The House will recall that on 18th June of this year it agreed to an Address approving the gift of a Mace from this House to the House of Assembly of the Bahamas and that, further, on 3rd November of this year the House gave leave of absence to the hon. Member for Streatham (Mr. Shelton) and myself for the purpose of presenting the Mace, in company with Mr. Michael Ryle, one of the Deputy Principal Clerks of the House.

I pay tribute to my two colleagues. I could not have wished for two better colleagues for this visit. They truly helped to make the mission a complete success.

We left a cold and foggy London on Monday 24th November and arrived in Nassau that evening to a climate somewhat less cold and completely fogless. The following day we called on Mr. Speaker and I handed to him the letter which you, Mr. Speaker, had entrusted to my care.

I am pleased to report that the Mace was presented to the House of Assembly in what for me was a very moving and colourful ceremony on 26th November. On receiving the Mace, the Speaker said that the Bahamas cherished its long history and traditions of parliamentary democracy which it had inherited and looked forward to continuing that tradition.

After the presentation, the Government Chief Whip moved a motion in these terms:

"We, the Members of the House of Assembly of the Commonwealth of the Bahamas in Parliament assembled, express our sincere thanks to the Commons House of Parliament of the United Kingdom for the Mace which by direction of Her Majesty the Queen it has presented to this House. We accept this generous gift as a token of the friendship and good will of the House of Commons towards the House of Assembly and the people of the Bahamas. This Mace will ever serve to remind us of the great tradition of Parliamentary Government which we as a member of the Commonwealth have inherited from the Parliament of the United Kingdom."

I am happy to tell the House that that motion was approved unanimously. I respectfully ask that it be recorded in the Journals of this House.

You, Mr. Speaker, may be interested to learn that the Speaker there has a very useful weapon in his armoury. In order to curtail lengthy speeches, he has the use of a sand clock timer which sheds its sand 15 minutes after a speech commences, and that is followed by a stricture from the Chair. When the hon. Member for Streatham addressed the Assembly, he suggested that if ever the Parliament of the Bahamas wished to present this House with a present, it might well send us such a device. I leave it to you, Mr. Speaker, to decide whether you would think this an appropriate gift.

Finally, may I say that from our meeting the Bahamian High Commissioner, Sir Alvin Braynen, and Lady Braynen in London to our meeting Sir Milo Butler, the Governor-General, who received us so generously, and the Prime Minister, the Hon. Mr. Pindling—in fact, all those whom we met—we were shown nothing but kindness and hospitality, for which we were most grateful. We, on our part, hope that as a result of our visit we have helped to strengthen the already close ties between our two countries.

Mr. Shelton.

On a point of order, Mr. Speaker. Before we proceed to the first debate of the day—

Order. We are still dealing with this first matter. Mr. Shelton.

I should like briefly to take the opportunity to associate myself with the remarks of the hon. Member for Stalybridge and Hyde (Mr. Pendry) and to express the appreciation of the delegation to the Government and the Parliament of the Bahamas.

Let me return the hon. Gentleman's compliment by saying that if he found us good companions in his delegation, we found him an excellent leader, and certainly we could wish for no better.

I should very much like to comment on the kindness that was shown to us by Mr. Peter Mennen, the High Commissioner, and by the staff of the High Commission, including Mr. John Doubleday, the Deputy High Commissioner. They were thoughtful in the extreme. They looked after us admirably, and they made excellent arrangements, without which our task would have been more difficult to complete.

In conversation with the Prime Minister, the Deputy Prime Minister, the Leader of the Opposition and many hon. Members of Parliament and members of the Government, I was profoundly impressed by their respect for the democratic traditions of Parliament—their own and this. I am sure that this House would wish to know that and will be as pleased to hear it as I was myself. I am grateful to the House for having been given the opportunity of being a member of the delegation. The visit was extremely interesting and a fruitful experience.

I know that the House will want me to express its thanks to the hon. Member for Stalybridge and Hyde (Mr. Pendry) and the hon. Member for Streatham (Mr. Shelton) for conducting their mission in the way they did. I thank them very sincerely, and I shall see that the resolution passed at the ceremony of presentation of the Mace is entered in the Journal of the House.

As regards the sand clock, my views are well known. I see two distinguished members of the usual channels here today. Perhaps they will take some note of the point.

On a point of order, Mr. Speaker. A great deal of publicity has been given to the subject of turkeys. Apparently, two have already been delivered to hon. Members, and it is suggested that the 635 of us are due to receive them. It would appear that this story is a complete myth, but if these turkeys should arrive, hon. Members may not be here to receive them, and as the House's deep freezes will be quite incapable of holding so many turkeys during the recess, could we have an assurance that, if they do arrive, they will immediately be delivered to the hospitals in the locality and that hon. Members will not have to meet the awful problem of dealing with turkeys which will have been here a fortnight when they return?

I have many responsibilities, but I am not sure that acceptance or storing of turkeys is one of them No doubt the point which the right hon. Gentleman has made will be noted and dealt with appropriately by whoever ought to do so.

I am glad to have this chance of focusing attention on the problem of vandalism, because I believe it to be in many parts of the country the most pressing social evil and the most immediate threat to the quality of life. I am referring not just to the headline-hitting vandalism of the football hooligans, but to the ever-rising tide of pointless, mindless, senseless destruction which threatens to engulf whole areas of our major towns and cities.

At its most trivial, this sort of vandalism takes the form of inscribing the virtues of "Millwall bootboys", "Chelsea shed" or "Charlton rule" on virtually every square inch of blank wall. It includes the systematic pulling up of street trees, the smashing of windows, the dumping of rubbish and the slashing of tyres. At its most serious, vandalism extends to wholesale attacks on public buildings and deliberate arson.

As I hope to show, this appalling trail of destruction is costing all of us gigantic sums, which we can ill afford in the middle of an economic crisis of the utmost severity. It is reducing some urban areas to little more than battlegrounds, and in the most serious cases it is actually endangering life. What I find most worrying about the situation is the lack of any nationally-directed strategy for dealing with the problem, or even any concerted attempt to quantify the extent.

I appreciate the difficulties. A great deal of vandalism goes unrecorded because there is little point in reporting minor acts of damage and destruction. The costs are spread over a great many individual authorities and no one is responsible for adding them up. That is why I warmly welcome the recently published Report of the Home Office working party, "Protection against Vandalism", which aims to focus public attention on

"… the damage and disorder which can only be described as a national disgrace."

The growing scale of the vandalism menace is revealed to some extent by criminal statistics. There is, of course, no such crime as vandalism, and it is abundantly clear that many incidents are not in any case reported to the police. But the trends of acts of criminal and malicious damage known to the police give us a clear warning about the growth of the problem.

Between 1965 and 1971, the number of cases of malicious and criminal damage exceeding £20 in value and known to the police in England and Wales more than trebled from 6,956 to 23,433. Over that seven-year period, the numbers of offenders prosecuted rose by 30 per cent. and the number cautioned as an alternative to prosecution went up by 61 per cent. Of 150,000 offenders dealt with during the seven years, about 25 per cent. were under 17 years of age, and the 17 to 21 age group accounted for 30 per cent., which means that well over half the offenders were under the age of 21.

These pre-1972 figures cannot be compared with those for later years because of the passage of the Criminal Damage Act 1971, which altered the method of recording. Nevertheless, the figures for the three years from 1972 reveal the same sorry trend. Cases of criminal damage exceeding £20 in value and known to the police rose from 35,816 in 1972 to 59,198 in 1974. Of the 103,000 offenders dealt with by magistrates' courts in those three years, well over half were again under 21 years of age.

In the Metropolitan Police area, the situation worsened even more dramatically. In 1972, the 7,237 cases known to the Metropolitan Police represented about one-seventh of the national total. By 1974, the metropolitan figure had increased to 13,243, almost a quarter of the country-wide total. This seems to bear out the suggestion that vandalism flourishes most rapidly in areas where police manpower is most fully stretched.

But it is when one starts digging into the costs of making good the damage that the extent of the problem is most starkly and frighteningly revealed. The Home Office report gives some examples. In 1971–72, the Post Office suffered in 12 months no fewer than 160,844 attacks on telephone kiosks and the repair costs amounted to £426,000. In the same year, British Rail estimated the cost of making good wanton damage at £1 million.

The building industry has always been a particular target for the vandals. Nothing on building sites seems to be safe. Windows are smashed, electric wiring ripped out, pipes cut, water turned on to flood the premises, sanitary fittings smashed, brickwork pushed over, unused materials ruined—the list is almost endless. On one housing site in my constituency the builders could not keep pace with the daily smashing of windows. They had to fit plywood shutters over the glass.

The cost of all this is enormous. Some building contractors put it at 3 per cent. of the contract price. The direct labour building force of Greenwich Council tells me that vandalism costs it £50 a week for every major contract. That adds up to £25,000 a year, plus another £25,000 for special security and other preventive measures.

But perhaps the biggest victims of vandalism are local authorities. To get some idea of what it costs them to repair the ravages, I asked my own council in Greenwich to undertake some research. I chose Greenwich deliberately. It is an inner London borough but with little of the housing, racial, or social tensions of the harder-pressed central areas. As such, I thought that it was reasonably typical of Greater London as a whole.

Greenwich also has a great deal of public open space and a high level of provision for leisure and recreation. Yet it is just these facilities that come in for some of the worst attacks. Vandalism in the parks is costing the council £15,000 a year. Damage to play centres, swimming pools, public halls and other recreation centres is put at £9,000 a year.

Perhaps the saddest example at this time of the year is the case of the Christmas trees. Greenwich, like many other councils, was in the habit of providing half a dozen illuminated Christmas trees in public places throughout the borough. The cost of the deliberate damage to those trees during three and a half weeks last Christmas amounted to £985. Not surprisingly, there are no Christmas trees in Greenwich this year.

The biggest single instance of vandalism to council property occurs on the housing estates. Greenwich officers estimate that 60 per cent. of all repair works to the communal areas of the estates is the direct result of deliberate vandalism. The overall cost to the council is breath taking. The council's building manager estimates that the equivalent of 40 men are employed full time all the year round repairing deliberate damage to council-owned buildings, including housing.

Allowing for materials and plant used, the cost is put at a staggering £280,000 a year for one borough. Adding other costs directly attributable to vandalism including those on the council's building sites, it becomes clear that Greenwich ratepayers are contributing at least the product of a penny rate to make good wanton damage.

If Greenwich is anything like typical of the rest of London, the vandalism bill for the whole of the London boroughs may be as high as £8 million a year, and if we add the Greater London Council, London Transport, British Rail, and all the other public bodies, the figure for Greater London alone may well exceed £10 million a year.

Nor should we forget that other public bodies suffer too. The Spastics Society recently drew attention to the fact that attacks on workshops, hostels and other facilities for the handicapped has cost £50,000 over a period of 18 months. The society's statement quotes one example. At one workshop, ambulances used to take spastics to work have had tyres slashed, windscreen wipers torn off, windscreens shattered and headlamps dismantled. Bricks are repeatedly hurled through windows. The callousness of people who can launch such attacks on the most vulnerable members of our society is almost beyond belief.

Faced with this appalling panorama of damage, destruction and violence, I believe that certain action must be taken urgently. First, we need far more reliable information about the extent of the problem. That means more reporting of incidents and separate recording of the costs of vandalism. Having done that, we must use the most modern publicity techniques, including radio and television, to bring home to the public the fact that they are meeting the bill for the ravages of the vandals and that they are the casualties of these attacks on our environment.

Second, we need much more research into the motivation of the vandals. I know that many people will argue that more opportunities for the young to use their undoubted energies constructively will lessen the problem. I accept that this may be part of the solution, but in many places the very facilities provided for the young are the first targets for the vandals. There is in my constituency an adventure playground which has been attacked so many times that it now looks more like a prisoner-of-war camp.

A play leader in West London was quoted in the Evening News on 15th December about one playground which has been completely destroyed twice in 18 months. She said:

"When we first opened it, the Fire Brigade was called two or three times a week. Sometimes there were up to 10 fires burning in the playground at any one time. The play leaders came back after the Bank Holiday … All the structures, the slide, the swings, were gone—just a charred, smouldering mass. They said they did it because they were bored. They are not sorry to tell you."

This play leader goes on to say:

"These kids think everything's a big joke. They think their parents are a joke, they think the law is a joke. They have no respect for themselves and no respect for other people. They seem totally insensitive. They're violent towards each other, towards play leaders. They do not seem to have any emotions. They do not even know fear."

I believe that we need to know a great deal more about what makes children behave in such a frightening way.

In the meantime, better efforts must be made to detect and prevent vandalism. I appreciate the manpower problems of the police, but I believe that there must be more co-operation with local authorities to concentrate at least on the more vulnerable areas. To be successful such efforts must have the active support of the public, and that means reporting cases and, even more important, it means that members of the public must be willing to come forward and give evidence.

Once they are caught, the punishment for the vandals must be more effective. Fines are easy to impose but are not always easy to collect. The collection of fines involves a great deal of costly time and effort on the part of the courts. A wider use of community service orders might be more effective, because that would require young vandals to spend their own time and effort clearing up their own mess. Courts have the power to order compensation, but with young offenders this can be as difficult to collect as fines. This is one more reason for placing much greater responsibility on the parents.

Although I have been an inner London magistrate for nearly six years, I was not aware that courts had the power, under the Children and Young Persons Act, as amended, to order a parent or guardian to pay any fines, damages, costs or compensation imposed on the offender

"unless the court is satisfied that the parent or guardian cannot be found or has not conduced to the commission of the offence by neglecting to exercise due care or control of the child or young person."

Unfortunately, it is not possible to find out how often this power is being used, but it is very unlikely that it is being frequently exercised.

As a matter of urgency we should draw to the attention of magistrates the fact that they have these powers and that these powers should be used. Some well-publicised cases in which parents are required to pay for the rampages of their children might do wonders for making some mothers and fathers more interested in what their children get up to.

The urgent need for that is underlined by a statement from a policeman reported in the Evening News of 16th December as follows:

"A lot of parents round here hardly see their kids until 10 o'clock at night. They are out at work in the daytime and playing Bingo or down the pub of an evening. I asked a crowd of rowdies, riding motorbikes inside the flats, why they did not go to one of the youth clubs. They said they did not like them because they chased you about there. They meant there was a bit of discipline. You get chucked out if you break windows. These kids aren't used to discipline. If their parents can't, or won't, deal with these kids, how can you expect a policeman to do it?"

I recognise that there is no simple, easy solution to this problem, which threatens to engulf many parts of our towns and cities under a tidal wave of destruction. But if we are to have any chance of halting that tide, there must be some co-ordinated, determined national campaign embracing the Government, the local authorities, the police, schools, courts and, above all, the general public, who have most to gain from the success of such a drive.

The number of complaints that I receive from my constituents indicates that many people are worried about these problems, and some, particularly among the elderly, are genuinely frightened. Unfortunately, all too often they do not feel that those in authority really care about the problem of vandalism, or are really determined to stop it.

If there is no sign of some speedy concerted action, there is a risk that people will become even more cynical. They will merely shrug their shoulders and come to regard vandalism as a fact of life that has to be lived with. That would be a tragedy. It would condemn many of our inner city areas in particular to a slide into becoming a sort of "Clockwork Orange" battleground. It would herald a total abdication of any sense of pride in the cities in which we live.

The fight back against vandalism must start now, and Members of Parliament must give a lead in that fight. That is why I have sought to initiate this debate. I can only hope that it will contribute something to the national campaign which the problem requires and which the nation increasingly demands.

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

1. Consolidated Fund (No. 3) Act 1975

2. OECD Support Fund Act 1975

3. Moneylenders (Crown Agents) Act 1975

4. Civil List Act 1975

5. Northern Ireland (Loans) Act 1975

It is with real personal pleasure that I welcome this short debate, because, although the hon. Member for Woolwich, East (Mr. Cartwright) is on the other side of the House, I find it fortunate that in my first calendar year as a Member of Parliament I can join with him and praise him for bringing this topic forward for public attention.

The problems of vandalism are associated with a number of others. There is the intimidation which a number of people are suffering. The facts that I have learned in the borough of Greenwich, part of which I have the honour to represent, are a surprise to me. For example, a constituent comes to see me and says "Do you know that in a certain area there are many people having their windows broken who do not dare report it to the police because they are frightened that they might get more attention from the vandals?".

It is time that the whole House drew attention to the importance of reporting all incidents. Obviously, one cannot expect the police to catch every old or young person who hurls a stone or a brick through a window, but at least we and they would have the opportunity to see the pattern of events, and the more information we have, the better able we should be to support those who have to deal with this problem.

We know also of the way in which young people dissociate themselves from the youth provision which is made. In my constituency there is a youth club where there are often six leaders and sometimes no more than six young people in it, yet, regrettably, on the walls outside one sees totally unnecessary writing, respectable though the language may be, and, what is more, if one talks to the neighbours one hears of young people running amok on the roof of the club and climbing over their walls, generally making the kind of provision which we all want to see unacceptable to the neighbours because of the influence it has on their daily lives.

I turn now to the way in which children are brought up in this country. I say at once that it is important to make it possible for families to do what they can for their children in their own way, because once one forbids them or denies them opportunities to bring up their children in the way they believe right, they will not give much attention to other children in the community, and it is the general community influence which I believe to be most important for young children.

When I am on a railway station platform and I see young people playing about in a dangerous way, I often wonder why only I shout out—drawing attention to myself, which is embarrassing, but at least making them feel embarrassed as well and doing something to stop them. In such a case, they are doing something dangerous. In the same way, when children are playing round a church and throwing stones so that the church is likely to be damaged, mature members of the community should be willing to draw the children's attention to the fact that that sort of behaviour is unacceptable. It is at that level that community involvement and control is so important.

To take it a stage further, I draw attention to what happens among younger children in primary school. In most primary schools the staff and parents combine to set standards. But there are, I believe, among those who have misread the Plowden Report, a number who believe that one should let children do what they wish, forgetting that just letting children do what they like, allowing them to be totally free, means that they end up by imitating one another, and it is not those among their peer groups who set the higher standards of conduct.

One usually finds that the attention given to authority drifts away. For example, in a primary school where school uniform is worn, if three-quarters of the children go back to their parents and say that they do not want to wear the uniform next day because three-quarters of the class will not wear theirs, if three-quarters of the parents pay attention to that, the school uniform is gone the next day. In itself, the wearing of school uniform is not all that important, but maintaining the authority of the school and the way that parents treat that authority is vital.

I have visited a large number of schools, and I have been interested to see the differences between them in this respect. There are schools in which there is no writing on the walls. One asks when a brightly painted wall was last decorated and one is told that it was done about four years previously, and it looks almost as good as it did then. There are other schools where there is writing on the walls and the windows look as though they have been frequently broken.

But the difference, I am sure, is not purely class based. It depends far more on the attitude of the head and the support from his staff. Going about the country, or in South London, the area which I know best, one can see how certain schools have gone up in the anti-vandal stakes, or good behaviour stakes, while others have gone down.

In much the same way, if one watches children coming out of school in the afternoon, one can usually get a fair indication of the sort of social control within the school from the way they behave as they come out. Let us hope that this debate will help to remind all heads and school staff, as well as parents of schoolchildren, that behaviour of this kind is part of the spectrum which goes from the ideal at one end—which I am sure none of us managed to live up to in our youth—to the other end, the "Clockwork Orange" style to which the hon. Member for Woolwich, East referred. We ought to do all we can to encourage the one rather than the other.

I believe that deterrence can be achieved by catching those who misbehave, and catching them early is far more important than what one does after they are caught for the first time. The problem of avoidance and prevention is, I believe, basically one for families, and families will need support. This should come in the main from the schools, because that is where children spend five hours a day from the age of five, but it must come also from the rest of the adult community.

A week ago I had a letter from a constituent who said "Could you please get the Government to pass a law making families control their children?". During my by-election campaign, I had people come to me and say, I hope you will stamp out the children who are the vandals in our society." I thought that rather extreme language, and I pointed out that the children they were talking about were our children, and that we all had a role in controlling them and in showing them what civilised behaviour was.

If our debate today receives the measure of publicity which it deserves. I believe that, without major changes in legislation, we could make a drastic reduction in the incidence of vandalism.

First, I must apologise to the House and to my hon. Friend the Member for Woolwich, East (Mr. Cartwright) for my absence hitherto. Unfortunately, I was held up in my constituency. I sincerely regret that absence and I extend my apologies especially to you, Mr. Speaker.

I wish to direct attention to an aspect of this problem which we sometimes lose sight of, namely, the practice of squatting and the vandalism perpetuated by many squatters when they occupy private or public property. We have had problems for many years, especially in certain parts of London. I remember the days when I was chairman of a local government committee before the war, when, as soon as we planted some young saplings to make a street look more beautiful, children would come along and take a delight in bending the trees right to the ground so that they snapped, with the result that all the effort and money spent by the council "went for a Burton". That sort of thing happened then, and it is still happening.

On Wandsworth Common, where a very nice avenue of new trees was planted, 50 per cent. of them are now desecrated, mostly, I suppose, by adolescents and youths, or even by girls, who at night make a sort of foraging expedition to destroy the work done and paid for by ratepayers and taxpayers.

The point I emphasise is that squatting has changed its nature. After the Second World War, in 1946, 1947 and 1948, there was an enormous number of empty Nissen huts, formerly used by the Army and RAF, on commons and open spaces in London, such as Clapham Common and Wandsworth Common, where I come from. They were in a dilapidated condition, but because of the extreme housing shortage squatters moved into them and turned them into first-class homes. The squatters, who were perhaps just out of the Forces—married men with children—made the huts homes to be proud of, homes that were a credit to them.

Today we see the reverse. Many squatters occupying private property bought by the local council for conversion into flats or similar purposes bring in mattresses for the time being and sleep on the floor. Sometimes from 10 to 15 people move into one house. All around the house are owner-occupiers and tenants of owner-occupiers and of landlords who do not live on the premises. Their houses and flats are kept in very good condition. In less than a month of the squatters' moving in the place is far worse than a slum. They destroy the fittings and take out water heaters, electric fittings and anything else that can be moved and sold. In some cases they can connect up with electricity and gas and obtain free supplies. People who go to work and pay their taxes and rates see others moving in who render no service to the community and who destroy the pleasant nature of that community. That is happening in London now.

