The House is aware of my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent, South (Mr. Ashley), who is a living example of what can be done by someone to rehabilitate himself after a disability. The House will also be wishing good luck to Jack Hawkins, that marvellous British actor who is struggling for his life at the moment. Before he had his recent operation he was able to rehabilitate himself in his particular sphere of activity, in which he had so much to offer the public. That was thanks to the devotion and patience of speech therapists, following an operation upon him for cancer of the throat.

Another example is Douglas Ritchie. I commend his book "Stroke". Those who have read it know that for five years following a stroke he struggled to be able to communicate. He had been employed by the BBC. Thanks to the devoted work of speech therapists, and his own efforts, he was able to return to the community and not be pushed into a backwater as a disabled person who had had a stroke and was only part of a human being. It is such people whose voices ought to be heard when we are trying to twist the arm of the Chancellor of the Exchequer for adequate finance and endeavouring to get a little animation into the Department of Health and Social Security.

Page 121 of the Quirk Report deals with the organisation of the speech therapy services. Conditions are deplorable. A speech therapist in the education service does a session in a school—probably in the headmistress's room or some out of-the-way corner—with no proper equipment or facilities. This is almost a return to Victorian slum conditions. The salary scales are ridiculous. If any hon. Gentleman cares to walk 200 yards from this place he will see a notice in Victoria Street asking for temporary shorthand-typists and offering wages of £200 per month.

An occupational speech therapist, if he or she is lucky, begins work with ILEA at £1,233 a year at age 21. This follows a considerable amount of effort and training. The salary rises over the years to £1,941. ILEA is at the top of the three. Its scales are higher than anywhere else. There is a difference between the two Departments covering Education on the one hand and Health on the other and I hope that the implementation of the promise given by the Under-Secretary to integrate all speech therapy under the DHSS will mean that this will come to an end. At present a principal speech therapist with ILEA receives £2,970, whereas a principal in the National Health Service receives just over £2,000 a year. It is ridiculous that people with the same qualifications and responsibilities should have such a gap in this case £900 in their take-home pay.

An example of the wages situations was given to me by the West End Hospital speech therapy training school—part of the St. Charles group. The scale at the Central School of Speech and Drama, Eton Avenue, London, for a senior lecturer is £3,131 compared with the National Health Service scale, for a deputy principal, of £1,878. A supervisor of studies receives £1,845. The complacency of the Government in the light of this kind of evidence—which they have had for years and years—is fantastic.

"Years and years" takes us back to a Labour Government.

I am afraid it takes us back to 1961. I was a member of a Standing Committee considering the Professions Supplementary to Medicine Bill when a good deal of this evidence was given to the right hon. and learned Member for Hertfordshire, East (Sir D. Walker Smith) who was then Minister of Health. I accept our share of the responsibility. We should have been able to move much more quickly.

I turn now to the lack of attention being paid to the teaching of lip reading, and the refusal of the hon. Gentleman, given in answer to a question of mine the other day, to give any advice to LEA's about the size of classes for lip reading. Many authorities will not reduce the size of classes because the regulations do not permit them to do so. Yet the size of a class for persons able to gain from learning to lip read should not exceed 10. There is, equally, an inadequacy of lip-reading teachers and training courses. Even with the good areas, such as ILEA, there is an annual allocation for cash, and classes can only be organised within the budget. There are teachers and facilities and pupils wanting to learn how to cope with deafness, yet there can be a sudden cessation of the classes because the money has run out. This is ridiculous in a civilised community.

The Medical Research Council now has a working party under Professor Howarth combining research between the Social Science Research Council, the Medical Research Council and the Science Research Council. This working party is looking into the possibilities for speech therapy and the art of communication and understanding. There are two parts to speech therapy, falling into distinct compartments. There is therapy for those pre-lingually deaf and therapy for those post-lingually deaf. There is the whole aspect of language and cognition of the signals received through sound. Work on this subject is going on at the moment in a number of universities. The project by the Science Research Council and the Medical Research Council will be able to give a good indication of further activity.

Whatever kind of report is delivered, such as the Quirk Report, the only thing that makes it tick is cash—we all know that. We must put cash behind research, and when a project is put forward an allocation of funds must be made, otherwise it is just another beautiful report lying on somebody's shelf collecting more and more dust.

I warn the Government of a complete breakdown in the whole of our speech therapy services unless they take more immediate action to implement this report than seems possible from the speech of the Under-Secretary of State. People are leaving speech therapy through wastage, and there is a lack of recruitment. As the hon. Gentleman and my hon. Friend the Member for Halifax pointed out, whole areas of the country have no speech therapists—indeed, no service at all. We cannot wait for area health authorities to start their work on this on 1st April 1974. The Secretary of State should act now.

The Minister has indicated that the Government may be prepared to go further in the autumn, but unless there is immediate and almost drastic action of a kind that we would have if we were at war, where the need is understood with sufficient force of cash and consultation—it is fantastic that since the Quirk Report there has been no consultation with the College of Speech Therapy and no round table conferences—the Government will find themselves in splendid isolation. The Minister can be assured that the present motion is so totally inadequate that we should perhaps think of a vote of censure on the Government.

I, too, was a little deterred when I looked at the motion simply to take note. I am always for action, and I think a great deal of action is necessary in the speech therapy service. But when I heard the excellent speech by my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary of State I realised how wise it was to have a debate of this kind so that the House, which is not particularly well attended, could understand what speech therapists not only want but require. I am grateful for the terms in which my hon. Friend opened the debate.

I have myself exerted quite a lot of pressure over the years for the things I have thought necessary in medicine and in services to the community, and I want to put on record how proud I am that the Government which I have the honour to represent have taken real action in so many sectors. It is true that many sectors still remain where action is needed, but the Government have started the process and I am proud of what they have done, which is a great deal more than the last Government did. We can all talk about the need for more money and for doing this, that and the other, but the Conservative Government have really taken action.

