asked the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland whether he will make a further statement on the security situation.

asked the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland if he will make a statement about the security situation in Northern Ireland.

asked the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland if he will make a statement on the security situation.

asked the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland whether he will make a statement on the security situation in the South Armagh area.

asked the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland if he will make a further statement about the security situation in the Province.

asked the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland if he will make a statement on the security situation in Northern Ireland.

During the course of 1975, there was a marked change in the nature of violence, much of it being of a sectarian nature. There were fewer explosions, but more deaths as compared with 1974. The security forces met with great success and during the course of the year 1,197 persons were charged with terrorist-type offences.

Since the New Year, there have been some particularly horrific events, notably the murder of five Catholics at Whitecross and near Lurgan, and the murder of ten Protestants near Bessbrook. In addition, a soldier was killed in Londonderry and a policeman near Toome.

As regards the special situation in County Armagh, I would refer to the statement made by my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister on 12th January 1976—[Vol. 903, c. 27–30]. The security forces there have been reinforced and maintain an increased level of activity.

The security forces continue to meet with success in bringing suspected terrorists before the courts. Since the beginning of the year, 38 persons have been charged with terrorist type offences, including five with murder and one with attempted murder.

Is it now clearly established that the security forces are not simply reacting to the level of violence, a policy which arguably leaves the initiative to the enemy, but are finding terrorists at every opportunity, not simply depending on the IRA's profile from day to day?

The security forces are well aware of their task. The fact that so many people are going through the courts is an indication of the success of the security forces. Arising from the events of the last few weeks, about 20 men are being looked for in South Armagh. It is wrong to believe that the situation would be dealt with by the Army using greater numbers. We needed a greater Army presence there and have got it. However, it would be playing into the hands of the Provisional IRA to believe that finding a small number of people who are difficult to discover would necessarily be made easier by having more soldiers.

Although it is essential to have a firm political decision on Northern Ireland, is the right hon. Gentleman satisfied that there are sufficient troops in that area to carry out the surveillance role promised by the Prime Minister to take the follow-through role necessary in respect of those who are being rounded up? Will the right hon. Gentleman clear up the SAS question?

I am satisfied, as are my security advisers, that there are sufficient troops in the area. The hon. Gentleman mentioned the follow-through procedure and, obviously, the nature of the area needs to be borne in mind. The fact that a small number of men can travel backwards and forwards across the border and the fact that there is support for them in the community generally—perhaps "hostile community" is too strong a phrase—indicates the nature of the problem. We must face the fact that over many decades, not just in the last year or two, South Armagh has been a problem for the Irish authorities as well as for the United Kingdom. Indeed, the problem has existed for the last 200 or 300 years and the situation is peculiar in that sense. The IRA would be pleased if we were to draw more troops into that area and away from the urban areas.

In view of the recent increase in the amount of violence in north Belfast, will the right hon. Gentleman ensure that the border RUC station at Fort William, to replace the station blown up by the IRA, will soon be reestablished and occupied?

I appreciate the hon. Gentleman's proper concern for north Belfast. That area is a different type of area from South Armagh. In north Belfast there are violence and terrorism by Protestant para-militaries. In the recent past there have been some nasty murders in the area mentioned by the hon. Gentleman, and we are discussing the problem of Fort William with the Chief Constable.

As the border cannot be continuously manned or sealed, does the Secretary of State agree that the search operation cannot be pursued successfully unless the maximum amount of random searching takes place on the border on both sides? From a manpower point of view, is it not important that the Irish Government should reconsider their attitude to the use of troops and police on their side of the border? Would it not be better if the Irish Army could undertake separate searches in addition to the police rather than having to operate together, thus avoiding the waste of valuable manpower?

I know that the hon. Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed (Mr. Beith) has recently visited both sides of the border, and I appreciate his comment about random searches. A few days ago, a vast supply of explosives, amounting to six months' supply, was found by the Army. That find will obviously save the lives of large numbers of people. I agree that random searches are important. Since the meeting that I had at Baldonnel a year ago last September, there has been close co-operation between the Garda and the RUC. There is no co-operation with the Army except through the police. The Irish Government, for constitutional reasons and for reasons of their law, as they put it, are prepared to co-operate to the full police to police, but not army to army.

Does my right hon. Friend agree that although he is doing everything in his power to help within the framework of the security situation, it is the hope of all people on both sides that when the Convention is recalled, political arrangements can be made between the two main sides, because that would reduce the necessity for security forces, at least in time?

No.

I have little doubt that until the minority community and its representatives, not just politicians, are prepared to work for Northern Ireland and to feel that they belong to Northern Ireland, security will be very difficult. On the other hand, I also have no doubt—and this is not contradictory—that if there were agreement among politicians in the North tomorrow morning, it would spark the Provisional IRA to even greater violence, because it does not want a political solution. However, if the two communities were working against the Provisional IRA, it could be defeated.

The Minister has said that the security forces are searching for only about 20 people in South Armagh, so will he not reconsider sealing the border completely? This would be an expensive operation to begin with, but might it not save a number of lives in the end? Will the right hon. Gentleman re-emphasise that although there may be sympathy for the IRA in South Armagh, there is no question of Great Britain doing a deal with Southern Ireland to swap South Armagh for something else?

There would be great difficulty about doing a swap of South Armagh with anybody. It is no good hon. Members talking about sealing the border as if we were discussing East or West Germany. I have discussed this matter with my security advisers. The manpower required and the nature of the border require action to be selective. As has been shown recently, arms as well as terrorists come across the border. If I may say so to the hon. Member, for whom I have great respect, sealing the border is a pipe dream. In politics we hear many simple answers that are wrong; there are no simple answers to military problems, either.