The squatters do not hesitate to pull up the floorboards of some rooms and use them for firewood. They will do anything. They will throw out anything into what is called the garden or backyard and create a health menace, because mice and rats move in. The people all round have to put up with it. They complain to the local authority, but it is very difficult to get the squatters out without going to court, and when that is done they usually leave the week before the hearing. Then the council or private owner must usually barricade, board and lock up most securely both the front and back of the property.

The squatters concerned are a menace. I cannot advise my hon. Friend the Minister what she should do, because it is a problem not only for her but for the local authorities and for us. In the past three months I have been inundated with letters from residents of Broomwood Road and Gorst Road, which is at the back of it. Number 51, Broomwood Road was offered to the council by an owner-occupier because the private buyer who wanted it was unable to obtain a building society mortgage, as the property was too old. That is a problem in London, which contains many houses built between the 1980s and early 1900s, and building societies are loth to advance considerable sums on such property. As a last resort the owner-occupier often has to ask the council to buy his house, and the council is often willing because it wants property to convert for letting to families.

As soon as the owner-occupier moves out of his house, which is often in first-class condition, the squatters get to know, and they move in straight away. They can break open the door or easily come in through a back window. Then, their whole idea is to sell what they can and leave the place after six or nine months. That is what has happened to No. 51, Broomwood Road, in my constituency. 1 feel very annoyed to think that constituents of mine who are tenants and owner-occupiers living around that property have to put up with the noise, dirt, smells, garbage and everything else that the squatters bring with them.

I hope that the debate will have shown that this is a serious problem in London and that local authorities must be more vigilant, that when they buy property they must make sure that it is occupied as soon as possible, and that they do not wait for plans to be drawn up for it to be converted.

Squatters create a nuisance to everybody around them. The local residents near No. 51, Broomwood Road have been up in arms for months about the nuisance created by people known as squatters, who in my opinion are not genuine squatters. They are not seeking a home for their wives and families. They are there only to take what they can out of the place and move on to another unoccupied property.

The local authorities and the Government must tackle the problem. There must be more severe penalties for such people. In inner London the problem is becoming worse every month. It is not easy for people who pay their rates and taxes, and go to work and bring up their families properly, to have squatters moving in—people who have no connection with the locality. Many of them do no work, but live on social security. The existing residents cannot sell their properties if they want to move, primarily because the squatters are next door, or two doors away.

I hope that my hon. Friend will see what she can do about this problem, which is particularly acute in my constituency and other parts of inner London.

I welcome this opportunity to express on my own behalf and on behalf of my right hon. and hon. Friends our thanks to the Home Office working party for its Report, and to thank the hon. Member for Woolwich, East (Mr. Cartwright) for initiating this debate on the Report and on the financial and social costs of vandalism.

The financial costs of vandalism are enormous. It has been estimated that in any one year the cost of school fires, mostly not accidental, is about £9 million. British Rail estimates that the cost of repairing damage caused by vandals is about £1 million a year. London Transport reports that in 1972 the cost of repairing damage caused by vandalism was £55,000. It tells me that it now estimates that the cost of repairing damage to its properties—stations, bus stops, shelters, and so on—and to bus and Underground rolling stock is running at about £200,000 a year.

In addition, London Transport is having to spend large sums primarily to combat vandalism and assaults—including £200,000 on closed circuit television at certain Underground stations. It has a rolling programme amounting to nearly £4 million to equip buses with radios so that drivers can summon help when they are in difficulties. That is not to mention the additional cost to London Transport of extra staff, and the paying for police at railway stations to deal with football hooligans from time to time.

It is not a peculiarly London problem; the Assistant Chief Constable of Manchester has estimated that damage caused by vandals in the city amounts to £10,000 a day, a frightening figure.

The hon. Member for Woolwich, East referred to his inner London borough. I have made some inquiries of my outer London borough, where one might have thought conditions were such that vandalism would be a relatively minor problem. My local authority in Bromley estimates that in the past financial year it had to make insurance claims amounting to £38,000 for straightforward vandal damage, not to mention an enormous amount of smaller damage put right in the course of routine repairs by the council.

These are substantial figures, and their importance is only too clear when we remember that during this week we have been expressing concern about the State's vast spending. The cost is borne by ratepayers, taxpayers and the passengers of the transport authorities. Perhaps we can measure the costs in financial terms, but the social cost is immeasurable. For example, there are the people who no longer attend football matches because of the attendant circumstances. There are some areas in which people no longer like to walk along the streets, because of what takes place. There is a deterioration in the environment because of the widespread damage that is taking place. Park staffs find that trees are uprooted and flowerbeds trampled underfoot after many hours of careful work.

We must also bear in mind the inconvenience to the general public. There are the damaged trains that are put out of action, the buses that do not run because the drivers are on strike in protest against the way in which they have been attacked, and the straightforward loss of facilities. For example, my home backs on to a recreation ground on which there are tennis courts and where there was a changing hut. Time after time and week after week the windows of the hut were broken and the tiles ripped from the roof. The woodwork was stripped and the huts contents were thrown into my back garden. Eventually, the stage was reached when the hut was pulled down because it was not worth repairing. The tennis players have now lost their changing facilities.

These matter have serious implications for society. It is mainly the under-21s who are responsible for this sort of damage. They may well commit damage to property today and turn to personal violence tomorrow. Unfortunately, relatively few of the vandals can be caught, but how are we to deal with those who are caught? How can we try to cure this problem? Reference has been made to fines and compensation, and the difficulty of getting money out of those concerned. Wherever possible it is desirable to hold the parents responsible and make them pay the fines and compensation.

I agree with the suggestion that community service orders could be used for the older offender and that the under-17s should be subject to intermediate treatment, where appropriate. It is notable that the Report comes to the conclusion that vandals are often lads with relatively little attainment at school, in academic subjects or in sport. They have a sense of failure, and the damaging of property may give them a small sense of achievement.

Would it not be much better if by all sorts of means, including intermediate treatment, we could give them an opportunity to achieve something in other directions? For instance, they could learn to swim, or sail a dinghy. They could be taught to climb rocks, or to do some modest home decorating. That sort of scheme, even on a modest scale, would cost some money, but surely it would be a worthwhile investment if it diverted young lads from vandalism.

We have so far considered cures, but we must look for some means of preventing vandalism. There is a basic need for more police. If we could have a greater number of policemen we would go a long way to deterring the prospective vandal. After all, he is not likely to become involved in unlawful activity if he knows that there is a copper round the corner. At the moment he knows that if a police car has driven past he is not likely to see another for a couple of hours. That means that the coast is clear.

Other action can be taken. The local authorities could make their contribution. They could help the youth clubs and the many voluntary organisations that provide facilities for youth. In my constituency there are sea cadet premises where about 70 lads are kept occupied three or four nights a week, but the organisers are having the utmost difficulty in keeping going because of the costs of running the premises. The rates amount to £150. The local authority, if it wishes, has the power to remit the rates altogether for such an organisation. I am sure that £150 would be a relatively small price to pay if it kept some lads off the street and away from vandalism.

Greater use could be made of school premises, not only for youth activities but for various other matters that take place in the evenings, on weekends and during holidays. That use could keep youths off the streets. If school premises are occupied they are less likely to be vandalised. Local authorities and architects should be far more concerned about the design of buildings and street furniture. They should bear in mind the opportunities for vandalism. That is one of the lessons to be drawn from Kirkby.

The GLC has estimated that when it empties homes for modernisation an average of £1,000 worth of damage is done to every home before it gets around to doing the necessary work. The answer is that when administering their schemes authorities must do their utmost to ensure that the properties are empty for the shortest possible time. I know that there are difficulties in decanting people from one property to another. In a block of flats in my constituency the sole occupant is an elderly lady. The GLC is having difficulty in rehousing her. Meanwhile, the rest of the block is being steadily vandalised at enormous cost to the community, not to mention the fear that is felt by the dear old lady. Perhaps there is something to be said for having electronic systems in schools and similar public places, such as are being installed by the Devon and Cornwall authorities. That sort of equipment is expensive but effective. There is no doubt that in the long run there is some benefit to be gained from that sort of installation.

Perhaps the most important thing we can do this morning is to increase public awareness of the cost of vandalism and the need for vigilance. Perhaps the local authorities could quote the cost of vandalism not merely in the lump sums that we have been discussing, which are difficult for the man in the street to grasp, but by pointing out to every ratepayer that the vandalism in his area is costing him money and that every passenger is having to pay increased fares because of the vandalism that takes place to transport systems. In that way we could bring home the cost of vandalism and not least, as my hon. Friend the Member for Woolwich, West (Mr. Bottomley) said, the element of parental responsibility.

Parents are taxpayers, ratepayers and passengers and they should know what their youngsters are doing. They should instill into them respect for other people and other people's property. Like my hon. Friend, I was a magistrate. I was also the chairman of the local juvenile court. I have a vivid memory of one case in which a group of lads burst into a baker's yard, getting into some of the vans and driving them about the yard. They did thousands of pounds' worth of damage in the course of one Sunday afternoon. Some of the children concerned could not even be brought to court because they were under the age of 10 years. The lads that appeared in court were ordered to be remanded in some sort of custody until further reports had been made. I remember the violent reaction of the parents to the idea that their children should be taken away even for a week or so, but those parents had not the slightest idea what their youngsters had been up to during the previous Sunday afternoon.

Much can be done if the effect of this debate is only to make the public generally, and parents in particular, more aware of the problem of vandalism. If that can be done, our time and the initiative of the hon. Member for Woolwich, East will have been well spent.

I welcome the fact that my hon. Friend the Member for Woolwich, East (Mr. Cartwright) has raised this extremely important subject. He and other hon. Members who have spoken—the hon. Member for Chislehurst (Mr. Sims), my hon. Friend the Member for Battersea, South (Mr. Perry) and the hon. Member for Woolwich, West (Mr. Bottomley) have all given vivid examples and statistics to illustrate the seriousness of this problem and they have made valuable suggestions about how it can be tackled.

Vandalism is of extremely great concern to the Government, the police, the public authorities and, I should like to think, to all members of society.

My hon. Friend the Member for Woolwich, East referred to and supported the report of the working party of the Home Office Standing Committee on Crime Prevention which was published only last month. The Report drew attention to the increasing seriousness of this widespread problem and, judging from its reception by the police, local authorities and the construction industry, it will offer a very valuable contribution to discussion and action on measures which can be taken to prevent vandalism. The demand for the Report has already exhausted initial supplies and further copies are being printed.

The working party could not make a precise assessment of the incidence of vandalism. Detailed records of damage are not always kept, and where they are kept, often no distinction is made between deliberate and accidental damage. Some costs are absorbed into general maintenance.

Concerning police records, unfortunately few cases of vandalism are reported to the police, who in any case do not report to the Home Office acts of damage where the value of the damage is less than £20. However, these cases are recorded by the police.

Therefore, there is no comprehensive national system of records on the incidence and cost of vandalism, although some estimate of cost can be made by using a number of sources such as local authorities, the Post Office and transport agencies.

Local authorities probably incur the heaviest costs. Figures submitted to the working party included an estimate of £150,000 a year from just one city borough with a population of 500,000. One London borough reported damage to housing alone at £40,000. Another borough had 200 to 300 street lamps broken every week. Damage to schools cost one authority alone £114,000. In addition, transport and recreation facilities, parking meters, parks and cemeteries were all reported to suffer damage amounting to many thousands of pounds. The total cost of vandalism throughout the country has been estimated at tens of millions of pounds a year.

The Post Office reported a total cost in 1971–72 of £426,000 for damage to telephone kiosks. British Rail reported damage to trains, signals, telegraphs and building totalling over £1 million. London Transport estimated the cost of reinstating damage in 1972 at over £55,000. In addition, private concerns such as building firms, shops and insurance companies pay large sums to cover the cost of malicious damage.

There are many difficulties in assessing the cost of vandalism. The effects of much vandalism may be damage which is indistinguishable from ordinary wear or tear or accidents. Another problem is that any record of vandalism will tend to refer only to the cost of repair or of materials. These figures do not necessarily reflect the true cost of vandalism. Much vandalism has been shown to be perpetrated against property which is already worn or partly damaged and which was in any case probably in need of replacement. On the other hand, when repairs are not done or are impossible because the vandalism is so severe, there will be no cost attributed to vandalism.

Local authorities tend not to record such damage separately from other kinds of damage. However, a few local authorities have started trying to keep such records and although these are likely to be only a rough estimate, they should provide in the future some information about which preventive measures are most effective. Accordingly, work can be done based on those figures. The fact that separate records on vandalism are kept not only by some local authorities but also by the Post Office and by public transport agencies illustrates the seriousness of the problem and that these bodies are trying to find positive ways of handling it.

Another problem is that the definitions of vandalism used by different authorities seem to vary, so that their costs cannot always be compared. Police records are more standardised but most vandalism, as I have said, is unfortunately not reported to the police. This is where every member of the public can take a positive and active step to help. Even if they think that there is minor vandalism or a threat of vandalism, they would be well advised to report it. Some damage, consisting for the most part of more trivial incidents, is expected in some areas and written off. Other cases are not reported because vandalism tends to occur where there is little public or police surveillance and offenders are unlikely to be caught—for instance, very late at night, or in bad weather. One Home Office research unit project revealed that police records, including damage of under £20, covered only one-twelfth of the estimated total extent of vandalism damage on one large estate.

In addition to all these problems of definition and recording there are difficulties in costing any type of criminal activity. For example, there is the cost of police time, the cost of taking an offender to court and the cost of punishment or reformation of the offender as well as the cost to the victims of the crime. With vandalism it is difficult to assess the cost to local authorities, for example, of the extra maintenance and staff needed to deal with this problem alone and the extra expenditure involved in introducing vandal-proof and vandal-preventive measures.

Then there are the social costs likely to be felt by the community as a whole. Much vandalism is extremely visible and directed at public property and communal facilities, thus reducing the quality of the environment as well as inconveniencing the public. Examples are the destruction of park benches, public telephones, street lighting, bus shelters and lifts in blocks of flats. It may also result in the wastage and under-use of space by the public, so that community facilities specifically provided for them, because of their derelict appearance and vulnerability to attack by vandals, are under-used. In the case of telephone kiosks, fire-equipment damage and obstruction on railway lines, vandalism may even endanger public safety.

Less obvious perhaps is the influence which the appearance and upkeep of an area has on residents' attitudes to their community and to the authorities responsible for maintaining public property. Many tenants living on estates where damage is persistent, or the vandal-proof building materials used give a particularly austere atmosphere, feel that they are reduced to the status of second-class citizens.

In areas which are generally run down and where damage is widespread the residents become apathetic and indifferent to local issues and sometimes hostile to local authorities. The problems in these areas include the concentration of low quality housing and poor families. But it would be wrong to assume that vandalism is the main cause of neglect and apathy in such areas.

The Home Office research unit is undertaking four projects on different aspects of vandalism. None bears directly on the financial and social cost of vandalism, but each has met with the problem of assessing its extent and prevalence.

One study in Manchester examined whether the amount and location of damage on buses was related to the extent to which passengers could be supervised by the crew. It was noted that a great amount of damage was left unrepaired because it was assumed that the property would be redamaged. The cost of some repairs had been reduced by using hard-wearing plastic covers, which meant less comfort to the public.

Another study undertaken on a public housing estate in Manchester examined ways of measuring vandalism. Residents and shopkeepers were interviewed about incidents they had experienced or noticed. It was found that no one source of information was comprehensive but that the individual sources usefully complemented each other.

A third study examined the incidence of vandalism in 52 housing estates in two London boroughs to see whether and how they varied according to the layout and design of estates and the numbers of children living in them. That study is not complete, but it has shown that lifts were the most expensive item to maintain, although glazed items were the most frequently damaged. On some of the estates glass was becoming so expensive to replace that designs were modified and brick finishes used. The study also found that communal facilities, such as laundries, store sheds and public conveniences, had often ceased to be used due to their state of disrepair.

In the fourth study in an attempt to gain some understanding of behaviour 600 Liverpool schoolboys were asked about vandalism they had committed. They were also questioned about their homes, leisure activities and their attitude to school. Early findings from the study confirm that vandalism is prevalent among 11- to 15-year-old boys in the city and that police records represent only the tip of the iceberg.

The courts possess extensive powers in this respect. They are able to give sentences of up to 10 years' imprisonment on conviction on indictment and up to six months' imprisonment or a fine of up to £400, or both, on summary conviction.

I have tried to emphasise that vandalism is a matter of great concern to everybody—not least to the Government, the police, local authorities and ratepayers. Everybody must make every effort to do what he or she can to report any incidents to the police so that more precise records of the type of vandalism and the places affected can be kept. The police are doing everything possible in my constituency of Halifax to cope with the problem. We have a Damage Squad. It is known to the public as the "vandals squad". It has been in existence for some time and has shown itself to be both effective and worth while. Chief officers everywhere, within the limits of their resources, are doing what they reasonably can to control vandalism and bring offenders to justice.

There is a need for the wider use of vandal-resistant materials and especially for greater awareness by parents and teachers of their responsibilities, as has been emphasised in this debate. We also need to provide for the diversion of young people's energy into more useful pastimes.

Most important is the need to awaken public consciousness to the extent of the problem. I hope that this debte will contribute to that end. We want to enlist the co-operation of everybody in the community in the prevention of vandalism and the detection of offenders by reporting all incidents, large or small, to the police.

. In seeking to raise this morning the subject of the financing problems of Covent Garden Market, I wish to examine the situation against the background of the considerable difficulties that now face British horticulture.

A very large amount, perhaps as much as 55 per cent., of the nation's fruit and vegetables passes through Covent Garden and perhaps as much as 85 per cent. of high quality flowers. Therefore, in any problems affecting Covent Garden the entire background of the horticulture industry must briefly be mentioned in passing.

Today the industry faces grave problems as a result of increased fuel oil prices and because of the introduction of equal pay for women in the tomato, flower-producing and fruit-picking sector of the industry. All these increases in costs mean that prices to the consumer are bound to increase. Therefore, there will be bankruptcies among small firms. Indeed there have already been a number of bankruptcies among the traders in the Covent Garden Market. We have seen bankruptcies among the smaller nurserymen who supply that market.

This is a difficult time in the industry. It is essential that the Government should tackle the problems quickly and sympathetically otherwise, if these sources of supply disappear, the sources of fresh fruit and vegetables will decrease. If the supply decreases the price will increase even further. This is a vicious circle and it is important that the Government should tackle the matter swiftly.

Having set the background to the problem, I wish to confine myself this morning to the problems affecting the market. I hope that the Minister in his reply will bear in mind that the market's problems cannot be taken in isolation. The market traders—or market tenants as they are called—are at present suffering higher rents than any other market in the country. They are paying £2·85 per square foot in contrast with a figure of £2·15 per square foot at the Western International Market, which replaced the old Brentford Market, and a figure of £1 per square foot at Spitalfields Market organised by the Corporation of the City of London. Therefore, the tenants in Covent Garden receive less for their money than tenants anywhere else in Britain's markets. I believe that if that is the case the Minister must see to it that they are treated fairly and equitably.

I believe that the problems all stem from the unsound financing of the market in the first place. When the market authority was originally set up to take over the old Covent Garden properties, they were let at a figure of £3·9 million, but the authority failed to met the interest charges. Thus, with interest piling upon interest, by September 1974 the market authority owned the Government a sum of £7·2 million. That was an incredible escalation of the original figure of £3·9 million. The new market has cost a great deal to build and the final costs are not yet published, but we see from last year's annual report a figure of £20·7 million, plus unpaid interest of £5·3 million. I believe that the total indebtedness now is £33 million to £34 million.

How has the problem arisen? It has come about almost entirely as a result of the preservation orders on the old market buildings—a situation that prevented those buildings being sold at an open market price. I am sorry today that in this debate on the horticultural industry there are only three horticultural hon. Members who intend to make a contribution. Apart from my speech, the House will no doubt hear my hon. Friend the Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Mr. Costain) and the Minister, who will reply to the debate. The problems of British horticulturalists lie not at the door of the Ministry or of my hon. Friend the Member for Folkestone and Hythe or myself. As I said in 1961, when attacking the proposals of my own Government, this change should have been charged to the GLC or the Department of the Environment. They are the people who have mucked about British horticulture. I believe that the Minister who is to reply to the debate will do his best to help the traders. The fault lies with the conservationists. They have put the heavy burden on our horticultural community. I am the first man to be in favour of conservation, but when conservationists get special treatment that mucks up other people, the bill should be paid by the Department of the Environment or the GLC and not by market traders.

The surplus from the sale of the old market which went towards building the new market at Nine Elms was only £1 million and the new market has already cost £33 million or £34 million. It is clearly absurd that we should be in this position. I hope that steps will be taken to recover from other people the burden that is being placed upon horticulture.

It is ludicrous that the old flower market should be preserved. I am not talking about the Floral Hall and it is unfortunate that people who do not understand these things do not know the nomenclature. The Floral Hall is a magnificent building, but the flower market is a nasty, tatty tin shed and the sooner it is pulled down and the site put to a proper commercial use, the better. I know that the Campaign for Real Ale is giving a temporary boost to its use and this is a good thing, but the site-contracting which has happened in the use of the old market is deplorable.

The new market is a fine building, and a large percentage of the nation's produce passes through it. If we have a Channel Tunnel one day, we may need a railhead into the new market. This was included in the original plan and the market could be a trend-setter for markets in this country. It is important that the Government recognise the premier and leading position of the Covent Garden Market.

It is believed that the Treasury has ordered the Market Authority to increase its revenue by £300,000 a year as a matter of urgency. This may well be true, but instead of bullying tenants, the Authority should be looking to use its resources in a more sensible way. There is an area of about 14 acres where the builders' site office used to be. This could be used for other purposes, but Wandsworth Borough Council is preventing any entry or egress from the road. It is most unfortunate that local authority after local authority has added to the problem.

I hope that the Ministry of Agriculture will have serious and urgent discussions with the GLC for proper compensation to be paid for the old site, and with the borough council, so that use can be made of the vacant 14 acres on the new site. Instead of penalising the traders, the Authority should be looking at other ways of raising revenue.