The hon. Member for Halifax (Dr. Summerskill) made some comments about physiotherapists which I found rather difficult to follow. For quite a long time I have had the great good fortune to represent Parliament on the Chartered Society of Physiotherapists, and I have had some very good letters from the society telling me how glad it is that the Secretary of State for Social Services has taken the trouble he has in connection with the requirements of the physiotherapists. Perhaps the hon. Lady has not bothered to get all her facts quite right before making her speech.

I cannot understand how the hon. Lady should think that physiotherapists are satisfied with their lot. My hon. Friend the Member for Willesden, West (Mr. Pavitt) can bear me out. We met a deputation of physiotherapists only two weeks ago. The members of the deputation pointed out that physiotherapists are extremely dissatisfied with their pay. Whether the hon. Lady is referring to other matters do not know, but from the point of view of their pay, which was the point I was making in my speech, they are far from satisfied.

The hon. Lady is right. I am saying that after the physiotherapists had had their recent meeting with my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State they felt that they had had a sympathetic reception——

Sympathy, but no cash.

Hon. Members are always talking about cash. Just for once, listen to me. I have had letters from the Chartered Society of Physiotherapists, and I am its representative. The physiotherapists felt that the Secretary of State was sympathetic to them in the way he met them and listened to their point of view and in the action that he had taken. It is unfortunate that the hon. Lady does not know all that goes on behind the scenes. I am delighted that my right hon. Friend has met the Council for Professions Supplementary to Medicine led by the Chartered Society of Physiotherapists and that action is in the pipeline.

Good.

When we are fighting for what we want, as we have to, we must not exaggerate the difficulties or fail to give recognition to what is done by those who are responsible.

I always like to make a balanced speech and I am rarely satisfied with what we are able to do. The foreword to the Quirk Report is signed by my right hon. Friends the Secretary of State for Education, the Secretary of State for Social Services and the Secretary of State for Scotland and my right hon. and learned Friend the Secretary of State for Wales. I am sorry to say that the last paragraph of the foreword is not very encouraging. Secretaries of State have the opportunity to influence the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and when any of my hon. Friends who are Secretaries of State want assistance I am only too delighted to support their arguments with the Treasury. The paragraph to which I have referred does not demand sufficient action.

The salaries of staff who are in the Chartered Society of Physiotherapists, the nursing profession and the Council for Professions Supplementary to Medicine are much too low. The Government are sympathetic in these matters, and I hope that they will recognise that the remuneration of these categories of people is so low. When this question is raised I get tired of being told by certain Secretaries of State—I will not nominate them—that this is a matter for the Whitley Council.

I was interested to hear the honourable Lady the Member for Halifax say that the Labour Government—if ever again they come to power—would reorganise the Whitley Council. Well, they certainly were in power long enough to appreciate the defects of the Whitley Council. I get a little fed up with constantly being told in respect of negotiations over salary rates in the professions and also in other sections of the community, "This is a matter for the Whitley Council."

Members of Parliament are not stupid and one well knows that the management side of the Whitley Council represents the views of the Secretary of State. It is fair to say that the Secretary of State's views are bound to be linked with the success or lack of success the right hon. Gentleman has with the Treasury. The management side of the Whitley Council is under the control of the various Secretaries of State or the Government Departments concerned. I have tabled a penetrating Parliamentary Question about the nursing profession which I shall ask the Secretary of State for Social Services next week. I hope that the Government in future, instead of saying "This is a matter for the Whitley Council", will say whether they are in favour of increasing salary rates in the professions. I am pretty certain that the Secretaries of State who find themselves faced with these matters are in favour of increased salary scales, which are very necessary indeed.

We all recognise that resources must be taken into consideration and that the resources which are available will be fairly and justly distributed. The Opposition seem to take no interest in how the money is provided and appear to take the view that the money has always been there. I sometimes think it would be a much better idea if the Labour Party were to take the view that everybody in the country should do a fair day's work for a fair day's pay. I know that people in the professions do a fair day's work, but if the same attitude prevailed in the whole of the country there would be much more money available to put into the professions which we are discussing today. I believe that the Conservative Party would see to it that there was a fairer and more realistic distribution of available resources, but I am not so sure that this would apply to a Labour Government, because members of the Labour Party seem to labour under so many ridiculous inhibitions.

I am delighted to have had the opportunity to take part in this debate. I believe it is a good thing that in considering the desires of speech therapists the Secretary of State for Education and Science and also the Secretary of State for Social Services should be linked in a common endeavour to assist the therapists and their work. That will give greater strength to the case which the Quirk Committee sets out in very great detail.

I also agree with the hon. Member for Halifax that the Quirk Committee was right to say that power must be exercised upon the local authorities. Often this depends upon the types of councillors who are elected. But those who speak for the professions ought themselves to exercise a little more pressure so that when council elections are held the needs of the professions are expressed.

Those who elect our councillors often do not realise that if they want more speech therapists, nurses, physiotherapists dieticians, and the like, they must express those views during council elections. In that way members of the public are alerted to the needs of people who do such great service to try to improve the health of our nation.

In terms of salary scales it is very important that a great step forward is made to ensure that trained people who carry great responsibility and are essential if health conditions are to be improved are adequately remunerated. I cannot help thinking that certain people exercise more pressure on the Treasury and get better treatment as a result than can be achieved by certain sections of the National Health Service in which many of us are deeply interested. But that is what happens in life.

Very often in this House of Commons it is essential for hon. Members to obliterate their party differences. In a debate of this kind the Opposition Front Bench spokesman must always get in "a bit" about this Government. I am afraid that sometimes I feel that I must get in my bit about the Opposition when they were in power. But I happen to know quite a lot about this subject and about what is needed in my part of the world. The North-East Coast is under-serviced. But it is a great pity that when we discuss these matters we tend to forget that quite a number of parts of the service are not political matters but professional matters. I wish that we could discuss them purely on the basis of their being professional matters and that we could eliminate the political controversy.