Does not the right hon. Gentleman accept that it was purely by chance that 21 tons of explosives were seized at the border? Does not that indicate that the IRA believes that it can carry explosives on the main road from Dublin to Belfast with impunity? While he may not be able to close the the border entirely, could not the right hon. Gentleman increase the number of patrols, so that all traffic can be stopped and properly searched?

The fact that the explosives were found shows that the IRA cannot move them with impunity. The statistics of the amount of arms found in the course of a year show a remarkable story. I am advised that random searches and spot checks are far better than having traffic on the main road stopped constantly. The para-militaries would then move in from other directions. It is far better to entice them on to the main road and then to impede them. That is the firm advice that I get. It is not a political but a military judgment. I believe that it is right.

In his original reply the Minister referred to the incident when a soldier was shot at a checkpoint in Londonderry. Does he not agree that this is a very disturbing incident? I know that an Army investigation is taking place, but can the right hon. Gentleman give an assurance that precautions will be taken to prevent this sort of incident, in which two soldiers were also injured, happening again? Does the recent seizure of explosives form part of the subject of the Government's representations to Dublin at the present time?

I would not say that we were making representations, because that assumes that there is no contact. There is, in fact, daily contact about our arms finds and information, particularly about Frangex, which is made in the South. In the past year co-operation about identification has been excellent.

The Army will be investigating the incident in which young people who, it seems, went back to the Bogside, were able to fire at three British soldiers at a checkpoint. There has been a disturbing feature in the past three weeks. Just as sectarian murders emerged as the major factor last year, explosions in Belfast and Derry, one of which my hon. Friend the Member for Belfast, West (Mr. Fitt) knows about, because his wife was nearly involved, are showing up the youth of those concerned and the education that they have recently completed. A girl of 14 carrying weapons was recently stopped by soldiers at two o'clock in the morning.

The involvement of young people in Northern Ireland terrorism has been one of the most disturbing features in the early part of the year. It is easy to talk about education in youth clubs, but the problem is much deeper than that. It is about these young people belonging to a cause. They must believe in it or they would not put themselves in the position of a girl of 17 recently, who was blown to Kingdom come when a bomb she was planting went off.

A greater harmony and will for peace appears to exist in Londonderry and the north-west of Northern Ireland. Does my right hon. Friend feel that this latest outrage in Londonderry represents an unfortunate turning point in this situation?

I am glad that my hon. Friend has mentioned that. Northern Ireland is relatively small and it is easy to make trite remarks and say that Deny is different from Belfast, but there is far less secretarianism in Derry. There has always been co-operation between the communities in the past. Whether through trade unions or the clergy, there has always been a drawing together and a condemnation of what has gone on. This is excellent. But the fact that young kids can come in and kill is a development that mere words will not stop, and we must find a means of stopping it.

I welcome the success of the security forces, but is it the Secretary of State's judgment that the overall security situation is improving? Can he confirm whether one infantry battalion is part of the temporary reinforcements sent to Northern Ireland? Will he also comment on what success there has been in handing the security role from the Army to the police?

I would not want to be drawn into using the word "improving". I learned early, before I had my present responsibilities, that a statistical improvement is of little comfort to those who may be suffering from a different form of violence. There has been a change in the nature of violence.

I must rely on the GOC to decide the number of soldiers he wants. It would be wrong to fix the number of soldiers in the Province and say that it will not be changed. One must be flexible.

There has certainly been a remarkable change in the success of the police. It would be idle to pretend that the police are the major force in South Armagh, although certainly the major force in North Armagh, where there have been some ghastly murders by Protestants. There are some parts of Belfast where the police are not the major force, but I am sure we have to achieve primacy of the police.

What matters is the acceptance of the police. We have some acceptance from the minority, who have given support and information, but there is still not general acceptance of the RUC, for reasons of history, and we must overcome that if we are to succeed.

asked the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland how many secondary schools in Northern Ireland have a selective entry; and whether he will make a statement about Government policy towards these schools.

asked the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland when he hopes to announce the ending of the 11-plus selection procedure in Northern Ireland.

Of the 260 grant-aided secondary schools in Northern Ireland, 80 are grammar schools, and about 75 per cent. of the pupils admitted to these grammar schools each year have received scholarships as a result of the selection procedure.

It is my view that Northern Ireland's secondary schools should be reorganised on comprehensive lines. As I told the House on 3rd December 1975 the senior chief inspector is engaged in a feasibility study of the practicalities of reorganisation and is expected to report next March. Consultations will then be necessary with the various education interests concerned. The speed with which reorganisation can be effected and the future of the selection procedure will be determined when this exercise has been completed.—[Vol. 901, c. 1890.]

Bearing in mind the answer by the Secretary of State about the involvement of young people in violence in Northern Ireland, what contribution does the Minister think can be made in secondary schools towards eliminating that very disturbing trend? May we take it from his reply that the Government have no intention of introducing in Northern Ireland that policy of coercion in relation to the abolition of selection in secondary education that was announced for England and Wales in the Queen's Speech?

The reorganisation of secondary education is not at such an advanced state in Northern Ireland as it is in England and Wales, and it is not therefore intended that legislation comparable with the Bill recently placed before this House will be introduced. The schools in Northern Ireland have a commendable record of protecting and guiding their pupils through the very nasty situation that often exists in the districts in which they live. The pressures for young people to take part in violent activities come from mostly outside the school and are to some extent counteracted by the dedicated work of the Northern Ireland teaching profession.