I understand that the tenants were told fairly recently—and I sought to adjourn the House 10 days ago on this topic—that they would have tolls introduced in addition to their rents. However, in a letter dated 11th July 1969, the Covent Garden Market Authority said:

"Following discussions with the Flower Market working party we have decided to introduce rent increases coupled with abolition of tolls (as has already happened in all the Fruit and Vegetable markets) and of bye-day rents (to bring the system into line with the arrangements which will apply at Nine Elms)."

In another letter, even earlier, on 17th January 1967, the Authority wrote

"it is likely that a fixed rent and no toll will be charged in the new market and any changes in the procedure in the present market leading to a more ready appreciation of the implications of renting space in the new market and to a more gradual 'acclimatisation' to the expected conditions in the new market are to be welcomed;".

The whole trend of the information given to tenants in the past has made them assume that tolls were "out". The Market Authority has acted improperly at the behest of the Treasury, first in trying to bring in vehicle parking and entry charges. The tenants resisted these on legal grounds and the Authority accepted their point. When they were defeated on that, the Authority resurrected the question of tolls and that is equally improper against the background of the information from seven and eight years ago which I have already mentioned.

As to possible alternative sources of revenue, there is the 14-acre site I have already mentioned and there is still 150,000 sq. ft. of the Market Towers building unoccupied. Negotiations were taking place with Mobil Oil, but they stopped overnight. I wonder why? I suspect that it was because the proposed rents were too high. Instead of accepting a reasonable rent, the Authority probably opened its mouth too wide. What will happen now? We are told that a Government Department is to rent the building, and I must complain about this. There must have been secret negotiations between one branch of the Treasury and another—fiddling their books in private. The House would like to know the open figures and if we do not discover them today, I hope they will come out in response to some Select Committee within the year.

It is an extremely bad thing for the Authority to have been negotiating in the open and then suddenly to go behind closed doors at the same time as the Treasury has told the Authority to squeeze another £300,000 out of its tenants.

There have been bankruptcies in all sectors of British horticulture. I visited the market in the early morning the day before yesterday and saw more empty sites than on any previous visit. I was glad to see that one man had actually had the courage to come in, but the number of newcomers was very small. Instead of traders, there are vegetable processers and others. I welcome them, but the market is not the proper market it should be.

Not only are the tenants being asked too much, but many shop sites are still unlet and some cafés are not entirely successful. On the one hand, the market is too grandiose and on the other, it is tatty. There are doors that were broken when the market was being built and they are still broken today. Stairs which were to have had metal strips on the front are crumbling and there are no strips. Heated panels which are meant to give a reasonable warmth at this time of the year are pretty well cold.

There has been grave mismanagement and cheese-paring, on the one hand. One appreciates that the cheese-paring results from the financial difficulties, but if the project had been financed aright from the start these difficulties would never have occurred. I say that the shop sites are empty because the prices are too high. The railway arches are empty. True, they are not attractive industrial sites, but there are many small independent traders who would be glad of any industrial site in the centre of London.

I therefore urge the Minister to talk to the Market Authority about cutting its cloth to please its public. I urge him to talk seriously and urgently to the local authorities, which, I believe, have created many of these problems. I mentioned the unlit shop sites. Can the Minister imagine the plight of a young secretary working at Covent Garden? About 3,000 people work on that site. Where does he think they could go to get a toothbrush, for example? The young secretary would not have a car and would be unable to get to a chemist's shop. A man would have to work right through the day and would have no opportunity to go shopping. There is one extremely good newsagent who has diversified a little, and all credit to this chap for running a good business, but it is totally inadequate to service the Market's large working community.

Under the rules of Adjournment debates I am not permitted to ask for changes in legislation even though the Minister knows that that is what I should like. Let me ask, however, for swift negotiations with the local authority to enable the unused areas to be occupied. Secondly, I should like a swift commercial appraisal of the use of the Market Towers building. Thirdly, I ask for the shop sites to be let at an economic price so that they do not stay vacant for ever. If they are let there will be more trade and more life at the market.

It was said that one of the problems in the old market was pilfering and that one of the strengths of the new market would be that since it was within a perimeter fence there would be no pilfering. This has not, unfortunately, proved to be the case. The perimeter wall is not quite high enough to keep out some of the gentlemen who were being discussed in the previous debate. I urge the Minister to ensure that other trading activities take place within the perimeter fence so that instead of its being a dead, deserted Colditz there should be a bit of life about it.

You, Mr. Deputy Speaker, well know from your native city the joy and life of a real market place. There was joy and life in the old Covent Garden, but Nine Elms is a dreary depressing place. The executives come early and go early because there is nothing to keep them there. They get through their work as quickly as they can and then they are off. That is bad. It should be a pleasure for anyone to be at his place of work. Nine Elms should be made attractive. The Government monopoly is depriving the porters, the staff and all the work-people there of a joyous place to work, which is what the old market used to be.

The malaise of British horticulture, with which I opened my remarks, extends to other markets, notably Birmingham. However, there are others. Western International rents are still 70p lower than at Covent Garden, and there are still vacant sites there. I must urge the Minister to look sympathetically at the whole problem of British horticulture and, in particular, the problem of Covent Garden Market.

We all know the interest that my hon. Friend the Member for Maidstone (Mr. Wells) takes in horticulture, and we know, too, for how long he has been pressing to get this debate before the House. He is an expert in horticulture, and he grows produce. The Kent Members who see his stall at the Kent County Show are amazed at the produce that he brings forward. Perhaps I should declare an interest, in that my hon. Friend sometimes supplies me with apples. We use the House of Commons car park as a miniature Covent Garden Market.

The problem we face is that if prices at Covent Garden get too high, people will not use it. Covent Garden is probably one of the best known markets in the world. It is a pace-setter. My friends in the horticulture industry tell me that Covent Garden is the place to sell when produce is in scarce supply, but that when produce is plentiful other markets may be more suitable.

The original concept of the Covent Garden move was developed in 1961. I was then a relative newcomer to this House and I had the privilege of serving on the Committee dealing with the hybrid Bill. We had a careful discussion of the whole procedure, and the Covent Garden Act was the result. Of course, we did not realise that there would be another such Act in 1966. It was this latter Act that gave preference to the payment of tolls.

It is well to consider an article by Mr. Donald Mack, who is an expert on marketing and managing director of the Mack Organisation, one of the largest marketing concerns in the country. He draws attention to the varying costs of market operation. His article shows that the rent in Cardiff is 81p per square foot, in Gateshead 95p, in Bristol 92p, in Liverpool 203p, in Western International 215p, and in the new Covent Garden 258p. He says that the new Smithfield Market at Birmingham will produce the staggering figure of 365p per square foot. These prices have all to be paid for eventually, either by the ratepayer or by the consumer. Mr. Mack points out that EEC markets get support from their individual Governments and from the EEC itself. What steps have the Government taken in the Common Market to secure grants for our market projects?

The NFU is worried about the situation in horticulture. This subject was raised in the debate on the Christmas Adjournment last night, so I shall not weary the House again with it today. Suffice it to say that we must improve our marketing facilities, but we must do so economically.

The idea behind the legislation was to clear up the old Covent Garden Market and turn it into an asset for London. All the opportunities are there to do this, but because of planning control financing of the project has gone wrong. That has caused rents to go up, and that has led to partial failures in property development. I have no interest to declare on property development at the moment, but I have spent a good deal of my life in it and I know of the dangers of putting up rents to try to provide some recompense. As my hon. Friend the Member for Maidstone said, if this were a private enterprise proposal those shops would not be empty; they would be let at nominal rents to encourage tenants to come to the Market.

In a debate of this sort we cannot ask for finance. However, I impress upon the Minister the need for a thorough inquiry into this matter. Can he give an assurance today that a full-scale inquiry will be held in public, so that we may understand the situation?

Perhaps not surprisingly, the hon. Members for Maidstone (Mr. Wells) and Folkstone and Hythe (Mr. Costain) have both taken this opportunity to raise some fairly pertinent points in relation to the horticulture industry. I do not propose to follow them, save to make one point. Less than two hours ago I met a top-level deputation from the National Farmers' Union, led by Mr. Richard Butler, specifically to discuss the position of the horticulture industry.

The Government recognise the difficulties that the industry is experiencing and, in particular, the effect on the glasshouse sector of the sharp increase in prices that was announced recently by the oil companies. I make the further small point that it was a little unfair of the hon. Member for Maidstone to imply that the smallness of the attendance of today's debate is a reflection of the lack of interest by hon. Members in horticulture.

No. The Minister has misunderstood me. I was not complaining about the smallness of the attendance. I was putting the blame at the door of the Department of the Environment, the Metropolitan Police and Wandsworth County Council—everyone but the hon. Members who have taken part in the debate.

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman. I misunderstood him. I shall not follow the arguments advanced by the hon. Member for Folkestone and Hythe about the EEC. We are always looking to the Community for sources of finance. We have had long discussion and question-and-answer sessions on the oil subsidy and on the position that the Community takes in regard to horticulture and the glasshouse sector.

I am grateful that the hon. Member for Maidstone has initiated the debate, because it gives me an opportunity, on behalf of the Government, to set in better perspective the origin and rôle of the Covent Garden Authority.

Only today I signed a letter to my hon. Friend the Member for Harlow (Mr. Newens), who wrote to me about some of the very points that the hon. Member for Maidstone has raised. I also take this opportunity to pay tribute to the work of the Authority in accomplishing successfully the major task of moving the country's premier and largest wholesale horticultural market from its former site.

The old Covent Garden Market may have been picturesque and full of tradition, but it was also an anachronistic clutter. Those who kept the market going in its last years, the Authority, the traders and users of the market, the local authorities and the police all deserve the greatest credit. However, very few of the hon. Member's constituents, with their interests as growers seeking outlets or as consumers wanting a great variety of fresh produce from all over the world delivered to them as quickly and economically as possible, can doubt the real benefits that the new Covent Garden Market can provide from its spacious site and modern premises at Nine Elms.

The Authority was set up because the Administration at that time believed, as we do, that it was not practicable for a private organisation to undertake the task of running and improving such a major market serving all parts of Greater London, the Home Counties and, indeed, the whole country—both as a means of distribution and in a price-setting rôle.

As the Authority's present Chairman, Sir Henry Hardman, will within a few days be stepping down after nine years' splendid service to the cause of a new Covent Garden Market, let us leave him in no doubt at all that his achievements have been greatly appreciated. I trust the whole House will welcome the new Chairman, Sir Samuel Goldman, and wish him well in the challenging task that he takes up on 1st January.

The financial problems facing the Authority are indeed considerable. There is no baulking that fact, but it is a matter deserving the most careful consideration and it is not to be assumed that one course or another must automatically be taken.

The Authority has placed upon it by statute the obligation to provide suitable services for the trading in horticultural produce by wholesale and at the same time it is statutorily required to break even, taking one year with another. My right hon. Friend the Minister of Agriculture has made it clear in recent discussions with organisations—including the National Farmers' Union—which have approached him that he is fully aware of the financial difficulties created for the Authority by circumstances outside its control, and that he is considering what action, if any, it would be appropriate for him to take. I do not think I can usefully go further than this today.

Hon. Members are, I trust, fully aware of the effects of inflation on all walks of our national life. Indeed, the hon. Member for Maidstone referred to the problems being experienced by other markets. My hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Northfield (Mr. Carter) has been leading a vigorous campaign for assistance for the Birmingham market. At the same time, we have to recognise that the Covent Garden Market is in a special position, it being a single-purpose statutory authority.

The hon. Member referred to the proposed introduction of a system of entry charges or tolls on produce brought into the new Market. I have explained that the Authority has a statutory duty to break even, taking one year with another, and the introduction of charges of this sort is a reasonable way of contributing to this end. It has been argued that the revenue from entrance charges or tolls is small in relation to the Authority's total indebtedness to the National Loans Fund. I cannot accept this as an argument for doing nothing to increase the Authority's revenues.

My right hon. Friend has considered very carefully these and other points put to him on behalf of users of the Market and has concluded that he would not wish to intervene in the Authority's managerial decision, which has been taken in the light of all the circumstances.

The hon. Member for Maidstone would recognise that perhaps it was a little incautious of him to refer to the breakdown in negotiations with the Mobil Oil Company without his being prepared to state all the reasons and considerations that led to that development. I hope that he will not be so unkind as to imply that there was any "fiddling", which was the word he used.

Not in that context.

I am glad that the hon. Gentleman has made it clear that he was not criticising the management of the Authority about the Mobil Oil situation or any organisation or Department that may move into these premises.

I do not think that I have made the position quite clear. Members of the public and hon. Members do not know the situation. We should like it to be made clear. The word "fiddling" had nothing to do with the Mobil Oil Company or the Market Authority; it related to pressures from the Treasury upon the Market Authority to have another Government Department. If one Government Department works with another everything is done behind closed doors and no one knows how the negotiations are proceeding. In the end, it is still the miserable taxpayer who pays, and that is what I object to.

The hon. Gentleman should not expect me to comment on the specific points related to the Treasury. It is normal practice for Government Departments to pay economic rents for premises. However, these points are out-with the scope of this debate.

We take note of all the points made in this debate. I repeat: my right hon. Friend is giving the financial position of the Authority his close attention.

I am very glad of the opportunity to raise the question of the future of the independent advice centres for immigrants. In 1974, well over a third of immigrants appealing to adjudicators or tribunals on immigration matters were unrepresented. The complexity of immigration law, a frequent difficulty in understanding the language and procedures which people appearing before adjudicators and tribunals have, and the great effect on people's lives which the decisions of those adjudicators and tribunals can have, all make it vital that immigrants have good and easily obtainable advice and, where necessary, representation.

Failure to receive this good advice on how to prepare a case can mean the deportation to a refugee camp in Cyprus, it can force parents to wait for years in poverty in India or Pakistan before being allowed to join the rest of their family in this country or it can mean the forced separation of young children in the West Indies from their mother in this country.

The facilities available at the moment for the provision of advice are clearly inadequate. The two main organisations which provide free advice are working under great pressure, and commercial fee-charging agencies are springing up very much to fill this gap. The 1971 Immigration Act gives the various Home Office officials, both here and abroad, wide discretion in granting entry certificates to dependants seeking to join relatives in this country.

Often, entry clearance officers subject dependants to extremely detailed interrogations about their personal life and that of their family. Minute discrepancies between accounts given by different members of the family can often result in a refusal to grant an entry certificate. We know, too, that many people coming to the United Kingdom as students or visitors are detained at their port of entry because of immigration officers' suspicions.

It is not unusual for people to be held for longer than a week. I am sure that there is not an hon. Member who is not at this moment battling with the Home Office about several cases concerning immigrants. But we cannot cope with more than a fraction of the cases which exist. It is important that there are organisations who can make speedy representations to the Home Office on behalf of such people. The Home Office also has wide discretion when deciding whether to extend the immigrants' temporary permission to stay in this country. I believe that this discretion is often used retrospectively and occasionally unjustly—for example, where students are refused extensions in the middle of their courses.

The Minister of State has frequently assured us that he is very much aware of the difficulties caused by shortage of staff at embassies on the Indian subcontinent. Since his visit there some months ago, there have been reductions in delays, and we are grateful for his intervention on that point. But there is still far too much delay before certificates are granted and interviews given. At some offices, interviews with dependants seeking entry clearance certificates are being arranged for dates as far ahead as July 1978. The law will continue to be unjust until it is as easy to get an entry certificate in Bombay as it is in Paris.

Since the immigration law and regulations play such a vital part in so many people's lives, it is important that the various organisations which give advice should be examined and that there should be consideration of how the advice services could be improved. At the moment, there are four main sources of advice and representation for people with immigration problems. The first is the United Kingdom Immigrants Advisory Service, a Government-financed organisation with offices in various part of the country, which employs 54 staff, including 27 full-or part-time counsellors. In the year 1974–75, it handled slightly over 32,000 cases. It was set up in 1970, following initiatives that the Home Office had been making since 1967.

In October of that year, a meeting was convened of seven voluntary organisations to discuss the recommendations of the Wilson Committee, which had said that there should be a system of appeals against immigration decisions. The Home Office appears arbitrarily to have selected which organisations were invited and subsequently formed them into a working party to discuss the formation of a body to give advice to people wishing to use the new appeals procedure. In 1969, the working party and two other organisations which the Home Office had decided should take part were invited to a meeting at the Home Office and asked to submit revised proposals. It was these revised proposals which led to the formation of the UKIAS in early spring 1970.

This organisation is very much a child of the Home Office. The Home Office, using its powers under Section 23 of the 1971 Immigration Act, which says that it must provide advice or assistance for persons who have rights of appeal under Part II of the Act, made a grant to this organisation, and since then it has been almost totally dependent on Home Office grants. I understand that, in 1974–75, it received over £120,000.

Clearly, the staff working at UKIAS do good work, but many immigrants consider that it is merely a Government-financed organisation, designed to correct Home Office bureacratic errors, which does not go into any substantive opposition of the law. It is certainly not seen as the independent organisation that it claims to be.

These suspicions are confirmed by the way in which UKIAS staff at airports act as Home Office agents in explaining the decisions of immigration officers to people who have been refused permission to enter. In some places in the Indian subcontinent, people are encouraged to make their applications for entry certificates through the local UKIAS offices. The organisation is also advertised on forms telling prospective travellers or arrivals in the United Kingdom of their rights of appeal.

I think that any organisation giving the kind of advice which UKIAS purports to give should be independent of the Government and capable of campaigning effectively against what it sees as unjust laws and regulations and against their application. Immigrants believe that it is important not only to fight within the Home Office rules but also to fight publicly so as to get the law and the rules changed. To them, UKIAS seems too close to the Home Office to be able to do that effectively.

For example, unlike the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants, UKIAS does not take cases to the European Court, presumably because to do so would be outside the terms of the Government's grant. On 9th April 1970, Sir Roy Wilson, giving evidence to the Select Committee on Race Relations and Immigration, said that it would not be a bad thing if some of the staff of UK1AS became anti-establishment,

"…because it would convince the appellants—and this is one of the objects of the exercise—that they were not all going through an establishment trick …".

It seems that UKIAS is not sufficiently independent of the Government for immigrants to be sure that this is not the case.

There is also concern about other factors relating to the organisation's work. Presumably due to the pressure of work which the staff face, there seems to be a reluctance to take up cases in which the chance of success is not particularly great. The PCWI says that it takes up many cases which UKIAS staff have dismissed as hopeless, so that it seems that there is a widespread lack of confidence in this Government-funded organisation.

The second organisation is the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants, which was the only organisation which decided not to join the UKIAS when it was set up in 1970. It believed that the UKIAS would, as in fact happened, become too close to the Home Office and would not have sufficient grass-roots administration. I understand that the JCWI has one office in London with five full-time staff, and they estimate that they saw nearly 6,000 people or families with immigration problems during the past year.

Due to its strong desire to remain independent, the JCWI has refused to accept money from the Home Office under the provisions of Section 23. It is financed entirely by trusts such as Rowntree and Cadbury and bodies like the British Council of Churches and the Methodist Missionary Society. It sees its campaigning and pressure group activities as a vital part of its work. However, it seems that this side of its work is to some extent restricted by the pressure that its heavy case load places on the running of the office.

Thirdly, there are solicitors. The quality of the advice which solicitors give on immigration matters varies greatly. Although a few of them give very good advice, many of them do not deal with a sufficient number of cases to become expert about the procedure. There is also the difficulty that legal aid is not available for representation before adjudicators or tribunals. Often, solicitors who represent people on immigration matters charge high fees for a not very good service. If legal aid were extended to cover tribunals, it is possible that there would be more incentive for solicitors to build up an expertise in immigration cases.

Fourthly, because of the shortage of agencies giving advice on immigration cases and the varying quality of the advice that they give, some commercial fee-charging advice centres have been set up. The one which has received my interest recently is the Greek and Turkish Cypriot Advice Centre run by Mr. Reuben Davis in Haringey. Until recent moves by the Home Office to dissociate itself from the centre, it was dealing with about 1,000 cases a year. I am told that in some cases there have been no charges whilst in others the immigrants have had to pay for their advice.

I believe that Mr. Davis has used some unconventional methods in pursuing his cases, but many of his clients say that he has fought their cases with a great deal of energy and has achieved results which they do not think that the other agencies could have done. I am aware that some weeks ago he was informed by the Chief Adjudicator that, under Rule 26(1)(a) of the Immigration Appeals Procedure Rules 1972, an unqualified person requires the leave of the adjudicator concerned before being permitted to represent appellants and that in future Mr. Davis would be refused such leave.

I understand also that the Home Office has told him that his clients should approach the Home Office direct. Whatever the reason for this may be, clients whose cases have been successfully pursued by Mr. Davis have come to the conclusion, rightly or wrongly, that he is being debarred because he pursues cases too vigorously.

Because I had heard that some of Mr. Davis's clients, about whom I am concerned, had been harassed by the police—and I have three written statements to this effect—I asked the Minister of State in a Written Question on 26th November whether the intervention of the police was on his instructions. He replied that it was not.

Nevertheless it is a fact that the police have been interested in cases being handled by Mr. Davis. As recently as 4th December, three members of the staff of the National Council for Civil Liberties were in Mr. Davis's office when the police called to ask questions about a client of the centre. I think that the policeman said that he was doing so on the instructions of the "Aliens Office". Something seems a bit astray here, and in the interests of immigrants, about whom I am concerned, the House should know what it is. It is not right that they should suffer and be punished in this way.

I must say that I am personally opposed to commercially run immigrants' advice centres. To make money out of the difficulties and frustrations of others seems to me to be at the best cynical and at the worst immoral. It is not very different from the pay beds issue. Richer patients and richer immigrants gain advantage from their ability to queue jump or to get specialist advice because they have money. Some poor patients and some poor immigrants feel forced to pay for a service because the queue for beds or the queue for clearance certificates is too long, and they are desperate.

The Minister of State has already informed me that the JCWI, the Haringey Community Relations Council and the local authority have welcomed the decision by the Home Office not to co-operate with Mr. Davis's agency. But so long as the voluntary agencies are unable to cope and have to turn people away because they are swamped with work, or perhaps give them inadequate advice because they are overworked, commercially run fee-paying agencies will continue to spring up.