I hope that my hon. Friend the Under Secretary of State will be able to say that the professions will be properly and adequately remunerated and that the management side of the Whitley Council will be instructed to that effect by the Secretary of State.

We have a magnificent Chancellor of the Exchequer. It a case is put to him, if the evidence is produced and if he has the money, which depends on the efforts of the country as a whole, I believe that we can go forward sure in the knowledge that when the next election comes these professional people will be properly remunerated. A great many of them are very much on the side of the methods which my Government have operated. I hope that we shall be able to show that we can find the money to ensure that those who do so much to help the country and the under-privileged in the matter of health are adequately and properly paid. I am sure that that is the desire of all the Government Secretaries of State.

On occasion the hon. Member for Tyne-mouth (Dame Irene Ward) speaks with several forked tongues and a singular lack of judgment. This was no exception, particularly when she described the speech of the Under-Secretary of State for Education and Science as an excellent one. The hon. Gentleman himself knew that it was not. He could not conceal the fact. He was a computerised Minister fed with bromides, who was signing off. He gave all the impression of one who was glad to be rid of something.

I am not sure that the hon. Gentleman was right about that. It is proposed that we hand over this service to bodies that will not be democratically elected. I agree with the hon. Lady to that extent. We are to have area health boards that are not democratically elected.

I am sorry that no representative of the Scottish Office is present, for in Scotland the appointments to area health boards, which are already made, are deliberately politically biased. In my area of Fife, which is a predominantly Labour county, there are seven known Tories on the area boards and only three known Labour people.

The hon. Lady said that she was proud of her Government's record. The Government were not very proud of the result of the by-election at Manchester, Exchange, where they polled 600 votes and the Tory candidate lost his deposit. There were no signs there, anyhow, that the general public appreciate what the Government are doing.

The Quirk Report is a good example of the inadequate attention which the wealthy, educated community pays to the needs of minorities who themselves are often inarticulate, unorganised, and embarrassed by their disabilities and for whom care and attention too often involve unrewarding, unromantic work which rarely hits the headlines.

I find the report very well written and readable but thoroughly depressing. Not the least impressive part of it is the historical account of the pioneers in speech therapy in the late nineteenth century. Mothers have been at this since Adam and Eve, in a not very scientific way but always anxious to tell their friends and relatives when their child makes the first articulate sounds.

The pioneering work of individuals and then, I am glad to say, the first local authority clinic in Manchester followed by the hospital clinics in London at St. Bartholomew's and St. Thomas's about 60 years ago indicates the gradual development of the recognition of a problem and of the ways of treating it.

It is interesting to note that the organised professional training for this work began principally at the end of the First World War. Up to then speech disorders had been, generally speaking, left by the medical profession to teachers of elocution and even teachers of singing and vocal production. By 1935 there were four established schools of speech therapy offering two-year courses of training. Three of these were predominantly medical in background and orientation, while the fourth was educationally orientated.

In many ways, the story of the historical development of this service is a sad commentary on our so-called civilised society, in that very often it takes a world war to inspire invention, innovation, and revolutionary progress in a field which might otherwise have been neglected. The report points out that during the First World War young men were coming back with severe head injuries which led to speech handicaps which in turn led to educative therapy and medical treatment. That is the revolutionary story of the development of this service.

The First World War and its aftermath inspired the establishment by Professor Norman Nott's rehabilitation team for neurosurgical cases at the Bangour Head Injuries Unit near Edinburgh, and the speech therapist appointed was the first full-time speech therapist in the hospital service.

Subsequent to that, there was the organisation and development of the service into, on the educational side, the Association of Speech Therapists, and on the medical side, the British Society of Speech Therapists. That was the position until the Second World War brought those two bodies together in the new College of Speech Therapists. It is difficult to pay too great a tribute to the pioneers right up to the Second World War.

We now have a relatively new profession of speech therapy with courses of training which have improved since the initial stages but which need still further improving. Since the passing of the Education Act 1944 and the Health Service Act 1948 there has been clear and increasing evidence that the demand for this service has exceeded the supply. I need not go into the figures, as they have already been produced in this debate. The output of the 11 courses of training is a miserable 150 a year, but perhaps the Minister has more up-to-date figures.

Qualifications for entry to the college are high. They are higher than, or at least as high as, those required for entry to university. Indeed, there is a degree course only at Newcastle University, though others may be in the pipeline.

This is a highly professional body which deals with exceedingly complex problems of human communication, and not just with stammering. At one time it was devoted almost entirely to dealing with stammering. I remember my own school days, when a boy or girl who stammered and stuttered was a figure of fun and ridicule. Indeed, I am sorry to say that is still often the case.

This science has been developed to a much more sophisticated degree and, as one would expect, an association has been found between speech defects and deafness or partial deafness, acquired brain damage, mental handicap. autism, severe social deprivation—to which I shall refer in a moment—and dyslexia. A combination of two or all of those things can lead to severe defects of one kind and another.

Complaints have been made in the report and in the debate about the inadequacy of the career structure. The same qualifications are required within the education service as within the National Health Service, but local education authorities can legally employ unqualified persons and they cannot stop private unqualified persons from practising. I do not know how extensive that abuse is, but perhaps the Minister could tell us and the extent to which he has authority to stop it. In Scotland, of course, we do things better. The National Health Service Regulations 1964 cover the employment of speech therapists in both local authorities and the National Health Service. There is no difference of treatment.

The problem which has exercised the mind of every speaker in this debate is the salary structure and the consequent and inevitable sex structure of the service. According to the Department of Employment Gazette that I was looking at yesterday, the average weekly earnings for men in manufacturing industry were £36·20 in October 1972. The highest gross pay for an assistant speech therapist after six years is £1,431, or £27 a week. So, after six years of service as a speech therapist one gets £9 a week less than the manual male worker in manufacturing industry.

If one goes right to the top, a senior speech therapist, after 10 years, gets £2,079 maximum—roughly £40 a week. So, after 13 years of highly-dedicated skilled and qualified service the senior speech therapist gets £4 a week more than average male earnings in manufacturing industry.