Many people in Northern Ireland will welcome the Minister's statement about ending the selection procedure. However, apart from the education and social reasons for ending it, is he aware of the grave disquiet which exists and which resulted in abandonment of this year's selection procedure? Statistics the Minister gave me showed that cheating and abuse of the examination system in Londonderry had resulted in more than 200 pupils unfairly securing places in grammar schools, and the only people who have sufffered as a result are their co-religionists in rural areas who do not take part in this practice.

As a result of our holding a new 11-plus selection examination tomorrow and on 6th February, no one not entitled to get into a grammar school will do so unfairly. I welcome the hon. Gentleman's support for the reorganisation of secondary education and the abolition of the 11-plus. The incidents to which he drew attention show the difficulties in operating the present 11-plus selection scheme and the serious practical forces operating against such a test.

Is the Minister aware that there are some primary schools in which over a period of years no pupil has passed the 11-plus? I refer to the school of St. Peter's and St. Paul's, Muldonagh, Claudy.

It is not the practice of my Department to comment on the 11-plus results of any particular school.

asked the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland if he will make a statement about the future of Harland and Wolff.

Since 1st August, when I gave hon. Members a review of the position at Harland and Wolff, I have been in close touch with the company's affairs. When it became clear by the end of September that the company had fallen further behind in meeting its production targets, I initiated discussions with representatives of management and trade unions and emphasised the consequences of failure to improve performance. This led to the establishment of a joint productivity action group and I am glad to report that over the last three months there has been a noteworthy improvement in the throughput of steel.

This improvement will have a bearing on the review and updating of the company's corporate plan, which is in course of preparation. It would clearly be wrong for me to comment on the future of the company until I have had time to study the results of the review and to discuss them with representatives of management and the trade unions. It will be my intention to make a statement to the House as soon as possible thereafter.

Is the Minister of State aware that we appreciate his efforts for Harland and Wolff, particularly for worker-management co-operation, since the company means so much to Northern Ireland, where unemployment is above 11 per cent., this also being a company in which so much public money has been invested? Will he confirm that in recent months the production targets have been hit and that new equipment has been adopted? How is research proceeding into new types of vessel? The order book appears to be full until 1978, but have there been new orders since the new system was announced and adopted?

The hon. Member may be interested in the figures for the throughput of steel. When I raised this problem with the company last September the throughput was as high as 65 man-hours per ton. Last December it had been reduced to 45 man-hours per ton. That is a considerable improvement but in itself it does not resolve the problem. The throughout of steel does not include the finishing trades, and these must also be looked at.

The present orders will keep the company going until 1978. However, we must start taking new orders in 1976, based on the criteria laid down by my right hon. Friend. The company is competing in a difficult world market and it is against that background that we must examine the position. I can assure the hon. Gentleman that all aspects of diversification and other alternative forms of production are being examined.

The Minister has referred to the productivity rate. Will he join me in congratulating the workers of Harland and Wolff on achieving such a dramatic improvement in recent months? Does he accept that the trade unionists involved in Harland and Wolff and in other industries in Northern Ireland insist upon the yard being included in the Government's proposals for the nationalisation of shipbuilding? Does he accept that failure to do so will be interpreted in Northern Ireland as a deliberate attempt by the British Government to divorce the economy of Northern Ireland from that of the United Kingdom?

In my initial reply I paid tribute to the noteworthy improvement in productivity. I am extremely pleased that this aspect has developed as far as it has.

As for the hon. Gentleman's second question, if he wants to see the yard close down, he should continue to advocate the policy that the yard should be included in the Government's proposals for nationalisation. It is a reality that we are trying to save the yard. We are trying to maintain the largest employer in Northern Ireland, and we are doing it against an extremly difficult background. The sort of argument put forward by the hon. Gentleman does not assist the situation. The yard is already fully publicly-owned. It is accountable to Parliament—I am answering today for it—and it employs a form of democracy that I should have thought the House would welcome.

Will my right hon. Friend comment on industrial democracy in Harland and Wolff? Does he realise that many Government supporters welcome his pamphlet on industrial democracy and feel that the development of industrial democracy in Harland and Wolff might be a useful example for Northern Ireland to set the rest of the United Kingdom? Will my right hon. Friend comment on whether the AEUW rule book applies in Northern Ireland all its United Kingdom standards?

As an AEUW member, I had better not answer that question. I am sure that AEUW members will note what my hon. Friend has said. On the subject of industrial democracy, I am pleased to tell my hon. Friend and the House that at a mass meeting of shop stewards in the yard this morning the Government's proposals for full participation in industrial democracy were accepted. They are now prepared to accept five worker-directors on the board, and that is an issue that they have been discussing for some time.

I am greatly encouraged by this information. The trade unions have not found the discussions easy, but they have now grasped the nettle, and what they have agreed to do will be in the interests of not only industrial democracy but also Harland and Wolff.

Is the right hon. Gentleman aware that his reply to my hon. Friend the Member for Belfast, South (Mr. Bradford) implied that a nationalised shipbuilding industry would take no account of the prospects or conditions in the various areas in which shipbuilding plant and firms are situated? As I cannot believe that that is his intention, will he correct that impression?

The necessary restructuring which we have already undertaken would have been set back by the Government's proposals and the yard would have been made more vulnerable. The yard has its only chance of survival in a Northern Ireland context. I have devoted a great deal of time to getting an understanding and an agreement with the work people and management within the yard. That is why we have gone for full industrial participation. The Government have already committed money to Harland and Wolff and if Harland and Wolff had been brought into the ambit of a shipbuilding board that development would have been retarded, and that could only have been harmful to the company.

asked the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland what contingency plans are being worked out for the phased withdrawal of military forces from Northern Ireland in the context of a political settlement.