I wish that it was not necessary for immigrants to have to consult solicitors. Again, the applicant is charged, and some times the charge is high, though solicitors maintain high professional standards and are bound so to do, there is no similar requirement on fee-paying agencies. Clearly, there should be more agencies providing a good, free advice service, and immigrants should have a choice.

There are difficulties about private fund raising, because this sort of service does not always appeal to the philanthropist. The Home Office should make more money available to enable voluntary bodies to be set up to provide advice about immigration matters, and it should be free of any strings relating to the kind of policy decisions which Section 23 at present restricts. Above all, it should be independent of the Home Office.

The alternative would be for the Government to announce some form of deficit funding arrangement whereby if any organisation were set up to provide this kind of service and it seemed likely to have to cease due to financial difficulties, the Government might step in to make good its losses. This would mean that the organisation would not be totally dependent on Government money and would have to seek to raise its own funds.

I look forward to hearing my hon. Friend's thinking on all these matters, and I know that the House will welcome some clearer definition of the policy of the Home Office in this respect.

I am grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Barking (Miss Richardson) for raising this issue. As she says, it has received a good deal of comment in recent weeks, and my decision on the matter has been misinterpreted seriously by people who have an interest in misinterpreting it but also by people who are genuinely mystified. Therefore, I am given this opportunity to explain to them and to my hon. Friends what I meant by two recent matters which unfortunately came together but which were never intended to be taken together, even thought a number of interpretations have suggested that they are linked.

Let me make it plain, first, that the argument that I have had with the JCWI is totally distinct from the argument which I have had with Mr. Reuben Davis. The matters arose in quite different ways.

In relation to the JCWI, I was asked to attend a reception held at its offices recently. In making a speech, the chairman spent some time in asserting the need for an independent agency divorced from the UKIAS. I remember well the arguments that went on before the establishment of the UKIAS because I was intimately involved at that stage. I have always thought that it was unfortunate that the JCWI took the view that it could not co-operate with the other voluntary agencies in forming the UKIAS. But I recognised that, the feeling being as it was at the time, it was impossible for the two to come together. I had hoped that by this stage those feelings might have been diminished and that it might have been clear that they had nothing to lose by joining and a great deal to gain.

I assert clearly that I thought there would be a profound gain if the two did come together. Inevitably, there is a certain amount of administrative cost in running two different organisations which are doing the same job. Equally, in terms of the personalities involved, a good deal is to be said for individuals working together, each contributing their own distinctive flair to the work of the organisation.

I want to put my hon. Friend's mind at rest. The UKIAS is a voluntary organisation in just the same way as the JCWI. It is not a Home Office creation and we do not give it any instructions about the way it does its job. What we do give, as my hon. Friend said, is a considerable amount of money in order to help it do its work, and that money is given for the purpose of advising and helping immigrants in immigration appeals. It is not given for other purposes, and my hon. Friend is right to say that it could not be used for the purpose of propaganda.

Nevertheless, there is nothing to stop the UKIAS involving itself in open dispute with the Government about policy in relation to immigration or race relations. The UKIAS has been unjustly treated by the media and in some respects by my hon. Friend in some of the things she has said in asserting that it does not take this kind of stand. Mrs. Maureen Baker, its counsellor in Leeds, would be surprised to think that she does not take a strong and independent stand against Home Office policy on a wide range of issues.

The UKIAS as a whole has campaigned vigorously for a change in the rules about foreign husbands, for the implementation in full of the assurances given about the amnesty for illegal immigrants, and for changes in the queue in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Much of the agitation mounted against the Home Office on this matter came from the UKIAS as a national body and from some of its counsellors in particular. Therefore, it is untrue that the JCWI has a distinctive rôle which is not shared by the UKIAS in this regard. It likes to think that it has, for obvious reasons, and I am sure that it has briefed my hon. Friend on those lines. But the truth is that both bodies do it, and I am glad that they do. There is no reason why they should not do so. But the question is whether it is necessary that they should continue as separate organisations.

The JCWI clearly dissents from my view. If it does, that is the end of the matter. It is a voluntary organisation and can decide for itself. No one is trying to pressure it. I simply suggested that the two bodies should join together as a means of helping immigrants by having a much wider service, and so doing both jobs and being seen to be doing them. If there is any lack of credibility about the UKIAS, as my hon. Friend suggests, that would not be shared by the joint organisation which would be seen to be campaigning too. But the matter is past. No one is now urging. I put the suggestion to the JCWI for its consideration, it vigorously rejected it and that is the end of the matter.

I have no desire, let alone intention, to try to pressure the JCWI out of existence. I hope that it will continue campaigning both against the Home Office and against me in particular, if it desires, for as long as it likes. That is a different matter, however, from Mr. Reuben Davis.

I like the way my hon. Friend put her case about Mr. Davis. She said that there are four sources of advice for immigrants, and she is right. Two of them are the UKIAS and the JCWI. My hon. Friend recited the way they do their work. Then there are solicitors. The basis of Mr. Davis's case against me is that if he takes money, so do solicitors. The difference is that if anyone thinks he is being overcharged by a solicitor he can apply to the Law Society and complain about the fees charged. For example, I would regard it as overcharging if people were paying between £50 and £100 simply in order that a solicitor should write a letter to the Home Office and get a letter back. But that is not much more than Mr. Davis does. If the Law Society takes the view that there has been overcharging, its disciplinary committee can deal with the matter. That is the safeguard for the immigrants in consulting solicitors. It is not so with Mr. Davis or any other commercial fee-paying organisation.

I share my hon. Friend's view that it is unfortunate if fee-paying organisations spring up in this work. Although Mr. Davis says that there are others doing the work, the only one that has come to my attention is his. It is true that there are some fee-paying organisations that advise about the specialist matter of naturalisation. That is a different kind of case from the agency that Mr. Davis runs.

I am a little wary of encouraging that kind of fee-paying organisation to come into existence, because of our experience in the Indian sub-continent, particularly in Pakistan and Bangladesh, since agencies that advise immigrants there are frequently found to be encouraging fraud and evasion instead of giving reputable advice to their clients. There is a genuine danger that if people are indulging in advice-giving for money they will be encouraged to do it in this country. Therefore, in principle, I am against fee-paying organisations coming into this work.

As my hon. Friend said, we have the JCWI and the UKIAS. She did not mention that, increasingly, minority group organisations are springing up to help their own people in disputes with the Home Office. I want to encourage that kind of activity. It is highly desirable that the minority groups should take such a stand on behalf of the people of their own communities, because they understand the issues so much better and are unlikely to try to take advantage of the difficulties which the immigrants face.

But that, I am afraid, is not the case with Mr. Davis. I first came to know about him when, in my early days as a Minister, he approached my office with a number of cases. Because some of the cases might not have come to my attention in other ways, I was wont to give him as much assistance as I could. Then, in October 1974, the Sunday Times and The People published two articles indicating that Mr. Davis might not be as reputable as he had suggested. The article in the Sunday Times was headed

"Refugees are good business for Mr. Davis"

and it was claimed that he had been charging Cypriot immigrants between £25 and £75 for services such as obtaining permits for people to live and work in Britain. The article said:

"In fact, any foreigner is entitled to make such an application for himself without cost simply by writing to the Home Office."

The article mentioned that his technique was to imply that he had good friends in the right places—I may say that some of his claims included a personal relationship with me—notably the Home Office, and that he enjoyed special privileges from the Department.

The article in The People was headed:

"Man who cashes in on misery".

It mentioned a young woman who said that Mr. Davis had charged £50 for a six-months' extension of her permit to stay in Britain. She got her passport back from the Home Office with a letter saying that the extension had been granted only because of the troubles in Cyprus. She then realised that she could have applied herself.

Both these articles went far to confirm an impression that had been developing in the Home Office. My staff were well aware of Mr. Davis's capacity to get what he wanted—sometimes in an abusive way—by claiming personal acquaintance with people in high places. I make it plain that my action was not based on newspaper reports. Indeed, I specifically rejected those reports, on the basis of my own experience with him, for some time. Over the past year, however, I have had a succession of complaints about what he has been doing in abusing officials and in the kind of advice that he has given to immigrants. But more importantly—for me far the most important consideration —was the kind of fees that he was charging for the advice that he was giving.

On 7th August this year I asked Mr. Davis to see me. I have a note of our interview, which lasted for about an hour. I gave him a full opportunity to tell me what he was about, what he was doing, what kind of man he was, and what kind of reaction he had to the allegations that were made against him. I quote:

"He explained that he considered immigration control to be a joke …. His own view was that there should be far stricter controls upon immigration but since the situation was what it was then he saw no reason why he should not base a business upon it."

This is a man who is now declared by a rather gullible reporter in The Guardian to be a great defender of the civil rights of immigrants.

Mr. Davis went on to say that he regarded the entire immigration control as a joke and found the whole situation distasteful. He said that he would make as much money as he possibly could out of it. I heard of one case in which, in order to get a six-months' extension for a seaman deserter, he was alleged to have charged the man £500. I taxed Mr. Davis with this. He denied that he had charged £500; he said it was £450. What is more, he had charged £450 because he thought the man was a pimp and deserved all he got. He went on to say that he told the man that he had had to incur expenses of £350 in dining out with the Under-Secretary in charge of the Immigration and Nationality Department. I may tell the House, knowing the Under-Secretary as I do, that that would be the very last thing that he would have done. What is quite clear is that if Mr. Davis ever did tell the man that, it was totally untrue.

That is the kind of thing that can happen with a man who is as oblivious to propriety and the truth as is Mr. Davis. I am not saying—there is little evidence to show—that at any stage he has done anything that is illegal, but he is the kind of engaging con man who works in East End markets, selling plates. He is quite prepared to adjust the truth a little in order to encourage people to put their money into his hands. With people who are immigrants and who are at risk because of their lack of knowledge of the language and of administration, and who fear authority, he is a very dangerous man indeed to be at large.

Therefore, I decided that we were going to put a stop to his activities. He tells me that I have no power to do that. I have no power to close his business. But what I do have the power to do, and what I have done, is to tell my Department that we shall not deal directly with him. I am in a dilemma once I get to that point. I have no desire—indeed, the whole purpose of my activity has been to support the immigrant—to prejudice the immigrant who, by mischance and, in my view, quite mistakenly, goes to see Mr. Davis. It would be wrong if, for instance, as a result of a dispute with Mr. Davis an immigrant found that he was overstaying his permitted conditions of stay.

Therefore, what we have decided is that when Mr. Davis sends cases to us we shall normally deal only with the immigrant himself. If we have no address for the immigrant we have to go back through Mr. Davis, and we shall send a letter in an enclosed envelope care of Mr. Davis. I am afraid that he will then claim that he has got something for the immigrant, and he may then proceed to charge the immigrant for his services. But what I can say quite categorically—I hope this statement receives the widest publicity in the Haringey area—is that nothing that Mr. Davis has ever done after this injunction went out has been worthy of payment. Therefore, anybody who does pay him for anything that he claims to have done is paying him quite wrongly. The sooner Mr. Davis goes out of business the better it will be, in my view, for all the immigrants of the London area who have been misled by him into thinking that he has some special relationship with the Home Office.

I know that this will be taken as being some kind of authoritarian view from the Home Office and from some kind of reactionary Minister at the Home Office, but I have been supported in the view that I have taken by a number of people, the most important, from my point of view, being the Cypriot community themselves, from whom come most of Mr. Davis's customers. The Cypriot Community Workers Action Group and the Cypriot Refugees Association of the United Kingdom wrote to me on 14th October saying:

"Over the last two years, we have on many occasions been disturbed by the activities of a Mr. Reuben Davis and his office in the handling of our resident Cypriot community. The Cypriot organisations, professionals and local Cypriot newspapers (both Greek and Turkish) subtly informed the community not to use his services. However, during the Cypriot crisis, Mr. Davis has once again tried to take advantage of the situation—this time, the desperate refugees, by purporting to deal more swiftly and efficiently with the Home Office. He appears to both duplicate and charge for work already undertaken by bona fide agencies who do not charge. We, as representatives of both the resident and refugee communities, fully support you in any action you think necessary in this case, and also have the backing of the local Cypriot organisations."

I have read that letter to my hon. Friend because she said—it was part of her case—that if one is to move against somebody like Reuben Davis one is denying an alternative source of help for the immigrant. What she can see from that letter, and what I can tell her from lots of information that I have received, is that Mr. Davis frequently does duplicate the work of other agencies, and often some of his clients have to go to JCWI and UKAIS to clear up the mess after he has taken the money from them.

In addition to the Cypriot organisations, I have also received a letter from Mrs. Mary Dines, sent to Race Today on 13th October. Mrs. Dines is not necessarily one of my slavish adherents, as my hon. Friend knows. When she says that she agrees with my decision about Reuben Davis I know that it comes from a completely impartial source. She takes a very strong view about the kind of activities in which Mr. Davis has been engaging. The borough of Haringey which set up an advice centre, also supports the view that I have taken, as does the Haringey Community Relations Council.

Therefore, I am bound to tell my hon. Friend that Mr. Davis is a menace to immigrants because he overcharges for the services he gives them. He claims that his average price is about £50. On that basis, if my hon. Friend is right in saying that he does 1,000 cases a year, his average income is £50,000, derived from the plight of people who could get their cases dealt with free either directly or with some of the voluntary organisations.

It seems to me totally wrong that this man should make this kind of money out of the plight of immigrants. He claims that I have interfered in the activities of his agency in relation to the Immigration Appeals Tribunal. I want to make it quite plain that I have no contact at all with the Immigration Appeals Tribunal. A statement that Mr. Davis is alleged to have made—that I told him that I would say this—was the complete opposite of the truth. I told him then that I had no power over the Immigration Appeals Tribunal and that there was nothing I could do in relation to their view about him. The acting chief adjudicator was so disgusted with Mr. Davis's conduct when he did appear before him that he has given instructions that all cases which come from Mr. Davis in future are to be dealt with by him and that he will not accept Mr. Davis as a representative of immigrants when they come before him.

In addition, Mr. Davis has suggested that I have been persuading the police to pressurise his clients. May I reassure my hon. Friend. The three cases to which she referred arose because an anonymous source told the police that a person living at a particular house was an illegal immigrant. When the police went to investigate they found some people who, it turned out, had applied for an extension of their leave and were, coincidentally, represented by Mr. Davis.

It is fair to point out also that some of the people claimed that they had been persuaded by Mr. Davis to enter into marriages of convenience with prostitutes, and one prostitute has given a statement to the police claiming that she was given £200 by Mr. Davis so that that ceremony should be carried out. It is said, moreover, that Mr. Davis had himself told one of my officials that he charged £800 for giving that kind of service to the people concerned. I cannot imagine that my hon. Friend, any more than I, would approve of such activities.

My hon. Friend went on to refer to the incident with the NCCL. I must point out the distinction here. If there is an alleged criminal offence by overstaying or some other breach of the immigration rules, the police may be informed so that they can proceed against the individual for his breach or criminal offence. Only the police can do that. The Home Office has no power to do it.

Thus, in such cases it is true that a person who has overstayed for a considerable time would be referred to the police, and they would try to find him. In the case to which my hon. Friend referred, that is what they did. They went to Mr. Reuben Davis's office because he had once represented the man, and when they were there they did in fact meet a representative of the NCCL. They told Mr. Reuben Davis that they were acting, I believe, on the advice of the Aliens Office, though obviously indirectly for the Home Office.

However, that situation was quite different from what occurred in Camden some years ago, when there was a kind of trawl by police and immigration officers, without any kind of information against a specific person, in an effort to obtain information. The then Home Secretary gave instructions that there would be no repetition of that conduct, and I assure my hon. Friend that we shall certainly not encourage it. Nevertheless, from time to time an individual will be approached by the police, on our instructions, because it is alleged that he has committed a criminal offence by overstaying or in some other way. That is correct. What is incorrect, and what we have denied, is that the Home Office had anything to do with the three cases about which Mr. Davis complained and which my hon. Friend mentioned. I hope that that now sets the matter right.

I am sorry to have to wind up the debate so quickly, because there is a good deal more that I should like to say about Mr. Davis. I hope that I have said enough to reassure my hon. Friend, and many other reputable people who have been misled by articles in The Guardian, that I have no animus whatever against anyone who is giving reputable advice to immigrants and who wishes to challenge Home Office decisions in any way he likes. But what I do not accept is that anyone should make a lot of money in this sort of way out of specious suggestions to immigrants that he has some kind of favoured treatment from the Home Office and, in particular, from me. I assure my hon. Friend that Mr. Reuben Davis does not have that.

I am anxious for two reasons to take this opportunity, before the House rises for the Christmas Recess, to raise the subject of the need for more secure accommodation for the treatment of offenders. First, it is high time that we explored in more detail precisely what we mean when we speak of the provision of alternatives to prison for some offences. Second, we have sometimes been guilty of going too far in reducing the number of offences for which prison is the only appropriate punishment.

I am conscious that, in expressing that second reason, I may be accused of reactionary tendencies, especially in late 1975 when all the pressures directed at the Home Office seem to be in the opposite direction, but I hope that I shall be acquitted of any such reactionary tendency when I assure the Minister that I am truly concerned about the growing public anxiety about whether we are moving in the right direction in penal policy, and whether all the enormous pressures which have been gathering momentum over the past year or two are entirely in accord with the public's wishes.

I am well aware that any suggestions I make today for the provision of more secure accommodation must be related to the need for economy in public expenditure. I cannot be hypocritical and call for cuts in public expenditure in general while at the same time inviting the Minister to agree to quite extensive expenditure for a particular purpose. Nevertheless, I suggest that, since 1976 will be the year when the language of priorities will have to be clearly spoken in terms of public expenditure, high on the list of priorities must come the provision of more secure accommodation, and perhaps even the extension of the prison building or improvement programme.

I do not agree with bodies such as the National Council for Civil Liberties, the National Association for the Care and Resettlement of Offenders and the Howard League for Penal Reform, or even The Times on this matter which, on 21st July, in a rather ponderous editorial, tried to persuade us that keeping people out of prison was somehow the overriding objective of penal policy. In my view, such bodies have not taken proper note of the growing public concern about the suggestion that we may in future have to tailor the punishment to the offence because of economic circumstances. I believe that they underestimate the strength of the public's concern on this matter.

As I see it, the public are becoming increasingly aware that the judiciary seems to be more and more reluctant to send offenders to prison. I say at once that it is no part of my case that people should be sent to prison just for the sake of it. My concern is that there are some offences for which prison seems to be the only appropriate punishment, yet sentencing to prison does not seem to be happening.

We all know the famous recent case when a rapist was given a six-month suspended sentence. That caused a great reaction. Against the present background in which, on the one hand, there is an apparent reluctance on the part of the judiciary to impose the sentences which certain crimes seem to merit and, on the other, an increase of 21 per cent. in indictable crime in 1974, I believe that we are running the risk of creating an appalling vacuum in the public mind in the sense of a growing lack of trust in the justice for which our country has long been famed.

There is, ironically enough, a growing demand by the Magistrates' Association as well as from the public for greater severity in sentencing, yet individual members of the Magistrates' Association seem to be content to pass ever more lenient sentences for offences such as assaults on the police, assaults on bus conductors and the hooliganism which we have come to expect at large football matches. The truth is that offenders in these categories hardly ever seem to go to prison in the latter part of 1975.

There is then the offence of burglary, which for a very long time was almost automatically assumed to be a crime for which imprisonment was the only appropriate punishment. That is no longer so today. One has the awful fear that 1975 London is becoming very similar to 1935 New York, when the incidence of burglary is seen as no more than part of the pattern of city life.

Our crime figures are booming. Therefore, while I urge the Minister to look carefully at the need to provide more prison accommodation where imprisonment seems to be the only correct punishment to fit serious crimes such as those I have mentioned, I ask him also—this is the nub of the matter—to look at alternatives to prison.

Probation and fining, which are on the increase, are hardly ever the true alternatives for the serious crime. The tendency for them to be used more and more is an invitation to criminals to cock a snook at authority. The Butler Committee's Report has recently recommended that, owing to the pressure on secure psychological hospitals, incurable and dangerous mental patients should be sent to an ordinary prison. I accept that that places considerable pressure on the prison accommodation. When there are more pressures on prison accommodation at the top and the bottom of the scale, there is a potential danger.

I turn to the true alternatives to prison. In my judgment they are the opposite of some of the suggestions that the reformers press upon us. There is no doubt that secure establishments are extremely important. High on the list is the provision of secure mental hospitals where dangerous patients may be detained, because they are a potentially grave danger to the public if there is the possibility that they may escape. I need not draw the Minister's attention to recent extremely worrying cases where public pressure has built up to provide the sort of institutions to which I am referring.

There is also a need for more secure institutions for juveniles. Few hon. Members would deny that the Children and Young Persons Act is not solving the problems in this area in quite the way that many of us had hoped. Yet, to be fair, one wonders whether that is not at least partly because of the lack of resources directed to the provision of the appropriate type of secure accommodation for juvenile offenders.

I suggest to the Minister—and I take account all the time of the pressure on public resources—that there is a third and perhaps new type of secure establishment which the authorities might well contemplate. That is an institution to deal with people who are not a great deal more than social inadequates, but social inadequates of a potentially dangerous type. I have in mind an institution which is perhaps a cross between a Salvation Army hostel and a prison.

As for non-custodial alternatives to prison, I welcome the existence of the parole system and today's announcement of its extension. It is not part of my case that I wish to detain a man a day longer than is necessary before he may be returned to society, having paid his debt to society. I also welcome the greater use of compulsory supervision to enable a section of the prison population to be released. Although I fear that we are under-provided with secure accommodation, I want to see an extension of the non-custodial alternative to prison.

To summarise, I am asking for increased prison accommodation to take care of those for whom no other punishment is appropriate and for whom punishments such as probation and fining would not be seen by the public as appropriate. I am also calling for increased secure accommodation for the mentally disturbed, because recent cases have raised fear in the public mind. I am calling for increased secure accommodation for juveniles and those whom I have described as potentially dangerous inadequates.

The public must be reassured. Hon. Members are frequently approached by people who are disturbed by the seeming lack of control over the growing crime that affects the country. The public are disturbed by what they see as the unholy alliance of sometimes seemingly cheese-paring bureaucrats and trendy reformers. That devastating combination occasionally appears to repose in the Home Office as well. I hope that the Minister will forgive me for saying so.