In the light of those figures, no one will be surprised to know that the entrants for training as speech therapists are nearly all girls. No boy would look at a career carrying that kind of prospect. Figures have been quoted in the report. In 1968–69, of 764 applications for training, 15 were men—one in 50—and only two of those 15 accepted places. The 1971 intake included five men, and the hon. Member for Maidstone (Mr. John Wells) said that there were only 11 male speech therapists in practice. I do not know whether the Minister has any accurate figure—I had thought that there were nine—but it is a minute proportion of the total.

Another point in the report is worth recording, that another 26 men, trained as qualified senior speech therapists since 1944, have left altogether, not surprising. Many of them have gone to other countries. My hon. Friend the Member for Halifax (Dr. Summerskill) mentioned the United States. According to figures that I got from the Library, the median salaries in elementary and secondary schools in the United States in 1970—three years ago—were £4,000 a year.

After these people have trained in this country, they go to Canada, where the starting salary is £3,000. Salaries are higher also in South Africa and Australia. We invest this money in expensive training and then we lose the value of these people's services. As a consequence we face an almost criminal shortage where there is an increasing demand. Calculations were made in 1945 that local education authorities should have one speech therapist for every 10,000 of school population. This was far from reached, especially in the socially deprived areas. Table II in the report shows that all the deprived areas suffer from shortages of speech therapists. They are, therefore, deprived in this respect as well as in education, housing and environment. In these areas it is a comprehensive deprivation.

The shortfall in the hospital service is equally serious. The Under-Secretary of State for Education and Science spoke of a formidable problem of wastage. He said the average length of service of speech therapists was about three to five years. He pointed out that the obvious cause of this wastage was an earlier marriage, but that itself underlines the need to enable married women to come back to the service after they have brought up their children. They ought to have the facilities to encourage them to take a course of retraining and to have their children looked after so that they can then offer their qualified service to the community.

This is a struggling profession, on inadequate salary and given extremely poor, almost disgraceful working conditions tolerated by a dedicated group of people grappling with a problem of unknown but obviously great dimension, and watched by a relatively indifferent public and, up to now, by indifferent Governments of both political complexions.

I understand that salary scales are now being negotiated and will be applicable from 1st April last. I should be glad if the Minister can tell us whether they will come within phase 2 of the incomes policy. If they do, it is quite clear that these people will suffer a fall in their standard of living, despite what the hon. Lady the Member for Tynemouth says. If the amount is to be £1 plus 4 per cent. it inevitably means that the standard of living of these people will fall. Or are they to be treated as a special case? We should be told.

There is too much ignorance amongst the general public about the work being done, and too little publicity. The Government should start a vastly increased publicity campaign. Too little attention is paid to the medical training, for instance. The committee made its own estimate that, far from the 1945 ratio of one speech therapist to every 10,000 children, the ratio should be more in the region of one to 5,000.

We have not had any survey of speech disorder in the adult population. I hope that the Minister will tell us that the Government will put in hand some such survey to find out the extent of the problem, not only among school children, where it may be established fairly accurately, but amongst the adult population, where we are in deeper waters. The committee estimated that 40,000 adults in Great Britain needed speech therapy of one kind or another. The 200,000 children, the 40,000 adults, together with the under-school-age children, gives a figure of getting on towards 300,000—and we have in post 822 speech therapists.

I do not need to labour the point about publicity for the nature of the problem and how it should be tackled. I will only say that the Scottish speech therapists have declared to me that they support the report and want its recommendations implemented as soon as possible. I do not know whether the Government have attempted any costing of the implementation, but if they have not they should have done. An implementation of the report is no less important than Maplin or the Channel Tunnel. The improvement of the quality of speech of our people is far more important as a means of communication than the construction of either of those projects. It would certainly cost far less in monetary terms and would give far greater return in human terms.

As a nation, we are prone to get our priorities wildly and inhumanely wrong. If we can afford £900 million, which is the recent estimate of the cost of Maplin—it will be double that figure by the time it is finished—we can afford to spend £10 million, £20 million or £50 million on speech therapists. That is the most effective form of human communication that we have.

I shall be brief. I am very glad to join in the debate.

The hon. Member for Willesden, West (Mr. Pavitt) complained about the form of the debate and what he called a weak motion by the Government. He is wrong about that. It is right that the Government should come to the House before they take final decisions to let us have "take note" debates on an issue such as this, where there are many views to which they want to listen. It is right that the House should be consulted at this sort of stage. It was rather unfair of the hon. Member to say that it is a weak motion. It is a highly desirable practice on the part of the Government to consult the House before taking final decisions and I hope that it will be encouraged. It is a very good use of Government Fridays.

Enough has been said about the remuneration of speech therapists. I support what has been said. I want to deal with an aspect of this matter which has been less stressed—the question of training. What the report is about is a charter for speech therapy as a profession. It is right that remuneration is critical to that. But we shall not get the kind of profession that we want unless at the same time we have the kind of training which brings about the status and the remuneration which is desirable. Therefore, I hope that my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary will be able to say something about this critically important recommendation in the report that training should be at any degree level. This is as important as anything else in the whole report.

The second aspect with which I want to deal is based on the position of the profession, unified, as we have been told, within the health service, and its position vis-à-vis the other Departments with which it is involved. Clearly, like other professions such as social work, which find that they are placed, properly, in a certain area and unified, its work goes very much beyond health and into education.

In spite of what the hon. Member for Fife, West (Mr. William Hamilton) said, the fact that in England—I believe this is true of Scotland, too—outside London, education authorities and health areas will be the same areas will help the kind of co-operation which the hon. Gentleman and I want between speech therapists working within the health service on the one hand and the education authorities on the other.

I have said previously in the House that the links are still not close enough between the health service and local authorities. I want to see a health service responsible to local authorities. However, perhaps this is not the right time to develop that theme again.