As I announced to the House on 12th January, I am examining with ministerial colleagues from other Departments the action and resources required for the next few years to maintain law and order in Northern Ireland with the aim of achieving the primacy of the police.—[Vol. 903, c. 57.]

Assuming that there can be some progress towards a political settlement—which is a large assumption in view of the mentality that seems to prevail in Northern Ireland—would it not be sensible to envisage the association of the forces of some friendly Powers with the British Army to relieve it of some of the burden of the odious task it now has to perform?

It is not a task that can be done by friendly Powers. Northern Ireland is not like the Gaza Strip. It is a question of policing. I do not believe that anyone else could have done what the British Army has done in the last five years so calmly. I see it on a day-to-day basis, and I do not say that out of false patriotism. It is our responsibility, and we must carry out the task. It would be wrong to give any sign that we were shuffling off that responsibility.

Is the right hon. Gentleman aware that his answer has the full support of the official Opposition? Is he also aware that any suggestion of a phased withdrawal at present would cause dangerous tensions, would not lead to a political settlement, and would not prevent civil war?

The subject of a phased withdrawal is not involved. What we must think about and not leave to chance is a return to the primacy of the police in a civil situation. I have paid my tribute to the Army. The fact that the Army takes the lead—I am glad it does—as it has to means that the police lose a certain amount of leadership. It is important that the police should get back that leadership. It is not a question of withdrawing the Army in the sense in which that phrase is sometimes used. We have to get back to the primacy of the police.

asked the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland what investigations he has undertaken with a view to ascertaining how the responsibilities of local authorities in Northern Ireland might most effectively be extended.

I am not contemplating any radical change in the present responsibilities of district councils which have been in effect for only two years and are as yet comparatively untried.

Does not the Minister agree that the complexities and growing frustrations being experienced warrant an early start to consultations to tackle the restoration of local government to elected representatives? Does he not further agree that such a review will become urgent if it is decided to continue the government of Northern Ireland from Westminster?

The Association of Local Authorities of Northern Ireland has put certain proposals to me. Some minor changes might be justified, but I do not wish to comment further at this stage.

Is not the only hope for a solution to the constitutional problem of Northern Ireland, first, an extension of the responsibilities of local authorities and, secondly, a return to permanent direct rule?

Local government in Northern Ireland has only recently been reorganised. The new arrangements have been in existence only for two years and are virtually untried. We must give them a fair crack of the whip.

asked the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland if he will make it his policy to consider the repartition of Northern Ireland.

No, Sir. This would not contribute to the solution of the problems of Northern Ireland and is not supported by either part of the divided community in Northern Ireland.

Is the Secretary of State aware that there is general admiration for the patience with which he approaches his responsibilities, but that there is a limit to patience? If his initiative in calling for the Convention to reach a form of power-sharing agreement fails because of the intransigence of certain groups, would not all other options have to be considered, including the voluntary emigration of the population?

What my right hon. Friend suggests falls into the category of the easy solution, which will not work in Northern Ireland. The Irish Government, the Northern Ireland Protestants and the Northern Ireland Catholics are not interested. The ethnic map is such that no computer, let alone any person, can redefine the border. That is the wrong approach.

I accept that the redefinition of the border is out of the question, but has the Secretary of State recently requested the Government of the Republic to set up a strip on the Republic side of the border that could be used for the hot pursuit of terrorists by forces on both sides, and, if not, why not?

The Government of the South would not be prepared to allow forces of another country to cross into their territory. That is plain. I do not think that it is necessary. What matters is co-operation between the forces in the North and South. I do not mean paper co-operation but co-operation that enables the Army in the North, when someone is seen crossing the border, to get that information quickly to the security forces in the South. That, I believe, is most important.

After having served two difficult years in Northern Ireland, does my right hon. Friend agree that the vast majority in Northern Ireland will bitterly resent the gross impertinence and arrogance of the intrusion of the right hon. Member for Walsall, North (Mr. Stonehouse) into the affairs of Northern Ireland? They have had to live there and see their relations killed. They could not evade their responsibilities by going to Florida or Australia. Does my right hon. Friend further agree that it was the original partitioning of Ireland that led to the present troubles, and that any further attempt to interfere with the border would lead to further trouble? Will my right hon. Friend take it upon himself to advise the right hon. Member for Walsall, North of the realities of life in Northern Ireland and to give him some literature, because, if predictions are right, he will have plenty of time to read it in the coming years?

I have been to and from Northern Ireland frequently in the past two years and I understand some of the views expressed there. It is not the Government's policy to alter the border.

Does not the argument of the right hon. Member for Walsall, North (Mr. Stonehouse) rest on the assumption, which has been proved false time and time again in elections and in the border poll, that Protestants as a whole are necessarily in support of the Union and that Catholics as a whole are necessarily in support of a Republican United Ireland? Is not this a dangerous assumption, which has been proved false by events, elections, and the border poll?

It is extremely difficult to draw conclusions from polls or anything else. There are two sections of the Northern Ireland community and our aim must be to get them to work for Northern Ireland.

asked the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland if he will make a statement on the reconvening of the Northern Ireland Convention.

As I told the House on 12th January the Constitutional Convention will meet on 3rd February to consider the matters referred to it: these are set out in the letter which I sent to the Chairman of the Convention on 14th January published as a White Paper on 16th January.—[Vol. 903, c. 61.]

I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for that information. Will he assure the House that if he feels that the Convention is near agreement after the four weeks set for the reconvened Convention, he will take it upon himself to have the powers, if necessary, shortly to extend its sitting?