Law and order are coming back into fashion. It is unwise for Ministers to overlook the strong pressures from the public that are building up, and the public concern. I hope that the Minister will be able to reassure the public today that, as we move into 1976, the punishment will again fit the crime.

My hon. Friend the Member for Brentwood and Ongar (Mr. McCrindle) has raised a number of interesting topics. I am sure that he will excuse me if, in view of the shortage of time, I do not take them all up.

With regard to adult secure accommodation, I observe first that it is now costing society about £100 a week per head, taking into account the cost of keeping a man in prison and the cost of social security benefits for his wife and family. Secondly, there is not much evidence that the prisoner benefits from staying in prison. Therefore, we should increase as much as possible methods of dealing with offenders within the community.

But my hon. Friend is right to draw attention to the inadequate amount of secure accommodation for juveniles, a matter which was investigated carefully by the recent Expenditure Sub-Committee of which I was a member. If a child is put into care in insecure accommodation, he absconds, offends and returns to the court, which can only make another care order, and the cycle is repeated. That undermines public respect for the whole system. The alternative, which is for the child to be made the subject of an "unruly" certificate and put into prison, cannot be tolerated. It is obvious that 200 places constitute insufficient secure accommodation for juveniles.

We on this side of the House welcome the undertaking of the Minister of State, Department of Health and Social Security that £2 million in grants will be available to local authorities to increase secure accommodation. I hope that that will be in the form of wings of existing accommodation rather than completely new secure homes, as the use of wings for remand facilities would make it possible to transfer the child from secure to ordinary accommodation when the conditions were appropriate. I hope that the Minister will refer to the way in which the £2 million will be used.

The hon. Member for Brentwood and Ongar (Mr. McCrindle) suggested that cheese-paring bureaucrats and trendy Liberals came together in my person. I must reject both allegations.

I said "the Home Office".

In so far as I am responsible for this area of the Department's work, I seek to see what is best for the public and those who come within the criminal justice system. I emphasise that the priority is in that order. I do not agree with every word of the hon. Gentleman's analysis of what is best for the public. He may take some solace from the fact that his hon. Friend the Member for Chislehurst (Mr. Sims) suggested that sending people to prison might not always be the best way to deal with them. He said that it might be much more expensive than some of the other methods, which are more effective in doing the job that the criminal justice system should be trying to do. That is to try to stop people getting into trouble again. If that test works, it is a good thing. If it does not, the hon. Gentleman will have some grounds for his criticism.

He does not have grounds for criticism by arguing that the number of criminal offences committed each year continues to rise. I am afraid that that trend is typical of every country in the world, including those countries where the system of penological sanction is much more rigid and restrictive than anything we have. Nevertheless, the number continues to increase. The fact is that no one has been able to find a satisfactory explanation and no one has been able to deal with the problem effectively.

The problem may have a great deal to do with the sort of social systems that have become common in Western countries and the falling away of moral standards, which is part of the pattern of life in modern times. If that is so, I am afraid that it is too difficult a problem for the Home Office to be able to deal with, as we have to pick up the pieces at the end. In picking up the pieces we have to consider the alternatives open to us and to determine which are the best from the point of view of the test that I have just applied.

It is interesting that fines come out higher in the list of sentences that seem to deter the individual offender from getting into further trouble. The recidivist rate for those who are fined the first time is much lower than for almost any other kind of criminal sanction. Equally, it is true that prison comes fairly low down the list. Although sending a person to prison may keep him out of harm's way for a little while, it does not necessarily mean that a sentence of imprisonment will prevent him from getting into trouble again, or that, by itself, it deters others from getting into similar kinds of trouble.

Perhaps the best example stems from an interesting case in Birmingham. The House will remember that the Birmingham Recorder sent a youth to prison for a substantial time for a mugging offence. That case caused enormous comment in the Press, and it was well publicised, but a substantial number of mugging offences were committed in the same area in which that youth committed his offence shortly after his sentence was imposed.

Such evidence as we have of the deterrent effect of long prison sentences suggests that it is a much over-emphasised part of the argument of the trendy Conservative. Therefore, I do not think we should be so ready to accept the alternatives that the hon. Gentleman has in mind. None the less, the three matters that he raised are those that concern the Home Office and the Government, on which we have tried to take some action.

The hon. Gentleman referred to the lack of secure mental hospital accommodation for convicted offenders who suffer from psychiatric disorders. In the light of recent events—in particular the Butler Report—the Government are reviewing what action they can take. Only recently my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Social Services indicated that she proposes, over the next few years, to try to provide an additional 1,000 secure beds in such hospitals in addition to the 2,000 which now exist.

The hon. Gentleman referred to the need for greater security for juveniles, as did the hon. Member for Chislehurst. As the House will know, the Government are conducting a review of the working of the Children and Young Persons Act 1969, and we hope to announce our findings very shortly. We have been assisted in our investigation by the Select Committee's Report which came out in the autumn. Although I do not think that it will be possible for us to accept all its recommendations, we are viewing them with considerable care.

I should explain that we are trying to increase the number of secure places in juvenile establishments as quickly as resources will allow. We accept the hon. Gentleman's point that this is an area of considerable priority even within the present restrictions on public expenditure. The local authorities have done their best. The current local authority capital building programme contains proposals to provide 1,738 places, 848 in observation and assessment centres, 85 in homes with education on the premises and 123 secure places.

As the hon. Gentleman suggested, we have gone further by allowing the Secretary of State for Social Services to allocate £2 million from national expenditure for the provision of 480 secure places. They will figure in the regional plans that are operated by the regional committees of the local authorities. It is for the local authorities to decide how they use the money and not for the Home Office or the Department of Health and Social Security. Within this restricted budget the local authorities will be able to make the sort of provision that the hon. Gentleman wants.

The hon. Gentleman also suggested that we should have institutions to deal with the social inadequates who are too dangerous to leave at large. It is a matter of great judgment as to what we should do with that class of prisoner. Recently I visited Pentonville, an establishment which used to be a prison for serious offenders but which is now a local prison for the social derelicts to which the hon. Gentleman referred. Having made that visit I was not convinced that we were doing any good to the drunks and the vagrants who were collected in that establishment in such great numbers. They were sitting around whileing out their short sentences without any real attempt being made to help them to recover.

It is difficult to see what else can be done within the confines of prison. I am anxious that we should get on quickly with the proposals to set up more detoxification centres for drunks. The real difficulty has been that the criteria applied by the health services are of such a standard that the centres are very expensive. Further, they have to be attached to expensive hospitals. My own judgment is that it would be better if we could experiment with something a little cheaper in areas where the centres would not necessarily be attached to a hospital. Discussions are proceeding, and I hope that there will be some fruition from them in due course. I hope that we shall get some better alternatives for drunks.

We are considering the whole position of vagrancy and the vagrancy laws in the light of the report of the working party of the Home Office. I cannot say any more about that matter at this stage. In principle we would like to see a situation in which both drunks and vagrants did not come within our penal system. We should like to see some way in which they could be diverted from it when picked up by the police, a system which would divert them into some kind of social rehabilitation situation either inside an institution or at large if they could be given supervision and advice. That has always proved extremely difficult to perform in practice and I am not sure that we shall find a solution. However, I approach the problem on that basis.

I am intrigued by the idea of an organisation which is a combination of a Salvation Army hostel and a prison. I must consider the suggestion more closely. I am not sure that the Salvation Army would like the concept very much. I understand and sympathise with what the hon. Gentleman has in mind. We are all anxious to get this kind of person out of prison because the prison population is far too high. I say that not just because of the expense of providing more prison places. This is not merely a matter of economics. The fact is that the present system is a bad way of treating those who are convicted of criminal offences in our society whatever the trendy Conservatives may say.

This debate is important for many of my constituents who are unfortunate enough to live in the village of Hanham, which is on the eastern fringe of Bristol. Until about five or six years ago, it was a delightful place to live in but since then it has been seriously blighted by road proposals which have never been implemented, and part of the village is now a type of "shanty town", being untidy and dilapidated.

I have lived in Hanham for many years, but my home is not affected by the "shanty town" area. The problems for the village started in the late 1960s when it was decided that Hanham was to be the point at which the Bristol east ring road was to cross the River Avon into Bristol. Many local protest meetings were held. I was not an hon. Member then, but my right hon. Friend the present Secretary of State for Energy represented my constituency. He was most active in drawing attention to the fact that the road would pass through a built-up area and that houses would be affected and many shops in the village would have to close.

However, despite the local opposition at the time, in 1970 the Gloucestershire County Council submitted a programme report to the Department of the Environment. As I have already mentioned, it was planned that the road would cross the River Avon and enter the area covered by the then Bristol City Council. Therefore, the Bristol City Council was involved in the continuation of the scheme once it crossed the river. Lamentably, at the time the Bristol City Council did not submit any scheme for its part of the ring road to the Department of the Environment. Therefore, there was a long delay.

Meanwhile, the Gloucestershire County Council went ahead acquiring properties to make way for the new road and in some instances it threatened compulsory purchase orders. Such action sent many elderly people to an early grave. However, throughout that time Bristol City Council did nothing.

I am indebted to the New Observer, which is the local weekly newspaper which covers my area. That newspaper has sent me many photostats of articles on this subject. Notwithstanding the answer that the Minister will give me today, I hope that he will accept that some of this information can be referred to the Department. In 1972, over two years after the original decision had been made, the New Observer said:

"The two years' delay has resulted in frustration and concern with part of the Memorial Road and New Walk areas falling into decay as property acquired to make way for the new road had become derelict and gardens overgrown."

The eyesore was present for all to see.

Some perfectly good houses had been built adjacent to the line of the road and the people who owned those houses had great difficulty in selling them because of the squalor of the Memorial Road area. Many of these people have lost promotion because they have not been able to move to other parts of the country as they could not sell their houses.

In 1972, the Gloucestershire County Council said:

"the road scheme was eligible for a 75 per cent. grant from the Government and must be included in a national road programme.

"We have submitted a programme report on the Hanham—River Avon section to the Department—and the report for our part of the project was submitted a little over two years ago."

At that time the Department of the Environment insisted—probably quite rightly—that it would take only the whole of the ring road into account and that it was waiting for the Bristol City Council to produce the plans for its part. However, they were never submitted.

Soon afterwards the land use transportation study was introduced. That study was implemented, reported upon and cost the taxpayers about £600,000. However, during all this time nothing could be done about the land in Hanham. It was left to the boarded-up houses and the empty shops to tell their own story of the sad legacy which had been left them by the Gloucestershire County Council and the Department. The land use transportation report has now been published and the road will not go through the Memorial Road area.

All this need never have happened. There is a new line on the map called the "Corridor of Opportunity", which still blights Hanham to a certain extent, but not the Memorial Road area. It affects another part of Hanham. On behalf of my constituents I say that the time has come for this road to be taken officially off the map in order that the matter can be cleared up and something done.

Therefore, while the new Avon County Council makes up its mind about the land use transportation study, the misery, filth and decay remain in the Memorial Road area, blighting adjoining properties. My constituents are rightly asking how long they will have to wait. In view of the regular statements about cut-backs in public expenditure, they see themselves having to wait another six years before the matter is finally resolved.

There have been many protest meetings in Hanham. The officers of the former county council and of the present council, partly under the auspices of my predecessors and now under mine, have been looking at this matter in great depth. My constituents look to the Department of the Environment for guidance and advice. It is their view that in the past the Department should have been stronger with the Bristol City Council and much stronger with the Gloucestershire County Council. However, that is all in the past.

The local authorities seem to have let the matter go and nothing has happened. My constituents ask the local authorities to act quickly to resolve the problem once and for all and to clear up that part of Memorial Road which has been laid to waste.

The new line, called the "Corridor of Opportunity", will run near to houses now being erected in Castle Farm Road and Common Road. These houses are being built because the previous Secretary of State for the Environment, the right hon. and learned Member for Hex-ham (Mr. Rippon), on appeal, gave permission for this to be done. My constituents are rightly asking who will pay for the noise insulation if the Corridor of Opportunity passes through the area where the houses are being built. This is a matter of grave concern.

I realise that the line of the Corridor of Opportunity is not definite, but, in view of what has happened in the past, we need this information quickly. If there has to be a Corridor of Opportunity, it should be sited further out towards Keynsham away from the development. The people of Hanham have suffered enough. We suggest that the unused railway lines should be considered as a possibility, because if it were sited there, people's homes would not be disrupted.

Many people have had their lives ruined by this costly blunder in Memorial Road by the local authorities, a decision in which the Department of the Environment has been involved. Hanham has already paid the price of this blunder and we do not want to see this happen again in the "Corridor of Opportunity".

Even now the development companies are being given nods and winks to prepare plans for development as a result of which ordinary people have been driven from their homes and others have had to live near a shanty town for many years. This has seriously devalued property. If ever action were needed, it is now. We can no longer leave it to people in the local authorities, who have failed us so many times abysmally in the past.

Public money has been used to buy property which has been left to rot and decay. It is time for the talking to stop and for action to be taken. Hanham has already borne too much of a load. The whole subject of the east fringe loop road should be looked at before it is too late. Many of my constituents will be affected by the loop road as it makes its way across my constituency to Hanham. Many houses will be blighted. I have a letter from the chief executive of the Avon Council to the effect that nothing can be done about the situation until agreement has been reached. It is wrong that this road should bring more traffic to Hanham.

We are seriously questioning whether the continuation of the road into Bristol over the River Avon is necessary. My hon. Friend the Member for Bristol, South (Mr. Cocks) is unable to take part in this debate, because he is a Government Whip, but I know that he is seriously concerned because his constituency will be affected by the continuation of the ring road as it crosses Highridge Common. He will also be affected by another part of the land use transportation study if the outer circular road is extended as proposed. Many people in the Bristol area are extremely worried about the situation, and they hope that the present position will not be allowed to continue for very much longer without some action being taken.

Many people give the impression that they want the public to have a say in what happens in an area. This must be proved to be a genuine desire, because all too often the public are just "kidded along". Decisions are made before the public are even consulted. Of course my neighbours in Hanham are cynical about what will happen. They have seen public money spent to no avail. Now is the time for us to aim at public accountability and for due consideration to be given to these problems. That is why I have raised this matter today.

The subject of the impact of new or improved roads upon those who are most closely affected by them is of great concern to us all. I have listened with great interest to the strong case made by my hon. Friend the Member for Kingswood (Mr. Walker) this afternoon. Indeed, my hon. Friend the Member for Bristol, South (Mr. Cocks) is also concerned in the matter. Although he is not able to speak in this debate, he has certainly made strong representations to me on this subject.

I have great sympathy about the issues that my hon. Friend has raised and the problems that they pose—and still pose—for his constituents. I must make clear at the outset that in the main these are essentially matters for local determination, but my hon. Friend has served his cause and his constituents well in raising this subject this afternoon. I am sure that the local authorities concerned will take note of what he has said. In the case of Bristol's ring road, and indeed the city's network as a whole, the responsible highway authority is the Avon County Council.

There are two main considerations for my Department. The first is that since April this year a new system for providing Government assistance for local authority expenditure on roads and transportation has been in operation. Specific grants for road schemes are no longer made and funds are now provided through the rate support and transport supplementary grants. The Government, therefore, no longer exercise detailed control of local authority road schemes. It is for county councils, in consultation with the Department, to draw up transport policies and programmes, and within a broad framework to decide the details and priorities of their transportation proposals.

Secondly, as my hon. Friend is aware, the Bristol land use transportation study report has now been published and is at present the subject of public consultation exercises aimed at informing the Avon County Council of local feeling on the options offered by the report.

I understand the frustration and concern of the people of Hanham, but the democratic process takes time and one cannot short-circuit these matters. One can get into serious trouble if one does so. It will be for the council to decide later which individual road schemes will fulfil the strategy options it proposes to adopt from the study.

It will fall to the Secretary of State to decide the level of grant appropriate to the overall transportation proposals for the county in each year in the light of funds available, but detailed decisions on the programmes on which these allocations are based are initially matters for the county council.

At this point, it may be helpful to outline briefly the history of these road proposals. As long ago as 1947 the Bristol ring road was defined in the approved city development plan when the city and the Gloucester County Council were the highway authorities; Gloucester for that section of the route outside the city boundary. Because investment in Bristol was mainly concentrated on improving other major routes in the city, the ring road did not receive high priority before the 1966 development plan review. But as development proceeded to the south of the city the line of the ring road was protected and Hartcliffe Way was built as the first stage of the ring road.

In response to development pressures and the expected increase in car usage, the 1966 development plan review set out a programme of road improvements which it was hoped to complete in the 1980s. The programme included the completion of the ring road and involved the upgrading of existing roads most of which are residential streets with frontage development. The standard of design adopted included the provision of roundabouts at all major junctions capable of subsequent modification to flyovers or underpasses.

Since the construction of Hartcliffe Way, two further sections have been completed—one between Filton and the M32—Parkway, north of the city boundary—and the other from Airport Road to Hartcliffe Way in the south of the city.

In addition, the Bronley Heath diversion from the A432 to the M32, which opened in the late 1960s, was built in association with construction of the M4 motorway and the Hambrook spur.

Two further sections of the ring road were included in the Department's principal road preparation list in 1968. The first ran from Wells Road, A37, to Callington Road, thus providing a link between Bath Road, A4, and the A37. This scheme, known as stage IV of the ring road, is included in Avon County Council's transport policy and programme for 1976–he level of expenditure accepted by my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State will enable the county council to make a start on it in that year.

The second section ran from the Bath Road to the city boundary on the River Avon and the third, in what was then Gloucestershire, from the river to the A431 at Hanham. These latter two schemes, although the responsibility of different highway authorities, were planned to be constructed together.

About that time, however, a study carried out by Bristol City Council and Gloucestershire County Council produced further road proposals for the period up to 1986 which included a new concept of a loop road from the Bronley Heath diversion via the A432 to the A431 southeast of Hanham. This new proposal had considerable attraction for the authorities as it would pass through open country and involve little or no demolition of property compared with the development plan line.

Preliminary design work on the two sections in the preparation list had still not been completed when in 1972 the local authorities of Bristol, Bath, Gloucestershire and Somerset, together with the Department, British Rail and the Bristol Omnibus Company, jointly appointed consultants to lead a team to undertake the land use transportation study. On the reorganisation of local government in 1974, Avon County Council became the local authority responsible for the study.

The object of the study was to recommend a transportation plan for Bristol and the surrounding area for 1986 together with a programme of implementation. A number of road schemes were held in abeyance pending the outcome of the study and the ring road was among those so deferred. Against that background, I well understand the reaction of those most closely affected who feel that these developments are taking a long time.

As I understand the position now, the study team adopted three different approaches in developing an integrated transportation plan for 1986. These were "highway-based" strategies, "bus priority" strategies and "car user restraint" strategies. All their recommended options included the construction of the east fringe loop road and the Hanham Bridge, over the Avon, and approaches from A431 and A4.

The report also identifies those road proposals which could be abandoned in the context of the strategies proposed, and I am advised that the appropriate committee of the county council has resolved not to proceed with a number of schemes, including the ring road north of Furber Road, St. George, as shown on the development plan, that is, the section from the Kingsway through Charlton Road and Thicket Avenue to Down-end Road. But I understand that it considered it inappropriate to delete the whole scheme until a decision had been reached about the alternative put forward in the report for the realignment of the ring road, that is by the Hanham Bridge, on a different alignment and via the loop road.

I also understand that a corridor for the east fringe loop road is being protected. Its precise final location and alignment are matters for the county council and will be for decision in the light of the outcome of the current public consultation exercises. I am told, however, that the usual provisions for blight purchases apply on the line currently being protected.

As my hon. Friend has said, both the former Gloucestershire County and Bristol City Councils had acquired property for the original ring road proposals under planning blight provisions and those which have not been demolished are boarded up. I am told that the Avon County Council is now considering ways of putting this land to beneficial use pending a decision on the future of the ring road and that it does not propose to acquire any further property unless statutorily obliged to do so.

My hon. Friend referred to dereliction and rubbish tips in the Memorial Road area, and I am told that an official tip at Conham Hill—Conham Road has been closed and tidied up. No doubt the problem of fly-tipping arises, as it unfortunately so often does on derelict sites, but I am sure that the local authorities will take note of what has been said this afternoon.

On the question of noise, the number of properties which would be affected by a new route would depend on the precise alignment and also, of course, on its design and on whether the road was in cutting or on embankment, all matters which have yet to be determined. The noise insulation regulations of 1973 and 1975 do, however, lay a duty on highway authorities either to provide insulation or to make a grant in respect of the cost where properties are subjected to noise above a specified level from a new highway.

I hope that what I have said will give some reassurance to my hon. Friend. As I have explained, the matters of detail he has raised are essentially for the local authorities concerned, but it will be clear that future planning in the area will be based on the comprehensive transportation study produced by the study team, which, incidentally, was grant-aided by the Department. While we must look to the county council for the initiative in the development of the local highway network, the broad issues involved and the county's future transport policies and programmes will, of course, be the subject of continuing dialogue between officials of my Department and officers of the Avon County Council.

There is, however, one other matter that I should like to mention. The Department has for some years followed a practice of public participation designed to inform people about practicable alternative routes for trunk road projects and for obtaining their views about them. These are genuine attempts to involve the people most concerned. These procedures were drawn to the attention of local highway authorities and they were asked to have regard to the principles of informing the public and providing at the proper time the opportunity for them to express their views. It was not, however, thought appropriate to impose on them any prescribed procedures.

I am very glad, therefore, that the Avon County Council, following the publication of the land use transportation study report, has embarked on a thorough programme of consultations with the public. I hope that this will prove to be a meaningful and helpful exercise and that the outcome will be a comprehensive solution to Bristol's traffic and transportation problems. I can assure my hon. Friend and the constituents for whom he has spoken so forcefully that my Department will continue to help wherever we can, because we want to see a satisfactory and, if possible, speedy solution to the problem he raised.

I am very glad to be able to speak about hydrography in this debate and, by a fortunate accident, to have rather more than the statutory period of time. Very many people both inside and outside the House regard this as a crucial subject.