The Government must state their intentions in this matter, and before too long, because the whole of the speech therapy profession will be under the aegis of the National Health Service and, therefore, within the Government's responsibility rather than that of local government.

It is critically important that in the reformulations that are going on in advance of April 1974 the interests of speech therapy should not be forgotten. The College of Speech Therapists is very concerned; it has received from the Department a letter in which it is told that it will be several months before consultations can begin on these matters. As we are having this debate I ask my hon. Friend that it be not several months before these discussions take place, because there is among speech therapists a feeling of uncertainty; with all these changes going on they are not clear where they will find themselves and whether their responsibilities will be properly exercised. I therefore press my hon. Friend to take a rather more vigorous approach to the consultations and to let them begin soon.

My final point has been touched on already, particularly by the hon. Lady the Member for Halifax (Dr. Summerskill)—the question of encouraging and helping married women to take part-time work and use their skills. I hope that my hon. Friend, when replying to the debate will state his intention of studying the obstacles that clearly exist—they are not exclusively financial ones—to encouraging married women to come back into this profession. The gap between the numbers required in speech therapy and the numbers at present practising is so large, and the time will be so long before enough more therapists can be trained, that there really is no other means available to us in the short term to bridge this gap than encouraging and helping married women to come back into active work, which, given the right conditions, I believe they would profit from and enjoy doing. I hope that my hon. Friend will give an assurance that he will look very carefully at this matter and look at the impediments which at the moment exist.

The Government, in taking the initiative to debate this report, have, I hope, indicated to the House the importance and significance which they themselves attach to the subject, to the skilled personnel who are involved and, above all, to the people in need of the remedial treatment which is available through speech therapy.

The common theme running through the debate—one to which I deeply subscribe, largely as a result of experience that I have had in going round particular health establishments—is that one of the fundamental aspects of life on this planet is that it is social, and that an indispensable element in social life is communication. If communication in the case of an individual breaks down, that individual is literally and specifically dehumanised. It is my belief that the curious phenomenon of defects in speech and hearing—stammering was the instance which the hon. Member for Fife, West (Mr. William Hamilton) referred to, and we all know about the public effect of hearing defects—giving rise to ridicule and mockery, is brought about precisely because human beings instinctively class those who suffer from these defects as in some way dehumanised.

It is entirely regrettable, indeed appalling, that this should be the case, but the effect of a loss in communication is to dehumanise someone and this is how ridicule and mockery arise. They do not arise in the case of the blind, for example. In that instance, solace, sympathy and care are engendered, not mockery. We are here concerned with something fundamental to the claim of a group of human beings in our society that they are utterly human in their attitude. That is why the report is extremely important.

I add in passing that one of the features of the hon. Member for Willesden, West (Mr. Pavitt) that always impresses me is not the skill with which he hears words that are uttered by others but the skill with which he utters words in return, because one of the most significant effects of the loss of hearing is the loss of the capacity to monitor one's own speech, and the two hang extremely closely together.

That is precisely why speech therapy is crucial in the context of these two features of the loss of communication. Often one of the most tragic aspects of early deafness in children is the recogition that without the help of speech therapists, among others, they will have this double disability of being unable to hear clearly and being unable to monitor their own speech. That is why we are doubly concerned with the Quirk element no less than the problems of the hard of hearing.

The hon. Member for Fife, West made a fair point when talking about minorities. This country has woken up very late to the phenomenon of disability. The blind have always been with us and there has been no shortage of voluntary organisations and public bodies happy and willing to do something for them. But it is staggering to reflect how recent is public awareness and concern about the range of disabilities that Amelia Harris has brought before an unsuspecting public.

There are 3 million men and women over the age of 16 and living at home who have some greater or lesser degree of sensory, mental, or physical impairment. Only in the late 1960s did we begin to become aware of this and only in 1970, after 1,900 years of Christian civilisation, has the country begun seriously to tackle the problems of the minority groups that the hon. Member for Fife, West discussed. The epileptic, the mentally handicapped, the mentally ill, the hard of hearing, a whole range of mobility conditions and so on—only in this decade are we beginning to tackle them.

At last we are doing it, but the charge that minorities have always been neglected until they themselves have managed to break through into public recognition by their powerful and tireless attitudes is a fact that reflects on the records of all parties in this country. The only way in which we can atone for the shortcomings of the past is to make certain that we do something effective for the future.

I invite the House to maintain a reasonable sense of perspective now that we have brought forward the Quirk Report and invited the House to consider it.

In a fair and understandable introductory speech, the hon. Lady the Member for Halifax (Dr. Summerskill) deplored the shortage of therapists. The hon. Member for Fife, West, in what I thought an extreme phrase, talked about it as being criminal. My hon. Friend the Member for Tynemouth (Dame Irene Ward) talked particularly about local government shortcomings, of which we have been conscious, in the administration of some of these services in the past.

But we must not allow too extreme a note of gloom to spread over us in this context. We must remember what has happened. and the Quirk Report itself makes it clear. I ask the House to study the table in paragraph 5.13. It is remarkable that in the past 17 years just over 2,000 therapists have entered the profession. It is within a time-scale of 20 years from now that Professor Quirk recommends we should increase the full-time force of therapists to 2,500. That is saying a great deal. He is asking us to have a slightly greater rate of increase over a slightly longer period of time. It is not entirely out of the question, and it shows that something has been achieved.

Above all, it shows that the growth forecast by Professor Quirk is not impossible. What comes quite clearly out of the figures that Professor Quirk presents us with, and again I refer to paragraphs 5.13 and 5.14, is the catastrophic wastage of the work force. The net increase over the past 17 years is pitiably small. We only just keep up in our output. The latest figure I have is 152 in 1971.

Clearly, salaries are relevant. I confirm most of the figures that have been mentioned. Since April 1972 the basic rate salary has been between £1,107 and £1,815 and for the senior grade from £1,554 to £2,079. The Whitley Council has recently agreed in principle to a revision of salaries, to be operative from 1st April 1973. Details of the agreement will have to be submitted for the approval of the Pay Board before being implemented. I cannot say anything further, not having the right to disclose, or to have any formal knowledge of, these recommendations before the Pay Board pronounces upon them. An increase is agreed in this voluntary Whitley machinery representing both sides. It awaits the imprimatur of the Pay Board.