I think the time has now come for there to be no flexibility for the Convention. It has had a long period to discuss the issues. I shall call it back for a month. In my view, that is sufficient. Of course, if it is necessary, I shall extend the time, but, whether successful or unsuccessful, the Convention will soon come to an end.

asked the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland if he will now increase the military presence and security on the border between Ulster and Eire, particularly in the counties of Armagh and Fermanagh and South Tyrone, and further press the Eire Government to do likewise.

The military presence in border areas is adapted to the needs of the local security situation. That in County Armagh is being increased as the Prime Minister described in his statement to the House on 12th January. I am satisfied that the Government of the Irish Republic, with whom I have recently had talks, will continue to co-operate in response to the needs of the situation.

I am grateful to the Secretary of State for his answer. Will he accept that I welcome the new military stature and more realistic tactics that seem to have been adopted by the Government? Have the additional troops in the border areas been drafted to those areas from other parts of Ulster, or from BAOR? Is the right hon. Gentleman satisfied with the deployment and numbers of the SAS, because its personnel are the best equipped and best trained to counter terrorism?

I am confident that the GOC knows how to use members of the SAS better than I do. That is his job. A realistic policy must adapt itself to the type of security needed in the area. Although I am sure that it would be easy to answer the hon. Gentleman's question, I think it would be very wrong for me to say where soldiers have come from or where they are going to. In the light of the flexibility that the GOC needs, I think it is best that I say nothing on that matter.

Does the Secretary of State recall that, following the atrocities at the beginning of September, he introduced the spearhead battalion? There then followed a lull in terrorist activities, which resulted in the spearhead battalion being redeployed. That lull was followed by an upsurge in murder, which culminated in the atrocities at the beginning of this year? Will the right hon. Gentleman assure us that the spearhead battalion will not be withdrawn again if the same pattern emerges?

I point out to the hon. Member for Armagh (Mr. McCusker), who is faced with the emotions in all parts of the country which come from killings, that the spearhead battalion, as its name implies, goes in and out. In my view when the spearhead battalion is being used and other redeployments are taking place, we should avoid its becoming a matter of public concern and comment.

As far as I am concerned, if the GOC wants extra soldiers, he can have them. The judgment must be his. In the north of the county, where the UVF has been active and about which there has not been the same amount of comment in British papers, for understandable reasons, there has been murder by Protestant para-militaries on a consistent scale. That will not be solved by a larger military force. It will be settled by detective work, and the police are doing very well.

asked the Prime Minister if he will list his public engagements for 22nd January.

I have held a number of meetings with my ministerial colleagues and others today. This evening I shall be speaking at the annual dinner of the French Chamber of Commerce.

When my right hon. Friend meets the French Chamber of Commerce, will he discuss the particular advantages of the public ownership of three of the major banks in France? Did my right hon. Friend notice that both the Conservatives and the Scottish National Party voted against any extension of the Post Office banking services, which are used by many ordinary working people throughout the country for receiving pensions, benefits and for paying bills and rents? Is it not becoming clear that the SNP, in particular, is concerned more with representing the interests of Scottish bankers than Scottish workers? Will my right hon. Friend appeal to all workers to put their money into places like National Savings Banks, Giro and the co-operatives?

My hon. Friend will realise that there is no ministerial responsibility for the way in which the Opposition parties vote, althought it is always interesting to observe it from time to time, as clearly my hon. Friend does.

On the subject of the French banks, I take it that my hon. Friend is referring to the semi-public financial corporations, such as the Credit Nationale and one or two others which channel public and private funds for investment into industry. We have had many exchanges with them about this matter. It is a fact that in certain directions, such as the Commissariat Plan, the French Government have power in respect of individual firms far greater than this House has ever taken, for example, in relation to the National Enterprise Board.

asked the Prime Minister when he next intends to visit Scotland.

I hope to do so in the spring, Sir.

That is very good news. In the light of the devolution debate, has the right hon. Gentleman had any further thoughts about the procedure he will use in making progress towards devolution? Is he aware that some of us take the view that, rather than have a quick Bill which has no chance of becoming law this Session, it would be better to have inter-party discussions about improving the proposals for devolution, either informally, or through a pre-legislation Committee?

I shall certainly consider anything that the hon. Gentleman or any other hon. Members may say about the procedure that should be followed. However, now that we have had the four-day debate, I am sure that the House will not at the stage want to go into the issues raised during that debate. The debate was very exhaustive and, indeed, exhausting. The Government will now want to consider seriously the arguments put forward in the debate. As to procedure, timing and so on, if my right hon. Friend the Leader of the House has anything to put before the House, he will no doubt do so.

Following what he has just said in answer to the hon. Member for Roxburgh, Selkirk and Peebles (Mr. Steel), does the Prime Minister fully appreciate how dangerous it would he for the future of the United Kingdom and for the Government in the aftermath of the devolution debate to proceed now with a Bill on the basis of the proposals outlined in the White Paper, which attracted so little positive support and, indeed, aroused so much opposition in all parts of the House? It is important that the Government should fully appreciate the position as it is.

Yes, of course. One always takes note of the weighty words of the right hon. Gentleman, who is experienced in these and other matters. However, I was not aware that when the Divisions were called the Conservative proposals received much support. Nevertheless, we shall study everything that was said from every part of the House, including the very serious speeches made from the Conservative Front Bench, which seemed to me to be sharply divided about which kind of Assembly they did not want.

rose—

Dr. Miller.

All that is very enjoyable for the Prime Minister—

Order. I had in fact called the hon. Member for East Kilbride (Dr. Miller) before the right hon. Gentleman got to his feet.

When my right hon. Friend comes to Scotland, as I hope he will, he will be pitched into the hurly-burly of politics in the area. May I extend an invitation to him to come to Strathavon, where he will be well received and where he will see the benefits that have accrued to little country towns during his Prime Ministership? It is a town that wishes to retain its old-world characteristics and, if he wishes, he may even catch a trout in the River Avon.