I have a high personal regard for the Minister who is to reply and, as he knows, this is the second time within a year that I have raised the question of the future of the British Hydrographic Service in the House. That is my point and my complaint. We are still awaiting decisions from Ministers. They need not and should not have been so long delayed. In my speech on 28th January, I declared my personal interest as a user of the service in war time and peace time and, if I may say sotto voce, as admiral of the House of Commons yacht club, but more particularly as the right hon. Member for Taunton, where the hydrographic department is situated.

Those who go down to the sea in ships or who live and work in Somerset are proud of the fine work done by the department. It is admired for its professionalism and competence all over the world and is a great national asset, not in the academic sense of a monument of the past but as a highly practical living thing, which is very relevant to our national prosperity. However, this is not the time for compliments. Perhaps we can take them as read. This is the moment for decision and action. Indeed the time is overdue.

Everybody, including the Minister, agrees on this and everybody also agrees that the hydrographic task will continue to expand while the funds available—and this is the irony—are apparently to be reduced. A cut would be madness in the national interest. The whole matter is clouded by uncertainty and indecision. I know the Minister is showing much personal good will towards the service and I am glad to pay tribute to him for that. None the less, the Government must take the blame for their lack of decisiveness, for prevarication and for their failure to give leadership in this matter to all those who are now so concerned about it.

The increasing difficulty of the Hydro-grapher in meeting his commitments has been emphasised for several years past in his annual reports. In the face of mounting criticism, in July 1974 the Government wisely established the Hydrographic Study Group to consider the matter and to report. Its Report came out last March, and I thank the Minister for his personal courtesy in seeing that I received a copy of it.

Answers by the Under-Secretary in this House illustrate the grounds of my complaint. Three months ago he was obliged to say that the matter was "under consideration". Five months ago he said that it was being "examined closely". As recently as two months ago, he said that the matter was "under active review". It is absurd that examination of this matter should have taken so much time.

The situation can be put very simply. Unless alternative sources of finance can be found, the proposed defence cuts will reduce the size of the survey fleet by 30 per cent. before 30th April 1976. I emphasise the date to indicate the urgency of the matter. Such a move would be unthinkable, wholly wrong and damaging to the national interest. In support of that assertion, I can do no better than quote from the Report of the Study Group. Under the heading "Conclusions and Recommendations", paragraph 154 states

"The study has highlighted once again"—

note those words "once again"—

"the great and growing dependence of the economy of the United Kingdom on the sea; on the energy sources beneath it; on the need to transport safely and economically to this country over it fuels and raw materials and to export finished goods in their place".

The study refers to the importance of the ports and the fishing industry and it talks of the continuing needs of the defence of our seaborne economy. It has a word to say about the immense expansion of recreation on the sea. In paragraph 155 it says:

"These requirements have increased in recent years, and are still increasing with marked rapidity. They can no longer be contained within the resources which can in future be devoted to hydrography from within a shrinking Defence budget."

Paragraph 156 says:

"the existing capacity of the Hydrographic Service is insufficient to carry out all the work which has been identified even at Home, except over a protracted period extending to the end of the century."

I hope those quotations make the point even more plainly than I am able to state it.

Hon. Members may ask how much money is involved. The Hydrographic Study Group identified an optimum minimum priority programme to be completed over the next 12 years. It recommended an expansion of the survey fleet and the hydrographic office staff in my constituency to undertake it. At 1974 prices about £18 million will be required over the next seven years to retain in service two out of the four existing ocean survey vessels and one out of the five inshore craft—that is to say, surplus to the reduced defence commitment, and which are due to be paid off before 1st April 1976. The programme also requires seven new vessels to enter service from 1978 onwards.

The capital and running costs are some £30 million over the same period. The total cost of the programme is estimated—and remember this was the minimum programme—as £91 million over the next seven years, most of it from the third year onwards when, if I am not guilty of an unwise prophecy, one estimates that the moratorium on increased Government spending is likely to relax. Of this

"the maximum contribution which could properly be made by the defence budget"

is stated to be just over £41,500,000. This figure allows for about £17,500,000 of revenue from sales of charts and navigational publications out of which

"the appropriate costs of the Taunton office are recovered in full."

Most, if not all, of this revenue comes from commercial and other users, in particular those outside defence. It is clearly inequitable that part of it is allocated to subsidise defence spending.

On the basis of the figures quoted, defence should contribute about £8,250,000 or about 47 per cent. towards the cost of the Hydrographic Office and an equal amount of the revenue should, therefore, go towards offsetting the shortfall for peaceful purposes.

The Report gives some interesting estimates about sales revenue. It suggests that increased sales revenue could be obtained at a rate of about £1·3 million per annum, which is about £9 million over the seven years. Essential surveys in support of the energy programme would require one ocean survey vessel continuously over the next three years at a cost of £3·3 million. The Report recommends that these should be provided by the Department of Energy. Can the Minister tell us whether that has been agreed? There seems to be considerable uncertainty about the matter. I will deal further with that point in a moment.

If we take all these figures into account, the shortfall still to be found is £22–7 million, or an average of £3,250,000 per annum. I suggest that this money needs to be found from other civil Departments in proportion to their needs. For example, it could come from the Department of Trade, the Department of the Environment, the Scottish Office, the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, the Department of Industry and the Ministry of Overseas Development for some overseas work. That Ministry seems to be asleep to the needs of developing countries in this regard. Much of the work of the Hydrographer is not in support of defence but in support of industry, commerce, shipping, science and so on.

Certain work might also be paid for directly by foreign Governments. For example, Iran or the Arab States could pay for surveys in the Persian-Arab Gulf and the Indian Ocean. It would be interesting if the Minister could give some details of the diplomatic discussions that may have taken place on this subject.

Some commercial work might be undertaken by the Hydrographer, bearing in mind that recent experience shows that he can quote realistically competitive prices which still cover all his costs without subsidisation from defence. Yachting charts are a good example, and many of us would like to see activity in this area. Perhaps the Minister will comment on that point.

However we interpret the figures, the shortfall at late 1974 levels is between £3 million and £5 million per annum, which in my view are puny amounts by comparison with the country's investment in and income from marine activities.

I turn to examine the positive side of the national balance sheet, the plus side. What formidable strength that side shows. In 1974 shipping earned £1,516 million gross, just under £800 million net, towards our invisible export total of £2,679 million. That was a remarkable achievement. Marine insurance contributed £47 million and shipbroking £52 million, both of them earnings from world shipping. British owners took delivery of about £600 million-worth of new ships. Shipbuilding in the United Kingdom earned £55 million in exports, which the estimates show is likely to increase by about 60 per cent. this year. That is one aspect of the positive side of the balance sheet.

I turn to another aspect. The investment in North Sea oil and gas by 1985 is likely to total some £18,000 million at today's prices. Production should be worth about £10,000 million a year. Without wearying you, Mr. Deputy Speaker, or the House with any more figures, I would point out that large additional sums go into fisheries, aggregate dredging and a wide variety of supporting services, most of which contribute to invisible earnings, or reduce or replace imports. All these huge investments and substantial earnings are placed at risk in varying degrees if charts and navigational data or unreliable. These risks must increase as the data gets further out of date.

I am endeavouring to make the point that the amounts needed to provide a proper Hydrographic Service—"proper" is not my definition but that of the Government after most careful examination—are modest by comparison with this country's investment in shipping, marine exploration and the like which, to venture on a second prophecy in this House, I believe still to be very much in its infancy. We have not yet adequately realised the vast wealth that is to be derived from the sea.

Not only is it a matter of modesty in absolute terms, but other points should be made. The expenditure is constructive. It is a foundation for future prosperity and commercial activity. I regard the Hydrographic Service as vital and we cannot afford not to afford a proper service in the United Kingdom.

As if all this evidence of the relevance of an effective Hydrographic Service in Great Britain is not enough, other points need to be made. I shall mention six. There is no likely alternative available to our own Hydrographic Service. Second, this Report, admirable and comprehensive though it is, omits to stress—and this was a serious omission—the important potential which exists as hydrography develops for the development of new technology. I know that my hon. Friend the Member for Ayr (Mr. Younger), who is my party's spokesman on defence, was anxious to be here today to speak on this point but has unfortunately been prevented by other engagements. I know that the Minister will accept his apology. He will also be familiar with the examples that we can give on this matter. The list is long. Third, it is important to remember that the Hydrographic Service is the principal source of trained and experienced hydrographers for civil needs. There are important side benefits, then, from a thriving Hydrographic Service.

Fourth, delays of the kind to which I have referred mean that such bodies as the National Environment Research Council and the Institute of Geological Sciences cannot do their forward planning. University programmes are now being held up, and so on.

Fifth, it will be within the knowledge of the House that it is likely that the Law of the Sea Conference will give us responsibility for a 200-mile exclusive economic zone—and only about 2 per cent. of that is properly charted. Indeed. it may amaze hon. Members to know that no less than 74 per cent. of the Continental Shelf, which we regard as so important to our future prosperity, is uncharted. We need this knowledge in order to safeguard our own vital interests.

Sixth, these delays must surely now be affecting morale among those involved. They are too loyal to say so, but I am sure that that is so. To give a practical example of delay, I said that I would return to the matter of energy funds. I am concerned about funds from the Department of Energy because the need for those funds is a high priority since two important surveys of tow-out routes must be done by 1st April 1976—a mere trivial three months away. This must be so if the tow-out route of the first Sea-tank/MacAlpine concrete structure is to be authorised for 1st May 1976 by the Departments of Trade and Energy. This requires depths of 65 metres—213 ft—and the two later units will be of still deeper draught.

The tow will not be authorised until the Departments are satisfied that it is safe. Nor should it be, but if the approval is delayed—it now seems that it may be—the development of another North Sea field could well be delayed still further. On account of the weather window, this might mean as much as a year's delay.

Seventh, what risks are we running if our charts and navigational publications are not up to date? It is a remarkable reflection that a mere two large tanker losses now would cost the British balance of payments more than the whole of the programme about which I am speaking. As a noble Lord asked in another place the other day, what if a natural gas carrier were to be wrecked on the shores of Great Britain? What would people say then? We know that more than one large tanker has touched bottom recently. When one reflects—my hon. Friends will be more familiar with the technical aspects than I—upon the Fox Pinnacle recently discovered a few feet below the surface at Holyhead, one can see the essential need for proper charting.

To put it in a sentence, hydrography is essential to safeguard the environment. The case for action is overwhelming. In the last debate that I initiated, I asked when the Report would be laid. Now we have it, and as I have said, it is a good piece of work—detailed and careful. As one would expect, it endorses the conclusion of the Select Committee on Science and Technology which argued for an expansion of hydrographic capacity to meet civil needs.

The recommendations here are absolutely plain. They are widely shared. I must not misrepresent the Minister, but I dare say that he shares them too. So far as I know, everyone is unanimous about the need. There are no surprises in this Report. Indeed, in the speech to which I have referred, I forecast a number of these proposals. They are, indeed, common sense. I hope that the Minister will be able to say that the Government will be determined to back a winner, to use that "Chequered" phrase.

Some have suggested that hydrography should be a separate Vote. There are good arguments for that on the analogy of the Meteorological Office, the point being that it is felt that the Hydrographic Service should be insulated from defence cuts. The way to do that would be to find a different method of financing and alternative funding. But however that may be, I hope that the Government will accept, and that the Minister will be able to say that he accepts promptly, these recommendations, so that the uncertainty may be removed and good progress made. It was suggested in another place that perhaps a statement would be made by the end of the year. This is almost the last debate that we shall have before Christmas. I hope that the Minister will think that this is an appropriate place and that this is the appropriate time.

I should like to refer finally to the annual report for 1974 by the Hydrographer of the Navy. The introductions are always excellent reading. The Hydrographer began this paper by talking a little about the history of the Hydrographic Service and said that the Department had been"

"… founded in self-interest 180 years ago."

It is a fine story and I should have liked to have time to retail it now, but time will not allow. He also said:

"It was a task of such romance and magnitude".

So it was, and those words are appropriate today. He went on:

"It was an investment by our ancestors from which we still reap the benefit."

There is much in this country today for which we should thank our ancestors. I hope that, in future, looking back, those who are to come will say of us that we had as much foresight, courage, intelligence and enlightened self-interest as our ancestors had.

These words at the end of the introduction are worth reflecting upon and repeating:

"Hydrography is creative and meets a national need. It satisfies those who practise it. Well-motivated, they respond to rising demands. Morale is high, but so are expectations."

I hope that the Minister will see that those expectations are properly fulfilled, in the national and the world interest.

I endorse the summary of the situation given by my right hon. Friend the Member for Taunton (Mr. du Cann), which everyone will agree was most able. We can all be grateful to my right hon. Friend for drawing attention to the fact that a vital interest of this country is at stake. The curious thing is that, at a moment of increasing need and decreasing resources, we face this dilemma. My right hon. Friend has drawn attention to the fact that there is a gross shortfall of adequate investment in the hydrography of the world's seas, for which we are not altogether responsible. Only 2 per cent. of them are said to have been adequately surveyed.

My right hon. Friend made the present situation sound much better than it is in respect of our own territorial waters. I believe that only 24 per cent.—a quarter—of our own Continental Shelf has been properly surveyed. This is at a time when, obviously, interest in it is increasing rapidly.

It is not without significance that the parts least surveyed seem to be in the north—north of the Buchan Peninsula, where I had the uncomfortable duty of serving in the last winter of the war, right up to the very north, past Scapa, with the exception of the approaches to Scapa itself. None of this has been even approximately surveyed, at a time when tremendous developments are taking place there. The situation could be summed up by saying that, at a moment when there is more need for work to be done, the resources for doing it face the threat of being cut away.

The three principal points of interest clearly line up. One is the development of the oil resources and, of course, not only the local exploration of the oil fields at the bottom of the North Sea up in northern waters, but the routes by which various large floating objects have to be towed out after manufacture before being sunk in situ, such as rigs, platforms and storage tanks, which ultimately will sit on the bottom.

The other day, I went to a symposium. There, I saw charts of the kind that I have used all my life in various capacities and in various parts of the world. I found it humiliating to see on one chart in an area within a few miles of one of the most heavily trafficked areas of water in the world, off Liverpool Bay and Holyhead, this pinnacle with only 24 ft. of water over it. Ships of 40 years ago were apt to draw 24 ft. Present vessels are threatening to draw more like 100 ft. How many more pinnacles are there in home waters that have not yet been discovered because of the inadequacy of our surveys? This is a matter of terrible urgency, because the consequences of our failure are so terrible.

Now we have the decision on limits which Iceland has arrogated to itself. But others before have done so. Chile did so some years ago without any of the left-right of ideological politics often brought into questions about Chile. I think that it was about 20 or 30 years ago that Chile arrested some of Onassis's whale factory ships because it claimed a 200-mile zone. It seems that we are likely by international agreement to have 200-mile zones belonging to the coastal countries and for the coastal countries to have responsibility for them, but at this moment we need the resources with which to exercise responsibility for safe navigation in our waters.

The curious feature is that the scale is so tiny compared with the stakes involved. Surely it is not beyond the wit of the Government, even of Governments which I do not necessarily support in other ways, to think of some way of developing a viable trade and commercial exploitation of the arts of the hydrographer so that they may become self-supporting, because I am sure that no one in the country can fail to agree that in principle this function has to be kept alive.

I believe that we have fallen short of what we could do about commercially exploiting publications. The charts are by no means cheap, but the sailing directions and other publications are still extraordinarily cheap compared with other much less worthy forms of literature.

Surely, too, as 55 per cent. of the benefit of hydrography has been said in another place to be made use of by civil as opposed to military users, these many Departments—Energy, Industry, Trade, Environment and others, Scotland not excluded—could very well be expected to contribute towards their future prosperity. Industries themselves, even though there are difficulties about secrecy in the exploitation of various underwater works, must be expected to help contribute to the functioning of the Hydrography Department.

Furthermore, there is an interchange of cartographical knowledge among the Governments of various countries. I think that there are only six which actually make charts. There is a good interchange. Surely we could set up some kind of consortium to work together and to make common cause and common finance.

But I am sure that our own contribution is vital. It may be that we should have a separate Vote and that appropriations-in-aid coming from the sale of these publications should be shown to belong not to the defence budget, but to the hydrographic budget. This would make the whole affair look a great deal healthier.

But I am convinced that, as all those who go to sea must agree, we have developed a vital national asset which has been of tremendous pride to this country in past years. We must not let it waver now.

I know that I speak for the whole House in saying how indebted we are to the right hon. Member for Taunton (Mr. du Cann) for bringing to our attention once more the wide concern which is felt about the future of the Hydrographic Service. We know how deeply impressed he has been over the years by the work of his constituents, and I can well understand how he has come to the conclusions that he has made.

The right hon. Gentleman was well supported in a brief intervention by my old friend the hon. Member for Fareham (Dr. Bennett), who we know has a long personal interest in the sea as well. He will forgive me if I do not follow him into the wider issues on which he touched which were central to the Law of the Sea Conference. It would not be my place to do so in this debate. However, he referred to pinnacles. In that connection, I am sure that we can all agree that this short debate will be a pinnacle in the last day of Parliament before the Christmas Recess. Again, we are deeply grateful to the right hon. Member for Taunton for having made it possible.

As the right hon. Gentleman knows, the Hydrographic Service is a service for which I personally have the highest possible unqualified regard. Its standards of professional accomplishment, both civilian and Service, at all levels, both ashore and afloat, are unequalled anywhere in the world. On my own ministerial visits to the organisation, I have never failed to be impressed by the calibre and motivation of its staff.

In the two speeches to which we have listened, several specific matters have been raised, and perhaps I might say a word or two about them.

First, I was asked about the possibility of a separate Vote. I noted carefully what was said by the right hon. and the hon. Gentleman, but I ask them to bear in mind that it is probably central to the success of the Hydrographic Service that it has traditionally been so closely integrated with the Royal Navy as a whole, and we should be cautious about following any suggestions which might inadvertently perhaps tend to draw the role of hydrography apart from the main ongoing work of the Royal Navy itself. I make that point because it is one which we should not cast aside lightly.

As for the issue of charts, I can assure the hon. Member for Fareham that this is a matter to which I give close personal attention. We review prices regularly, bearing in mind that we do not want to go against the general commitment of the Government to avoid inflation. As the hon. Gentleman knows, they are at the moment standing at £1·80.

The right hon. Gentleman referred to possibilities in the Third World of closer liaison with the Overseas Development Ministry. Again, this is a matter that we are always watching closely to see that no important need goes unconsidered. The Persian Gulf, too, is an issue which receives my detailed attention regularly. I am not yet in a position to say what the outcome will be in that sphere, but the right hon. Gentleman will know it is one at which we are looking very closely.

On the question of yachting charts, I am able to report that only this week discussions have taken place with the yachting organisations to see how best their needs can be met. But the priority for such charts has to be considered against those required for larger shipping.

On the crucial question of energy, in categorical terms I can assure the right hon. Gentleman that there will be no delay in the North Sea programme as a result of unsurveyed routes. Orders have been given for HMS "Hector" to complete surveys of the North Channel, starting in late January, and HMS "Herald" will start surveys off the East Shetlands in March.

The other specific issue raised by the right hon. Gentleman was whether defence is subsidising the non-defence aspects of the work of the hydrographic fleet. I am afraid that the situation is that the defence budget is significantly subsidising the non-defence tasks being undertaken. The right hon. Gentleman and I have had a full discussion about the value to the community of our Hydrographic Service. I explained in that Adjournment debate that the study group would assess the national hydrographic requirements with the current capacity of the fleet and make recommendations. As he correctly reminded us, we made the group's report available to all those with an interest, and I am sure that that was the right thing to do.

It was in many ways a novel step. We were aware that we might be making a rod for our own backs, but it was also a most valuable exercise in opening up the issues to discussion. The interest that has been stimulated clearly demonstrates that we were sensible to the issues, but the fact that the final decisions have not yet been made does not mean that the issues have been put on the shelf. That is far from being the case.

I am sure that the right hon. Gentleman will appreciate that a great deal is at stake. It would be foolhardy to underestimate the complexities. The requirements of defence, the safety of the mariner, the future of the world-wide British Admiralty chart series, the employment prospects at Taunton, and safe and successful exploitation of our offshore resources, are all intimately linked with the future of the Hydrographic Service.

The problem has been spelt out many times before, but I would be failing in my duty as Minister responsible for the Royal Navy if I did not make it clear that the Ministry of Defence can afford to pay only for the survey fleet that is needed to meet the Royal Navy's own requirements.

Although there has been an increase in the need for new hydrographic and oceanographic data for submarine and anti-submarine operations in areas not normally used by merchant shipping, surface warships are of much shallower draught than the present-day deep-draught merchant vessels and are no longer deployed world-wide. At the same time, the amount of defence funds available for hydrographic work has shrunk in step with reductions in the defence budget.

The new, increasingly divergent defence and civil requirements therefore needed to be properly identified and ranked according to priority. Alternative sources of funding also needed to be considered. This is what the Hydrographic Study Group did, and the House should not underestimate the significance of having established a study group of this kind. For the first time, the national hydro-graphic task was examined as a whole by a group comprising representatives of all interested parties, Government Departments, shipping interests, the port authorities, and offshore operators and oil companies. I am confident that one very positive result will be a much greater degree of co-ordination of effort in future. Indeed, this was something urged by the Study Group itself.

Although the Study Group made suggestions about the mechanics of funding, they were unable actually to go away and start printing money. However, as I have said, the Ministry of Defence now has more than ever to cut its coat according to its cloth, and I can only underline what I have told the House several times in the past—that only that part of hydro-graphic work necessary for the work and operations of the Royal Navy can be financed out of the defence budget.

Following the defence review—and here I want to underline something which the right hon. Gentleman said—the Ministry of Defence estimates that it will require a survey fleet of two ocean survey ships, four coastal survey vessels and four inshore survey craft. That represents a reduction in the current strength of the fleet by two ocean survey ships and one inshore survey craft. Whatever the historical precedents may be, this is all that the Ministry of Defence itself can afford to pay for.