I invite the House to consider that the scale of wastage associated with this predominantly female work force, which tends to get married within three or four years of qualification, is not one which could be significantly arrested by massive increases in wages. What can be done is to take active steps to encourage these women to return to work after they have married and brought up a family. Local authorities have been criticised for the way in which they have sometimes failed to react imaginatively to the conditions and needs of married women and to provide them with part-time sessions and facilities.

The reorganisation of the National Health Service on 1st April 1974, with the full transfer of these professional people into the ambit of the NHS, will mean that we shall be looking at the deployment of speech therapists, full-time or part-time, from a single viewpoint, systematically over the whole country. We shall be able to repair some of the defects. Local authorities should be assured that we shall do everything necessary to sustain the level of service which they are providing, even when the speech therapists whom they are at present employing come within the ambit of the NHS. We shall want to see that at least the present service is maintained. We shall want to do more by facilitating the return to the profession of married women.

I have noted the points made by my hon. Friend the Member for Chelsea (Mr. Worsley). particularly about the uncertainty which lies over some of the future. We shall take note of that and try to put it right.

I am grateful for the opportunity to raise the important subject of the housing cost yardstick. The Minister will be aware that I will relate my remarks to the London Borough of Islington. In the short time available, I will be as brief as possible. Otherwise. I should have included other boroughs in London which have much the same problem as we have in Islington.

Mr. John Wheatley introduced the Housing (Financial Provisions) Act in 1924, but the problems of municipal housing are, I regret to say, still with us. Various Governments have over the past 50 years tried to solve the problem. Undoubtedly, a lot has been done but still many problems remain.

The London Boroughs Association is equally concerned about these problems. In common with the central Government, it has a mutual interest in building adequate homes at a reasonable cost. Had the concept operated in practice as planned, there might have been little cause for complaint from the councils faced with the task of obtaining tenders within the prescribed limits. However, continuous inflation over the last four years has rapidly reduced the cost limits below those involved in building to the required standards, and quite apart from other changes four increases in regional variations have been necessary.

The Secretary of State for the Environment announced on 2nd November 1972 that the problems of London and a number of other cities were such that he was prepared to grant special yardstick allowances for individual schemes in areas of particular stress where local conditions made this necessary. This seems to have been acceptance of the London boroughs' contention that tenders could not be secured within the prescribed limits.

The task of local councils like Islington, and their architects, has been further complicated by the unwillingness of three major Departments of State to uplift their yardsticks and by the refusal of the Department of Health and Social Security and the Department of Education and Science to adopt regional variations.

Under the Housing Subsidies Act 1967, local housing authorities were given permission to accept tenders for housing schemes, providing that the cost was not more than 10 per cent. above the yardstick. It was accepted at that time that most schemes would come within the yardstick and the 10 per cent. tolerance would be used for including higher standards in excess of Parker Morris. Where any part of the 10 per cent. tolerance was used it would not be eligible for subsidy. This principle has been continued under the Housing Finance Act and where schemes exceed the yardstick, a contribution must be made from the general rate fund to the housing revenue account to cover the revenue cost.

When introducing the yardstick procedure, the Government announced that they would review the figures from time to time and take account of changes in cost levels, design practice, and so on, and increases were announced which affected Islington as follows. The effective date of 1st April 1969 showed that the increase was 6·66 per cent. On 1st May 1972, it was 9·33 per cent.

For the last quarter of 1972 the comparative index for costs of construction over the country as a whole had reached 153 and in London the situation was much worse. During this period, construction costs have been rising steadily and rates in bills of quantity show more than a 50 per cent. increase over the comparative rates in May 1972.

Since May 1972 the procedure used by the Department of the Environment for approving tenders is to allow a market factor addition to the yardstick. The addition is granted separately for each individual scheme and is allowable for subsidy under the Housing Finance Act. The Department claims that this system has the advantage of flexibility because if schemes are treated individually difficult cases can be given special consideration.

The system creates problems for the council, however, as the control which the fixed yardstick provides has now been lost. In the past, schemes could be costed at preliminary design and final design stage. If it was clear that the yardstick could not be achieved action could be taken before it was too late. Under the present system the final yardstick is not known until the tenders have been received and a market factor allowance has been negotiated with the Department of the Environment. This means that at the time when changes may be made to a scheme it is difficult to know whether the scheme will meet the yardstick at the end of the day.

Another problem relates to the amount of the market factor allowance. It would seem from recent approvals that, after negotiating the market factor allowance, schemes are coming out close to the higher level of tolerance—10 per cent. above the yardstick. Some of this excess is accounted for by the higher standards—full central heating, better facing bricks, larger floor areas—and the borough architect feels that, as acceptable standards of dwellings have advanced since the Parker Morris Report, the basic yardstick should be increased to take account of many of the items which are now regarded as higher standards. Although the extent to which higher standards apply is in some cases a matter of judgment, it can hardly be claimed that all the unsubsidised expenditure is represented by higher standards. The council, therefore, is having to bear a proportion of unsubsidised expenditure on all schemes in order to maintain the housing programme.

I will give examples of two schemes recently approved, showing the proportion of unsubsidised expenditure. Scheme HDA33 at Compton Street—8·80 per cent. Scheme HDA70 at Hillside—5·78 per cent. This means that a local authority like Islington, with a large programme, is building up a tremendous future commitment of unsubsidised expenditure. I will give figures to show how, if the current situation continues, the annual cost to the council will accumulate. In 1973–74 it will be £45,000, in 1977–78 it will be £233,000 and in 1982–83 it will be £541,000.

To place this commitment in the context of the effect on housing expenditure as a whole I will give figures of the net deficit expected compared with the rate equivalent. In 1972–73 the net deficit will be £1,117,000 and the rate equivalent will be 5·80p. In 1982–83 the net deficit will be £15,327,000 and the rate equivalent 34·06p.