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for what he said, and I admire his ingenuity in managing to get in on this Question the supplementary that he would no doubt have put on Question No. Q8. I am sure that what he said will have weighed very heavily indeed with doubting Members in different parts of the House.

I apologise, Mr. Speaker, for having got up at the wrong time. I think that it is only reasonable to return to the Prime Minister, who will not be surprised when I tell him that he did not in any way answer my question. What is far more important is that he should consider seriously and sensibly, as I know he will, what I am saying. We have the Government's proposals before us and the right hon. Gentleman has to account for those and for nothing else. I am saying that as they stand the Government's proposals will not attract support in the House. Does not the right hon. Gentleman realise that on that basis it must be right for him to think again about the whole of the proposals and to decide how we may proceed on a basis that will attract support in the House?

The right hon. Gentleman is too modest. I said that we should want to study not only the Government's proposals and what was said about them but all the proposals put forward from different parts of the House. We want to study them all very carefully indeed, including, as I said, the contributions by the official Opposition, though I indicated that on a first reading I was not very impressed by them.

May I ask the Prime Minister when he comes to Scotland—I am pleased that at last he has accepted an invitation—to meet some fishermen and to give them the bad news that I am bringing to the House from Luxembourg—that, at the end of a serious debate on the fishing industry on Thursday, Commissioner Lardinois said that there was no question of a renegotiation of the common fisheries policy, which is a direct contradiction of what Ministers here have repeatedly said? Ministers have even promised that renegotiation is under way. This is a very serious matter. Will the Prime Minister give that bad news to the fishermen and explain the reasons for it?

I am grateful for the hon. Lady's welcome. I visited Scotland six times last year, and I hope to go there again very soon.

I was discussing fishing matters with my right hon. Friends the Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Food and the Secretary of State for Scotland just before lunch this morning. I take note of what the hon. Lady said about what was said by a distinguished commissioner. I have found it more useful when listening to statements about what is likely to happen to listen to my right hon. Friends than always to accept what is said by the Commission. At the end of the day, these matters are decided by Ministers here and by the Council of Ministers.

asked the Prime Minister when he next expects to meet President Ford.

The Government are in regular touch with the United States Administration at all levels, Sir, and I myself had several useful discussions with President Ford on matters of mutual interest in the course of 1975. There are no current plans for any early meeting.

When my right hon. Friend next meets President Ford, will he raise with him the appalling record of executions, tortures and abuses of human rights carried out by regimes installed by CIA intervention in Iran, Guatemala, Chile and elsewhere and make it clear that a Labour Government will never tolerate such activities being planned in London? Will he also tell President Ford that all CIA agents attached to the United States Embassy in Grosvenor Square should go home immediately?

I have repeatedly said to my hon. Friend and others of my hon. Friends that if they have any evidence whatsoever relating to the behaviour of CIA personnel in this country that they feel it right to bring to my attention, I will immediately go into it and take any action that may be necessary. My hon. Friend criticised certain activities in other countries. In many cases these are activities that my right hon. Friends and I have criticised both in opposition and in Government. But that is another matter. I have taken the line abroad, in both the United States and the Soviet Union, of not normally raising with them the activities of either the CIA or the KGB in third countries, unless a specific British interest has been involved.

Will the Prime Minister take an early opportunity to express to President Ford the gratitude of the British people for the fact that the American taxpayer continues to foot the major part of the bill for the defence of Europe and the Western world? Will he also explain to the President why the British Government plan to make further cuts in defence expenditure when Russia and her allies are increasing their defence expenditure?

It is not necessary for me to give any explanation to the President of the United States based on erroneous statements made by the hon. Gentleman. I have made clear in the House on a number of occasions—the hon. Gentleman will have the opportunity of studying the figures when they are published in the defence White Paper, on which there will be a debate—that we have not in any way reduced our contribution to the NATO collective arrangement—that seemed to be the basis of the hon. Gentleman's question. The hon. Gentleman, who is no doubt supporting recent authoritative statements on behalf of the Opposition, cannot have it both ways. He wants to add £4,800 million to defence expenditure, as was stated by the Leader of the Opposition, who has explained to me why she cannot be here today, at the same time as he wants to cut Government expenditure.

asked the Prime Minister when he next proposes to meet the TUC.

I refer my hon. and learned Friend to the reply which I gave to my hon. Friend the Member for Bolsover (Mr. Skinner) on 25th November, Sir.

When my right hon. Friend next meets the TUC, will he congratulate those trades unions and their officials who contribute greatly to the good industrial relations that exist in the bulk of our industry and who receive so little recognition? Does he agree that while among some of the industries and plants in economic difficulty industrial relations are bad, there are many others, such as the Decca plant in my constituency, where they are very good indeed and that these plants deserve congratulation and special help?

I believe that my hon. and learned Friend's comments are absolutely justified. It would be good if occasionally, for example, the Opposition were to pay tribute to the great improvements achieved in industrial rela- tions during the past two years. I am sure that they are highly gratified, though very silent, that the number of man-days lost last year through industrial stoppages was the lowest in any year since 1968—I note their cheers. I am sorry if these facts make hon. Gentlemen opposite unhappy. They destroy their whole argument. The loss of man-days through disputes last year showed a fall of 60 per cent. compared with 1974—almost all in the first two months—and a fall of 17 per cent. compared with their record in 1973. The number of man-days lost through disputes, which is the pabulum of the Opposition's whole publicity, has fallen by 75 per cent. compared with their record in 1972. Why cannot they have the guts to acknowledge those facts?