The penalties to civil requirements of a reduced fleet would, of course, be considerable. We would have to disperse our pool of trained surveyors who have unparalleled experience and expertise. If this know-how had to be disbanded and the ships disposed of, it would be incredibly difficult and expensive to build them up again. Furthermore, reducing the fleet would mean virtually abandoning the highly regarded Admiralty chart series, which, as the House will know only too well, is a British product, unrivalled throughout the world. Before long, charts would become obsolescent and that, in time, would affect the safety of ship-borne trade on which the British economy itself depends. Hon. Members will therefore see the predicament. That which can be justified for defence purposes falls far short of that which is needed for the nation overall.

If the survey fleet were to be maintained at its current level of operation, priorities would need to be picked with great care, but it would be possible to complete the energy source exploration, and platform tow-out routes by 1980 and 1977 respectively. This would, however, be at the expense of the defence and shipping priority work, which could not then be completed until 1986, and some scientific work that could not be carried out at all. A high proportion of the effort would need to be concentrated on home waters, and although the Hydrographer would have to abandon at aleast one of his traditional overseas areas—the South-West Pacific—and reduce effort in another—the West Indies—some overseas surveying would be possible, and this would mean that he could at least hope to hold the line on the Admiralty chart series.

In broad terms, keeping the ships together when their support is not needed for defence purposes would cost from £15 million to £18 million over the next seven years at September 1974 price levels, and I must insist that the money would have to come from non-defence funds. We are considering carefully how this money could be raised, and non-Government sources are being examined as well as Government sources. I am, however, not yet in a position today—I cannot deny this—to give the House an answer.

The Hydrographic Study Group also indicated that if all the tasks that the Hydrographer might well, in national terms, be doing were to be done, he would need, on top of what he already has and in a relatively short time scale, an expanded survey fleet of four ocean survey ships, eight coastal survey vessels, and eight inshore survey craft—that is, two ocean survey ships, four coastal survey vessels and four inshore survey craft more than those required for defence purposes.

I am, of course, absolutely sympathetic to what the Under-Secretary is saying in general about the need for other Departments to contribute, but is he really telling the House—I am not complaining about his conduct in any way—that nine months after this Report was published we still do not have agreement between Departments on who is going to contribute, and how much? Is the hon. Gentleman really saying that although the ships are going to do the survey work which he described, and the tow-out routes are to be completed, there is no agreement for the Department of Energy to contribute? Is he saying that the pay-off dates for the various ships are still firm so far as he is aware?

If the right hon. Gentleman will bear with me, I shall in my remaining sentences deal with that point.

I was emphasising that we had to increase the size of the fleet if it was to do the optimum job as described by the Hydrographic Study Group. This, including the £18 million needed to maintain the survey fleet at its present level, as distinct from its defence level, and taken with the associated costs of increasing the staff at Taunton, would, in effect, cost about £50 million in round figures, at September 1974 prices, over the next seven years. Again—I am sorry to keep emphasising this, but it is most important that the House should not be misled—I cannot emphasise too strongly that this sum would need to be found from outside the defence budget.

We therefore have to make a choice, and a choice in stark terms. This is the problem that confronts us. The survey fleet has to be run down if its size is to be related to that solely necessary for defence requirements. This would mean that the civil sectors would benefit only from spin-off from the defence programmes. If we, as a nation, are to retain the fleet at its present level and maintain at least a holding position as regards the Admiralty chart series, it will cost about £18 million over the next seven years, though of this sum only £5 million need be found for the next two years. It would be necessary to find about £50 million, spread over the next seven years, to expand the survey fleet to its optimum size as described by the Study Group.

The House may feel—hon. Members have stressed this—that the sums involved seem small, but, even so, in the present economic situation there are, as we all know, a multitude of conflicting high priorities. This was why we concluded that hydrography should not be considered in isolation but should be related to competing national priorities. It was therefore specifically decided that those recommendations of the Hydrographic Study Group's Report which deal with public expenditure should be considered in the context of the annual public expenditure review. This is the only proper way of dealing with the matter—I am sure that when the right hon. Gentleman, with his characteristic objectivity reflects on it, he will agree—but I am afraid that it means that we are not yet in a position to make our final decisions about the future.

I assure the House that we are well aware of the profound importance of ensuring that the mariners of our nation can go about their trade in peace and safety. But we can do only so much from the defence Votes. It is a question of ensuring that the costs of a national service lie where they fall, and we must pursue this with energy.

I have been deeply encouraged to hear again the strength of the right hon. Gentleman's concern, expressed with such characteristic eloquence and passionate commitment today. We shall, of course, be taking decisions just as soon as we can, but we had better be under no illusions. The consequences of some of those decisions may, in the end, prove to be very tough. However, I naturally agree that it would be wrong if we had to spoil the ship for ha'porth of tar.

I am grateful to Mr. Speaker for selecting my topic for debate. I also thank the Minister for being present, whilst apologising to him for dragging him to the House at the very tail end of this Session.

I strongly support what my right hon. Friend the Member for Taunton (Mr. du Cann) said about the Hydrographic Service. Representing a maritime constituency, I am aware that my constituents know only too well the immense value of the service to many of them.

It is fortunate that what I am about to say will not enable the Minister to reply that I am asking for an increase in public expenditure. I remind the right hon. Gentleman of an answer I received from the Secretary of State for Defence on 14th July, when I asked:

"if he will list those countries to which Her Majesty's Government would not countenance the sale of military aircraft."

The answer was:

"All proposals for the export of military aircraft are considered individually in the light of the prevailing political, economic, strategic and security circumstances."—[Official Report, 14th July 1975; Vol. 895, c. 313.]

That is as bland an answer as one could receive, but I propose to take it as the text for the debate.

I make no apology for discussing the subject publicly. It might be considered to be more suitable for discussion in private rooms behind locked doors, but there are many matters of public interest involved, and as the question has been under discussion for so long, I do not believe that anyone can complain about its being discussed openly.

In addition to the factors in that answer, there are other national considerations which must be taken into account—jobs, exports and the need to back viable industries. All those matters are directly related to the discussion about whether the Harrier aircraft might be sold to the Government of the People's Republic of China.

As I understand the Government's present position, there are political and strategic reasons for caution. In addition, the Secretary of State said in a letter to me:

"The Chinese have not come forward with any definite proposals to purchase the Harrier."

I shall deal with these two strands of the argument individually.

I believe that the criteria on which the political and strategic considerations are evaluated, from the point of view of this House, relate to the Export of Goods (Control) Order 1970, which includes all aircraft. It was laid before the House but not debated. A great deal has happened since 1970.

It would be churlish not to recognise that one of the main reasons why our relations with the Government of the People's Republic of China have changed since 1970 is the relationship established with the Chinese Government by my right hon. Friend the Member for Sidcup (Mr. Heath). The strategic criteria on which decisions about military aircraft are decided are affected by our membership of COCOM, the permanent committee of which meets in Paris. Its activities are little publicised. It may even be meeting at this moment, for all I know. COCOM decides which goods and which countries should be subject to its embargo.

I wish to read out the list of countries on the COCOM embargo list. There is nothing secret about the information, which is readily available to all concerned. The countries are Albania, Bulgaria, China, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, North Korea, North Vietnam, Poland, Romania, Tibet and the Soviet Union. The list contain seven Warsaw Pact countries, one other European country—Albania—and four Asian countries.

What concerns me is that those 12 countries are apparently all to be considered together as more or less of a threat not only to this country, but to NATO. I wish to examine the matter in detail, because I think that it is the cause of the Government's present hesitancy over entering into the negotiations into which I wish them to enter.

The Warsaw Pact countries are considered to be a strategic threat to this country and the Government have rightly ensured that the defence budget is spent almost entirely within our NATO commitment. Few would argue that the reality of our position in 1975 calls for a decision along those lines.

The seven Warsaw Pact countries must be considered in a strategic position separate from any other country in the world. Albania, the one European country in the list not in the Warsaw Pact, is hardly a strategic threat to Britain. The four Asian countries in the list are not a strategic threat to this country, yet in a letter to me dated 28th July the Secretary of State wrote:

"Within its terms"—

that is, the Export Goods (Control) Order 1970—

"China is treated along with other Communist countries as one of the destinations most likely to be affected by security considerations."

That is the point that I wish to challenge strenuously. It indicates a total lack of reality, given the position of Britain in the world today.

The Harrier is a close air-support aircraft with an operational range of 100 to 200 miles, although it can fly in a straight line for distances up to 1,000 miles. As regards the Warsaw Pact countries and their relationship with NATO, there is an obvious "border" situation in which the Harrier could be extremely valuable to a country considered to be the enemy of any of the NATO countries.

However, the distance between London and Peking is 5,073 statute miles by the great circle route. It makes no sense to consider that the Harrier would be strategically valuable to a country over 5,000 miles from Britain. That must apply even if—and I stress "if"—that country were considered to be a potential enemy.

We must take into account the political reality of the position of China in the world of 1975. I had the pleasure of visiting China just over a year ago as part of a parliamentary delegation. I stood on the Nanking Bridge and had explained to me by our Chinese hosts the reasons for the Chinese feeling as they do towards the Soviet Union.

Although many people in the West think that the argument between China and the Soviet Union is only ideological, it goes a great deal deeper than that. The Chinese feel a bitter sense of betrayal suffered at the hands of their Russian neighbours. The Nanking Bridge symbolises for them the way in which they were betrayed by the Soviet Union when, after the famous Communist Party Congress in 1960, the Russian Government withdrew not only their support, their engineers, technicians and their plans, but every person and object that could conceivably be considered by the Chinese as useful assistance of the kind that the Russians had so far provided.

That was the basis of their feeling of betrayal, and it continues as the basis of the relationship between the Soviet Union and the Government of the People's Republic of China. Anyone who has visited China—I am not sure whether the right hon. Gentleman has—will know that the relationship between those two great Powers is all-pervading and not just some passing fad. It is an attitude that is based not merely on political ideology.

If we accept that the relationship between China and Russia is relevant to this issue, I hope that I may be permitted to quote the words of Mr. Schlesinger, who until last month was the Secretary of Defence in the United States Government. He recently came to London and during the course of an address to the Royal United Services Institute he described China as "NATO's best ally". Where does that put Her Majesty's Government in their relationship with NATO and China? Two days ago I asked the Secretary of State:

"what strategic criteria he applies to the sale of military equipment to Communist countries which are not members of the Warsaw Pact; and how this compares with the criteria applied to countries that are members of the Warsaw Pact."

The Secretary of State replied:

"Proposals for the export of defence equipment to Communist countries are considered individually in relation to the normal criteria and, in particular, to our obligations to our NATO allies."—[Official Report, 17th December 1975; Vol. 902, c. 654.]

I am sure that our NATO allies would express very natural and righteous concern if we were proposing to sell this aeroplane to East Germany. However, that is not and has never been the case. I submit that the recent conclusion of the Spey deal between Rolls-Royce and the Chinese Government knocks holes in the Government's arguments about the disadvantages of selling military equipment to the Chinese Government. I shall discuss the Spey deal later.

NATO is set up to protect our strategic interests. One wonders what the Foreign Office and the Ministry of Defence regard as our strategic interests. I should like to quote briefly from Volume XIX of a book entitled "Soviet Studies" and prepared by the University of Glasgow. This may appeal to you, Mr. Deputy Speaker. It says:

"The concept of what is 'strategic' defies a clear-cut and universally acceptable definition. In the narrowest sense, it covers items of direct military use and such items are reasonably easy to identify and define. On the other hand, extremists—such as Bernard M. Baruch, a well-known American expert on war production and defence—would regard any item as being of strategic value because if the opponent country wants it is must strengthen that country in one way or another. Others would take a stand somewhere between the two views. A general non-committal definition may be taken as: 'strategic items are those raw materials and manufactures (including munitions) which would increase the military strength of the Soviet Bloc'."

I have quoted that passage because I do not believe that China is an "opponent country" of NATO or the United Kingdom. It is certainly not a member of the "Soviet bloc." I should welcome the Minister's comments on this point. In any event, I cannot imagine a more easy way to insult the Chinese Government than to suggest that they are members of the Soviet bloc. The Chinese do not believe that the Soviet Union is even a Communist Government. They regard the Russians as Social Imperialists holding down the countries of Eastern Europe under threat of a military take-over.

I shall spare the House further quotations but perhaps the Minister of State will look at the 28th November edition of the Peking Review and especially page 9, because that will further enlighten him about the current views of the Chinese Government and their relationship with the Soviet Union.

Mao Tse-tung has said:

"My enemy's enemy is my friend."

If NATO considers the Warsaw Pact countries its potential enemy, led, of course, by the Soviet Union, it goes without saying that if the Chinese Government also consider the Russian Government their enemy, applying the principle "My enemy's friend is my friend", we should be considering how we can best help, within our own national interests, the Chinese Government to defend themselves against their own considered enemy. I understand that the Soviet Union would not look kindly upon Her Majesty's Government selling the Harrier to the Chinese Government. However, I hope that we have not yet reached the time when Her Majesty's Government are in a position to be dictated to by any Government, let alone by the Soviet Government, as to what our foreign and defence policies should be.

I have dealt at length with the political and strategic arguments. The second point raised by the Secretary of State in the letter which I quoted earlier was that the Chinese have not yet asked for the Harrier.

I have lived and worked in the Far East. I have some minimal understanding of the attitude and atmosphere surrounding negotiations with the people of that part of the world. As anybody with any knowledge of the area will know—and certainly as Hawker Siddeley salesmen know—we cannot expect the Chinese Government to send a memo or chitty to our Government saying "Please may we have 200 Harriers?" That will never happen unless we make the first move.

I have reason to believe that in principle the Chinese Government are interested in the Harrier. I say no more than that, but I have good reason to believe that that is the position. If begun, the negotiations will be protracted and no doubt there will be problems over payment. Perhaps Her Majesty's Government are holding back because of concern about the payments situation. We must remember that the Chinese have oil and there are many ways in which the detailed negotiations could be concluded, but they will never be concluded unless the negotiations begin.

Let me remind the House of what happened when Hawker Siddeley tried to sell the Trident, a civil airliner, to China. Over a period of 18 months Hawker Siddeley tried without success to obtain Her Majesty's Government's blessing to sell to the Chinese. Its salesmen were refused all the way along the line until finally Pakistan International Airlines sold five second-hand Tridents to China. Thereafter, Her Majesty's Government's opposition towards Hawker Siddeley evaporated because it was seen that opposition was irrelevant.

Hawker Siddeley has concluded a most successful commercial deal on Tridents with the Chinese, totalling well over £100 million. Those aircraft have been paid for in cash. I see no commercial reason why negotiations on the Harrier should not be started by the British Government.

Let me turn to the attitude adopted to these matters by the United States Government. The United States via McDonnell Douglas has concluded an arrangement with Hawker Siddeley under which Harriers will be built under licence in the United States. It is not too farfetched to suggest that the United States Government would not at present altogether welcome Britain selling the Harrier to China. From the Americans' point of view, the question could be reopened in five or even seven years' time—but in that time McDonnell Douglas will be producing Harriers under licence. It is conceivable that the attitude of the United States Government will change.

I hope that it is not too cynical to say that most Governments take a pragmatic view of the way in which their own economies can benefit from such sales. President Ford has just visited China. I should not be in the least surprised if his visit were followed by a visit by a General Dynamics sales team to Peking to discuss the sale of the F 16.

The Harrier is a unique aircraft. I cannot imagine that the United States Government or the French Government, if they were in our shoes, would ever become involved in the process of hanging back. The reluctance which Her Majesty's Government have continued to show over this subject must seem surprising to them. I am sure that if the Harrier had been a French or American aircraft, sales teams from those countries would have had a roving commission looking for markets. The British attitude to the sale of the Harrier is sadly reminiscent of the present British attitude to selling anything! Last Friday I addressed the Christchurch branch of the United Commercial Travellers Association. Many of its members asked me to press the Government to put a salesman in the Cabinet. That would not be a bad idea.

That concludes the "external" part of my argument. To sum up, I believe that it would be good for Britain and NATO if we were to sell the Harrier to China.

I had a meeting yesterday with the shop stewards of Hawker Siddeley Aviation and I understand only too well their urgent demands for Government action to protect their jobs and to increase employment opportunities in the aviation industry. Hawker Siddeley Aviation may soon be nationalised, but whether it is or not, these men will need jobs and that means orders for aircraft. The Minister should expect increasing pressure from trade unionists within the industry on what they see as a decision affecting their jobs and their future.

If a quantity of Harriers were ordered by China, employment would be spread throughout Hawker Siddeley's factories all over the country and to numerous other industries and component manufacturers. This is a most important aspect of the issue, which I am sure the Minister will consider carefully.

Under successive Governments, the British aviation industry has been bedevilled by politics. Sir Kenneth Keith was quoted in The Times as saying, earlier this week, that the

"whole British procurement policy in the past has been one of casting bones to starving dogs."

Those are strong words from a man who should know. He has just returned from Peking with a hard-won order of £100 million worth of business from the Chinese Government. The Harrier has the Rolls- Royce Pegasus engine, an order for which would bring badly needed work at the Rolls-Royce factory in the Bristol area.

I hope that the Government will recognise that the aviation industry has a future and that companies like Hawker Siddeley Aviation and Rolls-Royce represent significantly more impressive and worthwhile companies for the future of this country than a company like Chrysler. With 1¼ million unemployed the employment argument is vital, but so, too, is the export value of this order. The sale of 200 Harriers would bring us between £500 million and £700 million worth of exports and create thousands of jobs in Bristol, Brough, Hamble, Hatfield and the Lucas and Ferranti factories in Coventry and Edinburgh. The north, south, east and west of the United Kingdom would benefit.

Sadly, our country has a history of failure to create, let alone exploit, exports of our technological inventiveness. Recently we have also had a history of failure to realise the opportunities being created in a changing world. The proposed visit of the Secretary of State for Trade to Cuba is an example of this. The Foreign Office attitude towards international political changes in the world appear to be, first, distaste, secondly, reluctant acknowledgement, thirdly, an awakening to reality and, fourthly, activity—but by then it is often too late to exploit the opportunities.

One of my constituents returned recently from Hanoi. He said that it was swarming with Japanese salesmen and there were plenty of French and American salesmen about, but he was the only Briton they had seen for many weeks. There are enormous opportunities for the sale of technology to China and Asia and I believe that Hawker Siddeley has the ability to sell aircraft and aviation equipment to the Chinese.

I have congratulated the Secretary of State for Defence on arranging the sale of the maritime Harrier to the Royal Navy. The previous Conservative Government neglected this in a thoroughly unsatisfactory manner during their time in office. I can also congratulate the Government for doing their part in bringing about the sale of the Spey engine to China.

I finish with another quotation from Chairman Mao:

"A journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step."

The Spey deal is surely a giant stride, and I hope that the British Government will smooth the path towards the sale of the Harrier to the Government of China.

The hon. Member for Christchurch and Lymington (Mr. Adley) is very persuasive today. He certainly has no need to apologise for raising this matter, and he has made his case in a very thoughtful way. If I am unable to give him entire satisfaction this afternoon he may like to know that it is useful for him to have put his thoughts on the record, and we shall reflect upon them in a constructive way.

In returning to the question of the sale of Harriers to China he has returned to a cause which he first raised with Ministers as long ago as July 1974. It is for this reason that I am glad to be able to deal with these matters more fully than is possible in reply to Parliamentary Questions or even in correspondence. There is no argument between us that the questions that he raises are important. As he said, they are important not only for the aircraft industry and therefore for employment—he mentioned the meeting he had with shop stewards yesterday to which he kindly invited me, but which I was unable to attend—but also for Britain's overall trading position and the balance of payments.

I know that the hon. Gentleman recognises that the implications are not only industrial and economic but international and diplomatic, in the fullest sense. I know that the hon. Member will not misunderstand me when I say that the matter is not only an eccentric and rather special interest of his. On the contrary, he is raising a matter today of widespread interest and concern.

I answered a Question on the matter early this year from the hon. Member for Hastings (Mr. Warren) and I have also had discussions with my hon. Friend the Member for Welwyn and Hatfield (Mrs. Hayman), who is always assiduous in the conduct of her constituency responsibilities, which involve many Hawker Siddeley workers.

But the issue itself goes back even further than the honourable Gentleman's identification with it. The Chinese first mentioned the Harrier to us some three years ago, when the first Trident was handed over. Quite properly, Hawker Siddeley Aviation made the Government aware of this at the time. As I understand it, Hawker Siddeley then said to the Chinese that it would like to be able to sell Harrier to them. It added, however, that such a sale would require the approval of the British Government, which would need to take into account a number of factors, including international aspects. Hawker Siddeley made it plain that while it could not be assumed that approval of the sale would in the end be forthcoming, it would welcome further information about Chinese requirements.

I do not think that the position has changed fundamentally since then. We know, as the hon. Gentleman has said, that Hawker Siddeley would still like to sell the Harrier to China. He understands—as he made clear this afternoon—the fuller implications of such decisions. The fact remains that we are still short of hard information about Chinese requirements.

The hon. Gentleman said that in a number of informal ways the Chinese have shown their continued interest. I would not dispute that, and I am sure that that would be the view of Hawker Siddeley, also. The question is at what stage this interest can be considered sufficiently firm as to justify the Government taking it seriously.

The burden of the hon. Gentleman's case was that we should take it seriously now, that we should not let the opportunity pass. But the matter is a great deal more complicated than that. It is important to consider timing. If, in the event, the Government feel that they can support such a sale, they want to be reasonably confident that it will go forward.

I should like to say a word about the sale of Speys to China. The deal announced last week is of great importance. The value of it to Rolls-Royce and to this country is, as has been reported, up to £100 million. However, it could be more significant than that, because it represents a further step along the road opened up by the sale of the Trident. In other words, it is evidence that there is a substantial and growing market in China which the British aircraft industry can exploit to the mutual benefit of both countries.

However, it would be naïve to assume that the sale of Spey engines is necessarily as welcome to some of our international partners as it is to us. Of course, there is an element of commercial jealousy, which we must discount. But there are more fundamental strategic considerations. There is a long-standing agreement, as the hon. Member for Christchurch and Lymington said, between ourselves and other members of COCOM on the export of military equipment of important strategic significance, and we have to take this agreement into account.