The view of Islington Council is that the Department of the Environment should up-date the yardstick to take account of current and future building costs and improved standards so that the yardstick may resume its original function of acting as a realistic instrument of cost control. The new yardstick should be subject to frequent review to keep pace with rising costs and changes in acceptable standards.

It may be thought from my arguments that Islington is a bad area, but it is not. As the Minister knows, the council has more than 5,000 new homes in the course of erection, some of which are almost complete. Parts of our borough have become very fashionable. A shell of a private house today will fetch anything from £20,000 to £60,000. An acre of land costs approximately £250,000, and, as the Minister well knows, we have no available land for housing in Islington.

Three years ago I raised in the House in a similar Adjournment debate the need for Holloway Prison to be rebuilt outside Islington. This would have given us approximately 11 acres, but the Government of the day did not accept my arguments and thus lost for ever an opportunity of obtaining available land which we badly need.

Islington Council housing today is of the highest standard and has been praised by some of Europe's leading architects. When I mentioned earlier that private homes can cost from £20,000 upwards, the point I wanted to stress in this connection is that the average working man is quite unable to purchase such a home. Even if he has £1,000 or £2,000 available, the building societies or even the local councils are unable to help. Indeed, to those who are unable to buy such homes no help is given by the Government, barring a very small amount in tax relief. The Housing Act 1972 may in some small way have helped boroughs such as Islington, but, on the other hand, 50 per cent of our council tenants are now in receipt of rent rebates or rent allowances One must, therefore, ask what is the real problem involved when, in face of the rising costs in rents, we at the same time give half our tenants some form of supplement. Figures supplied to me by Islington Council show that rent rebates now cost £500,000 and rent allowance £120,000, and—if the present trend continues—Islington Council by 1982 will have to find £2 million for rent rebates and a rent allowance of just over Eli million.

Because of the escalation of the "lump" system in building, inner London has suffered a great deal through scarcity of craftsmen. In fact, some contractors will not accept work from Islington Council because it insists on the employment of trade union labour.

The recommendations put forward by the London Boroughs Association seem very worth while. The one that interests me most involves a yardstick that is capable of automatic adjustment, since it appears that both the present Conservative Government and their Labour predecessors seem to be committed to the yardstick method of control. In such conditions the modification required is the introduction of a system of automatic adjustment in line with rising or falling costs. The prescribed limits could then be subject to automatic adjustments based on either specially-designed index or, after suitable modifications, the Department's index of the cost of new construction. This would cover increased costs under fluctuation contracts and thus attract the appropriate subsidy by allowing the actual expenditure up to the adjusted yardstick limit.

I am aware of the Minister's concern about the housing position in inner London. I am endeavouring in this debate to bring home to him the problems facing our council of Islington. I hope that when he replies he will take into account the special needs of the borough and the points outlined in my argument. We undoubtedly require financial help to overcome the very severe problems which we face in Islington.

I am sure that we are all grateful to the hon. Member for Islington, North (Mr. O'Halloran) for raising this important matter in the House today. Before dealing with the specific points he has made let me say at once that the Government are anxious to do all they can to help local housing authorities in their efforts to improve housing conditions in their areas.

This has clearly been demonstrated in recent months. Additional public expenditure resources have been allocated to housing at a time when we have had to moderate the demands for public expenditure in other fields, and two White Papers have been presented setting out new policies and initiatives that we are taking over the whole housing field. The White Papers make it clear that the local housing authorities have a crucial rôle, involving not only new council house building but helping the voluntary housing movement to complement authorities' own efforts in the rented sector, in house and area improvement, in slum clearance, in helping people to owner occupation and, more generally, in other measures to improve the environment and social conditions. I fully understand the hon. Gentleman's feelings when he describes the situation in certain parts of the borough of Islington.

One of the primary housing responsibilities of every local authority must continue to be the provision of rented houses to meet the needs of its area.

Our work on the Action Group on London Housing shows clearly how concerned we are, and rightly so, to find solutions to the immense problems still facing London.

The hon. Member complained that Islington is having to pay exorbitant prices for housing land and that this is causing an excessive burden on the rates. I recognise that the shortage of land, and the consequent high price, is one of the main difficulties facing us in our efforts to solve London's housing problems. It is for this reason that the Action Group on London Housing, under my chairmanship, has been concentrating its efforts on finding more land—with some success, as will be revealed in the next report, which I hope will be published before the House rises for the Summer Recess.

Much of this land, of course, lies outside the crowded inner boroughs, and I think it is common ground that boroughs like Islington must continue to export some of their population in order to rehouse the remainder in decent conditions.

We must continue to look to Outer London to help with this "rippling out" process, as well as to dockland and the new expanded towns. However, Islington still needs to buy land for housing development and redevelopment within its own boundaries, and the Government recognise this need, and the cost of meeting it, by paying substantial subsidies under the Housing Finance Act 1972 towards the acquisition of sites. I understand that approval has been given to the acquisition of sites costing as much as £235,000 per acre.

Many London authorities benefit enormously from the Housing Finance Act, which concentrates Exchequer assistance on the areas where there is a continuing need to build on a substantial scale. Islington, for example, made rate fund contributions equivalent to a 9p rate to its housing revenue account in 1969–70, 1970–71 and 1971–72. The Housing Finance Act, by increasing the total amount of Exchequer subsidies paid to Islington from £1,860 million in 1971–72 to over £4 million for 1972–73 and 1973–74, has cut this contribution from the rates to about a 4¼p rate for 1972–73, and the authority's estimate in its claim for subsidy shows that it is expected to reach only a 5¼p rate for 1973–74.

As to the other long-term figures that the hon. Member has quoted for Islington, they must be based on assumptions on which I cannot comment and they could be affected by a number of factors in the years ahead. I think he will accept that those I have given show clearly that Islington is doing far better under our new housing finance system than it would have done under the former system. The point that I want to stress is that the general objective of channelling assistance to where it is really needed is being achieved.