Does the Prime Minister agree that when he meets the TUC, it is highly likely that the problem of the current level of unemployment will be raised? We welcome the grant of £70 million to the Manpower Commission to create 15,000 new jobs. However, will the right hon. Gentleman undertake to look at the Canadian experience, where a job creation scheme under a local initiative programme for 150 million dollars has already created 100,000 new jobs, and consider whether we can benefit from that experience?

Finally, as there are 40,000 additional school leavers on the register, may I ask whether he is satisfied that the recruitment subsidy scheme is as successful as he hoped it would be?

I do not not quite accept the right hon. Gentleman's figures. It is certainly the case that in every meeting we have with the TUC we discuss these important questions. I cannot accept what the right hon. Gentleman said about comparability with Canada, nor, indeed, his figures for this country. He will be aware that for a fairly limited increase in expenditure—for example, on other job creation schemes apart from those he mentioned and, of course, regeneration schemes related to wool textile machinery and so on—there has been quite a marked response.

I am sure that the right hon. Gentleman is not suggesting—and I do not think that the Conservative Party is suggesting—a major programme of Keynesian-type reflation, which would not quickly reduce the numbers of unemployed, but could endanger the very significant progress made recently in the attack on cost inflation and rising prices.

Does the Prime Minister recall that a few months ago I asked him whether he would consider with the Trades Union Congress the proposition that major pay settlements should be arrived at on one day, certainly in the public sector? Has the Prime Minister discussed this proposition with the TUC? If so, what was the TUC's attitude to it as a method of overcoming leapfrogging?

I have not discussed it with the TUC. It is on all grounds of good theory a consummation devoutly to be wished, but it raises practical difficulties concerning the dates on which there have been previous settlements in individual industries. The hon. Member will know, for example, that in the proposals approved by the House in July or August last—the observance of which has been 100 per cent.—there was a very important clause requiring a whole year to go by before further increases were made. If there were now to be—however desirable in theory—a telescoping of the dates into a single date, it would make it very difficult to enforce the agreement by the TUC, the CBI and the Government.

(by Private Notice) asked the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland whether he will make a statement about the disclosure of official information from a Department for which he is responsible.

The Protestant Telegraph which was published in Belfast on 29th November carried an article which quoted from three official documents of the Northern Ireland Department of Housing, Local Government and Planning, two of which were classified "Confidential".

An official complaint was lodged with the Chief Constable. The RUC is actively investigating the matter. I cannot comment further on the nature of the investigation, which is entirely a matter for the police.

Yesterday, according to the Official Report, the hon. Member for Antrim, North (Rev. Ian Paisley) in the debate in Committee made certain references which it is apparent were quotations from a document classified "Confidential" about the appointment by the Minister of the Chairman of the Northern Ireland Housing Executive. This implied a further disclosure of official information.

I should also inform the House that after the RUC had begun its inquiry a document classified "Restricted", and prepared by Army representatives for the purpose of briefing the Minister in connection with the impact of the security situation on housing questions in West Belfast, was reproduced in full in the Irish Times of 5th December. This also is being investigated by the RUC.

Certain allegations implying irregularities in housing matters for which the Northern Ireland Housing Executive is responsible were raised with me by the hon. Member for Birmingham, Edgbaston (Mrs. Knight) in a series of letters beginning in September last year. As I informed the hon. Lady at the time, these also have been brought to the attention of the RUC.

I am seriously concerned that the action of any individual in the public service or connected with it may bring into disrepute the high standards of the service as a whole and the name and repute of good and civilised government within the United Kingdom. It is essential, therefore, that every possible measure should be taken to eradicate the source of such leaks.

Does my right hon. Friend agree with me that the recent disclosures cast a real cloud of suspicion on every civil servant at Stormont Castle, and that many of those civil servants are trying to do a very difficult job and are in no way involved with the leakage of information to the particular gentleman named?

Does my right hon. Friend also agree that it would appear that the hon. Member for Antrim, North (Rev. Ian Paisley) who, by the way, is at a wedding today—and did not think it important enough to come here—has access to Army files, police files, Housing Executive files and every part of the Civil Service administration in Northern Ireland, and that the hon. Member's remarks yesterday were calculated to smear a person who had just been appointed to a very responsible position in the Housing Executive in Northern Ireland?

Will my right hon. Friend give an undertaking that he will pursue his inquiries with all urgency, and that if it means appointing a Select Committee of this House to inquire into the activities of the hon. Member there will be no hesitation in setting up such a Select Committee?

On a point of order, Mr. Speaker. Is it in order to refer to the proceedings in a Committee of this House which has not yet reported?

The right hon. Member for Down, South (Mr. Powell) is wrong. It has reported.

The appointment of a Select Committee is not a matter for me. My hon. Friend the Member for Belfast, West (Mr. Fitt) is right in saying that it is a bad thing for the Civil Service in Northern Ireland that documents are leaked with consistency, and that they appear in newspapers—

It happens here.

My hon. Friend the Member for Newham, North-West (Mr. Lewis) has seen nothing in that respect unless he has been to Northern Ireland. The hon. Member for Antrim, North, in discussion with my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary, quoted verbatim from the record and said "This is on a file on a piece of paper in your office." There is no doubt that documents are passed, and the harm that this does to the Northern Ireland Civil Service, in a divided community, is really very great.

I can only assume that any hon. Member who has information that would help to track down any person passing this sort of information—at a time when I was busy dealing with the question of an appointment to the chairmanship of the Housing Executive—will make that information available. It really is indefensible that a quite proper analysis of the character of the person involved should be peddled around. It makes the normal processes of government very much more difficult. Inquiries are, of course, taking place, and I am sure that all men of honour will help the police.