I do not know whether the hon. Gentleman has seen the interesting leading article in today's International Herald Tribune, which is reprinted from the New York Times, on the significance of the Spey deal. The opening paragraph states that

"The triangular relationship among China, the Soviet Union and the West enters a new phase with Britain's $160- million contract to provide Peking with Rolls- Royce jet engines and the technology for their manufacture."

I should not dissent from that. The article ends by saying:

"For China, the chief factor in seeking better relations with the United States, West Europe and Japan undoubtedly was the need for political support to counterbalance the Soviet threat. But it is now clear that a second reason for Peking's rapprochement with the West was to gain access to modern military equipment. This is a factor that may actually promote stability in the delicate triangular Soviet- Chinese-Western balance".

I would not necessarily dissent from that, but I mention this article because it makes the point, which the hon. Gentleman has fairly acknowledged, that even the Spey deal has wide implications. A deal involving the Harrier would have even wider ones.

I want to say a few words about COCOM. The initials simply stand for Co- ordinating Committee, and membership comprises the 15 NATO nations, excluding Iceland but with the addition of Japan. The committee was originally set up in 1950 to agree and keep under review a list of military equipment, arms and munitions which should not be exported by the West to the Sino-Soviet bloc for fear of compromising our own security.

Although this consultative process dates back to the 1950s, it remains important to us, for commercial as well as strategic reasons, to ensure that we do not provide a potential enemy with military technology that he could not develop for himself and hence allow him to benefit from the expertise that we have carefully built up and nurtured in certain areas. On the other hand, we must not allow the strategic considerations of the 1950s to dictate what can or cannot be sold to Communist countries in the very different circumstances prevailing today.

The hon. Gentleman referred to 1970 and to the changes that have occurred in China since then. I understand that he has recently visited China. Five years ago I made a personal application to pay such a visit, and received no acknowledgement. At that time I was a prohibited visitor. Without making any comparisons, the fact that he was able to visit China recently and I was denied the opportunity some years ago is a sign of the times. Therefore, in looking at the COCOM restrictions we must be alert to change and we must be discriminating. We must not take anything for granted.

We should not allow the genuine safeguards that we, as an alliance, quite rightly apply to the export of military equipment to be used by our partners to protect their own national commercial interests. I would not deny that sometimes there may be a place for the hon. Gentleman's declared cynicism in this respect. In short, we should consider whether these controls should be applied realistically and should fully reflect present- day circumstances. We have to make sure that they do make sense. That is the plain, short story.

If they do not make good sense, there is a danger that the process of mutual agreement that has worked so well over the last 25 years may suffer, as individual countries are tempted to go their own way in frustration at restrictions that are over-rigid and outdated.

The Spey deal does not, in our opinion, conflict with this philosophy, even though it has caused some concern amongst our COCOM partners. But the Harrier, as an integrated military weapons system, poses us problems of a very different order from those of the Spey. Nevertheless, as the hon. Member conceded, the fact that we have authorised the Spey deal shows that we are prepared to consider requests for advanced technology from the Chinese as sympathetically as possible and that we are willing to meet them in the same positive spirit, provided this can be done in a way that is consistent with our own security interests and our obligations to our allies.

These obligations would present us with considerable difficulties in respect of the Harrier. For our part, we have given very careful consideration to the military, political and international implications of such a sale, but we could not guarantee that our allies would agree with our own assessment of the implications.

The hon. Gentleman mentioned Mr. Schlesinger's aphorism that China is NATO's best ally. I think that the hon. Gentleman will recognise that, in the first place, aphorisms have to be examined for content, and perhaps there is less content in this aphorism than he would suppose. Second, although Mr. Schlesinger was then representative of the American Government, he is representative no longer, and one does not know how far those views, even if the content matched the words, are genuinely those of those most affected in the United States.

I know that it has not escaped the hon. Member that China is not the only possible market for the sale of Harrier, in one form or another. It follows that matters of judgment are involved about how future sales prospects can best be maximised.

We should therefore need to make a strong case to our COCOM partners for selling Harrier to the Chinese. In making such a case we would want to know when a firm order could be expected, the number of aircraft likely to be required, and what sort of delivery time scale was envisaged. At present we have no definite information on any of these points.

I hope that I have said enough to show the hon. Gentleman that we are far from indifferent to the prospect of a major sale of Harrier to China. I would only ask him carefully to consider the manner in which progress can best be made. Clearly, as he will see, this depends in the first instance on knowing more precisely the real interest of the Chinese in a significant purchase. An interest in principle, as he put it, is not really enough.

The hon. Gentleman has been very persuasive. We are aware of the Chinese interest, and have been for three years. The fact remains that, given all the considerations involved in such a deal, we must regard it as hypothetical for the present, while very ready to look further at it.

I suppose that most hon. Members over the next week will more than once hear the words of the second chapter of St. Luke's Gospel about the plight of the most famous homeless, if only temporarily, family of all time. It is right at Christmas that our thoughts should turn to those families who are without a home and that Government and voluntary effort should be directed to their needs.

I want, in this last debate before the recess, to draw attention to the plight of an increasing number of single people in our major cities who are without a home. Before embarking on my main remarks, I should declare an interest—although in no way a financial one—as chairman of the trustees of the charity "Crisis at Christmas" and as chairman of a voluntary housing association.

The charity Crisis at Christmas, to which the right hon. Member for Newham, North- East (Mr. Prentice) and the hon. Member for Cornwall, North (Mr. Pardoe) give an all-party flavour, is active only at this time of the year in raising funds for the agencies dealing with the single homeless and providing food and shelter over the period for several hundred single homeless people in central London. Incidentally, any hon. Member who is approached by the British Poultry Federation with the offer of a free turkey, as has been suggested in one national newspaper this morning, need fear no accusation of accepting a bribe: he can pass it on to Crisis at Christmas, and we shall make sure that it goes into the stomachs of those who would otherwise have no sort of proper Christmas dinner.

In the course of 1975, the House will have become aware that there is a serious and growing problem of single homelessness, highlighted perhaps most dramatically in the film "Johnny Come Home", which hon. Members will have seen either in the Grand Committee Room or in their homes. It shows how grim the situation is. Any hon. Member who represents an inner city constituency knows how young men and women arrive at city centres, for one reason or another lose their accommodation, and then may easily lose their jobs and get into a vicious downward spiral which leads to their becoming down and out. The unemployment which faces us at the moment makes the dangers of young people and old people alike being caught up in this vicious spiral very much greater, and we know that prospects for increasing unemployment, both generally and particularly among the young, must be very grave for the foreseeable future.

Even though I am raising this matter in what I hope will be almost entirely a non-political spirit, I must mention the impact of the Rent Act 1974 in drying up the supply of furnished accommodation, which was the traditional resort of young people coming to the city for the first time. I do not know whether the Under- Secretary is yet able to give any evidence of the working of the Act, but I take the announcement of the Secretary of State that the system of rent control is to be reviewed as being at least in part an acknowledgement that the Act of 1974 may not have operated entirely satisfactorily in this regard. We also know of the problem of young West Indians who, in domestic clashes, opt to leave home to sleep rough and who present a problem in London and in one or two other cities.

It is a real and growing problem. Of its nature, it is almost impossible to quantify with any precision. But in the annual report of Crisis at Christmas the assertion is made that we must think in terms of about 100,000 single homeless people this Christmas.

At the same time as the problem is growing so fast, so the voluntary bodies seeking to deal with it are being hit from several sides. In the first place, the increased demand which they face places them very much in a Catch 22 situation. The vast majority of the agencies would wish not only to be able to engage in rescue work for people actually homeless at present, and not only to be able to work on the rehabilitation of those who have gone down this vicious spiral and found themselves homeless, but to be beginning to undertake preventive work where this is possible and so to minimise the problem for the future. So great has been the increase in demand for their rescue services that many of them are having to stop preventive and rehabilitation work which they were planning and in some cases had actually started in recent years.

Secondly, like every other institution and individual, they have been ravaged by the impact of inflation upon their affairs. The examples of the closure of Salvation Army hostels in Liverpool and Bath and the Church Army hostel in Liverpool, the collapse of the Cure Hostel in London and even the collapse of the Cyrenian Homes were all examples of inflation and the way in which organisations with fixed grants have had their work disrupted by increasing costs.

Again, although in no party political sense, I put a comment from the Campaign for the Homeless and Rootless:

"A series of economic measures have been taken by the Government to emphasise the serious decline in our national wealth. For single homeless people, and the voluntary organisations which provide for so many single people their only escape from the streets, the effect of these measures has been serious in 1974–5 and could be devastating in 1975–6."

Inflation, public finance policy and the impact on fund raising have all had their effect on these charitable bodies. They are not alone.

All charities have suffered to one degree or another from this impact. It is inevitable that when, for the first time for many years, many individuals and families find their own standard of living and security being threatened, their concern for their fellow men and women who are less fortunate should move further down the agenda. It has been estimated by Mr. Mooney of the Charities Aid Foundation that the impact of inflation alone on services in the country as a whole means that some £65 million will be needed to compensate them.

There we have the problem. No one doubts that it is serious and growing. What can we do about it? In the long and medium term we can take several steps. The Government have announced their decision to place statutory responsibility on housing authorities to provide for the homeless, but I imagine that such provision would ignore the single homeless. Certainly in the past, once one reached the age of 17, unless one was under the control of a probation officer, there was no provision for the single homeless, and it would be an immense encouragement to everyone working in this area if the hon. Gentleman could tell us when the legislation will include the single homeless, although I doubt whether he will be able to do so.

My hon. Friend the Member for Wallasey (Mrs. Chalker) has a motion on the Order Paper proposing a Select Committee of the House to study the problem. Does that suggestion find favour with the Secretary of State?

My hon. Friend the Member for Cambridge (Mr. Lane), who has been fortunate in the Ballot for Private Member's Bills, has a Bill in draft which would both tackle the question of statutory responsibility for the homeless and restore in one form or another, yet to be finally decided, the provision of short- term terminable leases in an attempt to bring back into use some of the private empty property which would be suitable for the housing of single people. I hope that the hon. Gentleman will be more forthcoming than the Department has so far been in looking afresh at these proposals.

My hon. Friend the Member for Kensington (Sir B. Rhys Williams) has put forward a Bill along these lines. Both Shelter and Booker and Gray have made suggestions for a housing emergency office, which is an alternative approach to the same problem. It is essential, if we are to check the increase in homelessness, that something be done to cope not simply with the empty properties in public hands, but with empty properties in private hands, which, for one reason or another, owners are reluctant to put on the market at present.

The Minister reminded me at Question Time the other day that he had encouraged local authorities to let their tenants take in lodgers rather than discourage them in the way that had been traditional in the past. I should like to see this encouragement to maximise the use of our housing stock—and I understand the Secretary of State's target—extended in a more imaginative way. I wonder whether he could persuade the Chancellor of the Exchequer to exempt from income tax the first tranche of income received from letting off rooms in an owner- occupier's own home. I believe that in any case there is widespread evasion of this tax, and I do not suppose that my suggestion would cost the Treasury very much. It might be a major encouragement to people who are not using the whole of their accommodation as efficiently as they might to take in lodgers and thus help in providing accommodation for young people.

The Campaign for the Homeless and Rootless has made various suggestions, ranging from the provision of information booths at the main railway terminals in London to the extension of small hostels and the re- emphasis in the general housing policy of the needs of the single homeless. All these suggestions have merit in them and ought to be considered with great care, but we are faced with an immediate crisis with which these measures cannot begin to cope in time. We are faced with a crisis in which the numbers of single homeless are growing, and the agencies provided for them are cutting back their services and some, indeed, are in danger of collapsing. Unless we are prepared to stand by and watch this happen, we must examine alternative solutions. They may, indeed, not be alternative but may have to go hand in hand.

First, we need more generosity from the public. I believe that there is a growing awareness of the sort of hell that is represented by homelessness. If at this time of Christmas, when we are reminded of the problem, the public could not only financially but in terms of their own time and voluntary effort give higher priority to the needs of the homeless, and the plight of the young homeless in particular, we should all very much welcome such an approach.

The second possibility is Government help. I know that this is no time to be advocating new priorities for public expenditure. Yet I have to enter—and I do it only in passing—a query whether the Government have their priorities right in launching a monster like the Community Land Bill, at a time when there are many smaller steps which they could take to help those who are homeless or otherwise in need in our society.

I do not want to see a huge programme of Government- sponsored hostels set up all over the country. The most efficient and flexible way for the Government to help in the plight of the single homeless would be to give help to the voluntary agencies facing this cash crisis. The voluntary agencies are able to cope much more flexibly with the conditions of the single homeless. They spend their money more economically than the local authorities are able to do.

By definition, many of the single homeless at the moment would be extremely reluctant, as they see it, to come into the grips of a local authority or a statutory organisation. But, because of the differing provisions which can be made by voluntary agencies, they are able to catch many of these unfortunate men and women in their net.

This has been all too brief an opportunity to raise the subject of this increasing problem. We have a crisis this Christmas of single homelessness. My fear is that it will get worse in 1976. I hope that this brief debate will do something to make the general public more aware of the problem and to prompt the Government to begin to do something about it.

I am grateful to the hon. Member for Chelsea (Mr. Scott) for raising this serious human problem, and I pay tribute to his own involvement in the important voluntary activity to which he referred. As he said, it is fitting that we in the House of Commons, in this very last debate before the Christmas Recess, should be reminded of the acute problem of single people who are homeless.

As my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State said in his recent speech to the local authority associations, there is an unhappy paradox in the existence nationally of more houses than we have households and the coexistence of acute housing difficulties and homelessness. Succeeding Governments in fact seem to have been least successful at helping the poorest or the unluckiest 10 per cent., who include many of the single homeless to whom the hon. Gentleman referred.

Homeless single people are not a homogeneous group. Nobody knows just how many there are. I think that everyone would accept as homeless those sleeping out at night, the 1,800 in reception centres, those who have to move around from one lodging house to another, and some who end up in prison overnight or have nowhere to go on discharge from hospital. But we must remember that many live in lodging houses year in and year out, from choice, and many of those who enter prison or hospital from no fixed abode are able to obtain accommodation on discharge.

It is difficult to form an accurate idea of the numbers of those sleeping rough. They do not like being counted and some can disappear if they learn that a count is to be made. They also move around in the night, and it is easy to count them twice. It is impossible to produce accurate estimates of young people "crash- padding" with friends.

A count of homeless single persons organised by the National Assistance Board in 1965 found 965 persons, of whom 45 were women, sleeping rough in Great Britain. The figures for London were 247 men and 28 women. The St. Mungo Community Trust organised a count of people sleeping rough on the night of 20th October 1972, and it found 1,225 men and 190 women in 14 central London boroughs.

The basic causes of homelessness among single people include the increasing number of single-person householders and a reduction in the amount of suitable accommodation for them.

In 1931 the proportion of one- person householders in the total population was only 7 per cent. Forty years on, by the 1971 Census, this proportion had increased to 20 per cent. The evidence of Scandinavia and Switzerland suggests that the proportion could rise further yet. There are increasing numbers of old people, who now live longer, often alone. There is the breakdown of marriages, and the wish of more young people to set up earlier on their own or to move away from home for their work or education. The private rented sector, on which many single people have depended, to which the hon. Gentleman made proper reference, has continued to decline at the rate of about 100,000 lettings a year—and, in fact, it has gone on over 20 years. We are looking at the effect of the Rent Act and so on, and we are concerned about this aspect of the matter.

Some cheaper accommodation has disappeared on redevelopment. With changing social patterns and the growth of affluence, fewer people wish or need to take in lodgers, and some of those least able to compote or cope have been forced out of the housing market into homelessness.

The variety of the needs of single people can be as great as that of homeless families. The family itself usually provides stability and support. But among the most vulnerable are the single people who, as research has shown, are beset by a variety of other problems than the fact or the risk of homelessness—heavy drinking, alcoholism, the habitual use of drugs, psychiatric disturbances and personality disorders. Many homeless single people, too, are probationers or have been in prison or borstal, and follow the miserable cycle of hospital, prison and pad.

The Gleaves Affair and the television programme "Johnny Go Home" have drawn further attention this year to the plight of young people adrift in the centre of large cities, especially London. The main problem does not concern juveniles, who are covered by the various pieces of children's legislation, but concerns those perhaps between 17 and 25 who, through lack of foresight or resources, or just bad luck, find themselves in an unfamiliar city without a roof over their heads and so vulnerable to sexual or financial exploitation.

The Government have been active in seeking ways of combating this problem, which is very difficult. We are far from complacent. We are concerned about what can be done. After the Gleaves case, discussions were held between the Government Departments principally concerned, local authorities and representatives of the many voluntary organisations in this field. Following the showing of the television film "Johnny Go Home", a stronger working group was formed with wider representation in order to consider fully the accommodation and Other needs of homeless young people in inner city areas. The topics being reviewed by the working group include measures to dissuade young people from coming to London and other large cities without making proper plans; improving information services at travel termini; better monitoring by statutory bodies of the voluntary organizations they help; and a more effective information network to ensure that helping-organisations are aware of hostels with problems.

Work with homeless single people, whether they need care and support or not, has traditionally been a field for voluntary effort. We cannot overemphasize the tremendous work done by individuals in this area. Although the statutory services—the Supplementary Benefits Commission, the probation and social services, the hospitals and the youth service—have a very important and growing part to play, many of the people who need longer-term help find that difficult to accept unless it is offered in a way which falls in with their own ideas and does not smack of authority. Voluntary bodies have responded to this challenge, and have been able to offer the dedication and approach to which these men and women are most likely to respond.

The help required by those who not only lack a roof over their heads but have other problems can range from the mutual support derived from living with others to the intensive care needed by those with problems of alcoholism and personality disorders. It includes first-aid and rescue work, soup runs and night shelters. It is in the field of providing a roof-plus that the voluntary bodies, it seems to me, are particularly good. It is here that the personal touch is most important. In saying this, I do not forget all those in the probation service, in the reception centers and in local authority social services departments who likewise display a high sense of dedication.

The bulk of accommodation for those single people at risk of being homeless is provided by large bodies, but increasing numbers of small local groups are opening accommodation of the hostel or shelter type with varying degrees of social work support. But it is not enough simply to provide accommodation. Those who have no employment require somewhere to go during the day, and a few day- centers have been opened which seek To combine warmth and companionship with work of a therapeutic nature. In some areas local authority social workers and probation officers work closely with voluntary projects, and we as a Government intend to encourage the development of this type of facility.

We must improve co-ordination between all the official and voluntary organizations. We have gone some way in Government. Indeed, I am speaking today on behalf of a number of Departments. In addition, the House will know of the statement by my hon. Friend the Minister for Housing and Construction on Monday, saying that we are calling a series of meetings with Government, local government and voluntary bodies to consider the intended legislation on homelessness responsibilities.

I sympathise with those who feel that the plight of the single homeless is so serious that nothing should stand in the way of giving to the voluntary organizations which work with them as much money as they think necessary. Resources will never, under any Government, be enough to do right away all the things that are needed. Certainly, in the general climate of economy and restraint in which we live today, the disagreeable fact must be faced that choices have to be made between many deserving proposals, and we have to take decisions about priorities. I believe that, without being in any way complacent, we should recognize the level of resources that is being provided. Our policy is to keep going those voluntary initiatives which are most useful and valuable. There is a variety of ways in which Government help is made available to voluntary bodies. The Urban Aid Programme, the Voluntary Services Unit, prison after-care, the Department of Health and Social Security and the Supplementary Benefits Commission are all involved.

I want to spend two or three minutes on the main theme which runs through all the discussion on homelessness—the need to provide housing of the right sort in the places where people need it. When all is said and done, all of those who are homeless, whether single or not, have a basic need for housing accommodation. For the relatively few, that shelter might have to take the form of institutional care but not for most people.

The impact on the housing market of demographic changes which have led to more than half the households in Britain consisting of only one or two people is only now being appreciated. Attention was drawn to the situation in Department of the Environment Circular 24/75. A large part of our housing problems is due to the mis- match between the present housing stock and the nature of the needs and demands that the families and people of today are making on it. We see single people not in isolation but as part of this complex of supply and demand, while recognizing what I think will be common ground, which they have not in the past, had sufficient place in housing policy.

The importance of the Housing Act 1974 for single people has, in my view, not yet been properly appreciated. It introduced greatly increased help through housing association grant and housing deficit grant for registered housing associations whose experience in meeting the needs of particular groups should be especially useful to single people. It recognized for the first time that hostels were a form of housing eligible for the same subsidies and housing association grant as self- contained dwellings. There was also a special form of hostel deficit grant.

Substantial financial help is thus now available for the construction, conversion or improvement, and the management, of a range of accommodation to meet all single people's needs. In introducing the changes relating to hostels we had particularly in mind the need to provide for those people at the bottom of the social and housing ladder to whom the Crisis at Christmas publication "Out in the Cold" refers.

The answer lies not only in adding to our housing stock but in correcting our past failure to make the best use of the stock that already exists. We are pursuing a number of lines of action. We look to the new possibility of bringing into use new forms of tenure. I do not suggest that we can rest content in the belief that the support we are giving to voluntary organizations will meet all the needs of the single homeless, but I hold that, taken together, they represent a substantial contribution.

As regards legislation, we are in consultation with the local authorities and The voluntary bodies. The discussions will include the position of single people who may become homeless. I assure the hon. Gentleman that I shall take a very special note of the suggestions that he has made.

I have tried to indicate some of the difficult problems associated with single homelessness. I hope that I have been able to demonstrate that we are doing more than is sometimes appreciated to help the voluntary bodies and through our broader housing policies, some of which are particularly designed to alleviate the housing stress of single people. But our concern does not stop there. I assure the House that we regard this matter as urgent and serious. It is a great human social problem and it is appropriate that it should be raised at this time. We hope that the legislation that is coming forward and the discussions we are having with those voluntary bodies which know a good deal about the problem will result in a lessening and in a eventual solution of this terrible problem.

As I am the last person to address the House today. I convey my Christmas greetings to you, Mr. Deputy Speaker, to Mr. Speaker's Department, to all who are concerned with the running of the House and to all those who help us in so many ways. I wish you, Mr. Deputy Speaker, a very merry Christmas and a peaceful New Year.

I thank the Minister for his kind remarks, which are much appreciated. I reciprocate the hon. Gentleman's good wishes.