As regards the cost of administering the rent rebate and rent allowance schemes, local authorities have a special responsibility towards their own tenants and a general responsibility for assessing the housing needs and problems of their area. As rent rebates and allowances contribute towards housing costs, we believe that they should be administered by the local authorities. The cost of administering discretionary rent rebate schemes before the Housing Finance Act was met by local authorities.

But we propose that the cost of administering the rent rebate and rent allowance schemes should, from 1974–75 onwards, be relevant expenditure for rate support grant, and for 1972–73 and 1973–74 we are allowing authorities whose costs are higher than a basic figure to count the excess costs for rising costs subsidy.

Turning now to the housing cost yardstick, which is a very complicated matter, I believe we have dealt with this in the most practicable way possible in present circumstances. The scheme, as the hon. Gentleman acknowledged, was introduced by the previous administration. We have increased the basic yardstick figures by amounts varying from 23 per cent. to 43 per cent. since June 1970. The last general increase in the figures was in May 1972.

The movement in tender prices since then has not been a steady one. During the last half of 1972 tender prices for new local authority house building schemes began to move in a very erratic fashion. A study by the Department showed that there was no consistent pattern even within the same region or, indeed, between adjacent London boroughs. Some authorities were receiving tenders in line with the basic yardstick while in other areas tenders were much higher. A general increase in the basic cost yardstick figures, which the hon. Gentleman advocated, would not have been a satisfactory answer. What was wanted was some means of giving flexibility to the system.

It was for this reason that on 2nd November last we announced special yardstick allowances for individual schemes where local market conditions made this necessary. These more flexible arrangements have now been operating for eight months and, by and large, I think it is fair to say that they have coped reasonably well with a difficult and complex situation. They have certainly enabled the great majority of local authorities to keep their housing programmes going.

Taking England and Wales as a whole, the number of dwellings in tenders accepted by local authorities in the first five months of this year was 19 per cent. up on the same period last year. For London, the same comparison shows an increase of nearly 27 per cent., while less than 5 per cent. have had to be rejected on grounds of cost. There will of course be cases where tenders received by local authorities are higher than can be justified by market conditions alone; and I know that in some cases it has not been possible for schemes to go ahead. But this would presumably happen under any system of cost control.

As regards Islington itself, the hon. Gentleman will be glad to know that no scheme which has been put to the Department has been refused a market allowance sufficient to enable the scheme to proceed. In fact, market allowances, some of them very substantial, have been given for 11 schemes, totalling 1,321 dwellings.

I do not think the council would disagree that the allowances have been realistic. Certain costs have been left to the unsubsidised tolerance, but these have I think been identified in discussion between officers of the council and the Department as attributable to frills and which subsidy was not intended to cover.

There may, of course, be some room for argument as to what constitutes a frill, but the general basis is clear. Expenditure reckonable for subsidy purposes has to be related to the Parker Morris standards. The hon. Gentleman was accurate when he referred to this. If a local authority wants to provide something higher than that it is open to do so within certain limits, but it would be wrong for this to be reckoned for subsidy. The Government at the centre have to be fair to all local authorities and treat them alike. It is important to channel subsidies to where they are needed, and the basis of allocation must be equitable throughout the country. The Islington schemes cover a wide range of tolerance from 2 per cent. to 10 per cent. and are a fair reflection of the cost of these unsubsidisable items in each case

In some cases where even a realistic market allowance—I assure the hon. Gentleman that we do our best to see that the market allowances that we give are realistic—may not entirely close the gap between the basic yardstick and the lowest tender, an authority is faced with a difficult decision. Should it go ahead. making such use of the unsubsidised tolerance as may be necessary? Or should it wait and go out to tender again later?

While fully recognising the difficulty of such a choice for the local authority, I do not think it would be right for the Department to try to avoid it by giving a market allowance which, after careful examination, it believes to be excessive. We have a duty to the taxpayers, and we cannot, therefore, subsidise housing regardless of cost. Local authorities take the same view about their responsibility to ratepayers.

The hon. Gentleman also referred to difficulties for local authorities in securing really competitive tendering in a situation where the construction industry has a very high load. I know that some London authorities are having great difficulty in compiling tender lists and are having to approach quite a large number of contractors before they can do so. I should not attribute that to the yardstick, but it would be useful to have specific evidence of the reasons why contractors appear reluctant to tender for public sector housing work. In an effort to identify the real sources of difficulty the Department has commissioned the National Building Agency to make a survey. The GLC and a representative sample of the London boroughs have agreed to co-operate.

There are great pressures on the construction industry, and it has been faced with problems since the slump that it suffered in 1969 and 1970. The shortages of skilled men are to a large extent the result of output falling in 1969 and 1970 when many men left the industry and training was cut back. The shortages, though important, are probably not very high in absolute numbers, but despite the shortages, output is very high, and if it continues at the present rates will be at a record high in 1973.

Training and recruitment are now very important. The Government's Training Opportunities Scheme is now making a major contribution to the industry and is to be expanded. In 1972 it produced 5,000 trainees in construction skills. This year the figure will be 6,500, and in 1974 it will be 8,500. But this substantial Government effort is additional to the main responsibility of individual firms, and groups of firms, to train the numbers of skilled men needed in the future. Matters are improving. The 1972 figure for the number of apprentices taken on for all construction trades—27,000—was, according to the Department of Employment, the highest for some years. What is now needed is the maintenance of that increased momentum.

The hon. Gentleman referred to the "lump". I should like to speak at length upon that subject, but I merely say that the matter is being carefully studied and discussions are taking place which I hope will result in a much improved situation.

The question of the control of prices in the construction industry is difficult. This is a large, fragmented and dispersed industry, and prices—

The Question having been proposed at Four o'clock and the debate having continued for half an hour, MR. DEPUTY SPEAKER adjourned the House without Question put, pursuant to the Standing Order.