In view of the fact that the disclosures appear to relate solely to housing matters, will the Secretary of State say whether he suspects that the disclosures may have come from the Northern Ireland Housing Executive, from the Department of Housing or, as has been implied, from his own Northern Ireland Office? Secondly, will he say what damage, if any, has been done to the public interest by the disclosure of this information?

Concerning the origin of the document, it would be much better if I were to say nothing as to where my suspicions may lie. I think it is a matter for the police. Whatever its source, however, the fact that someone feels that information of this kind should be passed on is very regrettable. We have had military documents passed on, and it is not a subject of amusement in the security forces that anyone regarding himself as loyal should do that kind of thing.

I feel that it is much better for me to leave the matter there. I can only repeat that it has done damage to the Northern Ireland Civil Service. I am afraid that too often I hear from different parts of the community, or rather from a particular part of the community, that the Northern Ireland Civil Service is Protestant-dominated. That is not true, but we shall now have it said "What do you expect from the Civil Service?" The Northern Ireland Civil Service is a remarkably fine service. There are bad eggs everywhere—sometimes, perhaps, in the House of Commons.

Is my right hon. Friend aware that one of the most important of British standards is that the identity of civil servants and the advice they may give to Ministers is highly treasured and kept very secret by all administrations, in order that a civil servant may give advice knowing that it will be treated as his best opinion and not as something which is likely to be leaked or used against him or used to throw suspicion on him and his colleagues in the future?

Can my right hon. Friend say whether any of the matters referred to in Committee have been brought to him by any hon. Members representing Northern Ireland constituencies saying where they got any of this information? Thirdly, is this only a phenomenon of the present administration in Northern Ireland or has it occurred in the past?

I am advised that the same thing happened under the previous administration. On the second point about Northern Ireland Members, not as far as I am aware. As for standards, that matter does arise in this respect. While the modern fad is to believe that what is sometimes peddled around is advice and discussion which takes place—I suppose that that is what one has to take in political life and we should welcome it—if documents are handed around and published when it would be very easy for those concerned to come to discuss them so that it can be explained what they are all about, that is a matter of standards which is to be deprecated.

While the leak in security is a matter for the police, would the right hon. Gentleman agree that for any hon. Member or civil servant in Northern Ireland the first priority should be to obtain a settlement which alone can end the bloodshed in Northern Ireland, and that anyone who exploits a security leak and, far worse, uses it to gain some temporary political advantage is indulging in action which in all quarters of the House would be utterly deprecated?

I agree fully. As I was coming to the House today I heard a further statement about this matter to the effect that all that had gone on in West Belfast was a deal with the IRA and so on. That is the most worrying aspect. The deductions which are made from documents in Northern Ireland would leave Aristotle gasping.

May I ask the Leader of the House whether he will state the business for next week?

Yes, Sir. The business for next week will be as follows: MONDAY 26th January—Supply [6th Allotted Day]: until about 7 p.m. a debate on the Provision of Services for the Mentally Ill Within The Hospital Service and In The Local Community, and afterwards, a debate on Municipal Trading and Direct Labour.

Both will arise on a motion for the Adjournment of the House.

Motion on the Financial Assistance for Industry (Increase of Limit) (No. 2) Order.

TUESDAY 27th January—Motions on Suggested Amendments to the Trade Union and Labour Relations (Amendment) Bill, and Third Reading.

WEDNESDAY 28th January—Remaining stages of the Prevention of Terrorism (Temporary Provisions) Bill, and of the National Coal Board (Finance) Bill.

THURSDAY 29th January—There will be a debate on the Employment situation, on a motion for the Adjournment of the House.

FRIDAY 30th January—Private Members' motions.

MONDAY 2nd February—A debate on procedure.

Can the right hon. Gentleman give some information about the form of the debate on Monday 2nd February and on the motion on which it will arise? Second, the Leader of the House gave an undertaking some time ago that, whenever possible, he would avoid bringing forward major Bills late in the Session. Can he therefore say now when the Dock Work Regulation Bill will be set down for Second Reading? Apart from the inconvenience to the House, the delay and uncertainty caused by such waiting in an industry like this is very serious.

On the first question, it is proposed that the debate will arise on a motion for the Adjournment. On the second question, the Dock Work Regulation Bill will be brought forward as soon as time can be found in Parliament for it. The undertaking—an informal undertaking in discussions between the two Houses—was that we would try so far as possible not to bring forward any major Bills for Second Reading after Easter.

Shall we have the White Paper or Green Paper on elections to the European Parliament next week or the week after?

I am not sure of the date of publication, but I imagine that the week after would be more likely. I will try to give more exact information next week.

Have the Government any intention of making statements next week on two matters—first, on the price of petrol and the fact that garages can apparently reduce the price by 7p a gallon despite the Government's decision allowing price increases? Second, is there any possibility of a statement before next Thursday's debate on unemployment on the strategy of the British Steel Corporation?

I do not know of any Minister who intends to make a statement on the price of petrol, but I will call what the hon. Gentleman has said to the attention of the appropriate Minister. There is no chance of a debate on the steel industry before the debate on unemployment on Thursday, but I said last week that I will try to find time for a debate at some time in the not too distant future. There will be a debate within a few weeks anyhow on the Iron and Steel Bill, which will give an opportunity for the House to debate the industry.

Will the debate on procedure on Monday week be only about my right hon. Friend's proposals for reform of Parliament and setting up a Committee to consider that, or will it be also on the basis of motions relating to any of the outstanding Reports from the old Procedure Committtee?

I hope that it will be a very wide debate. I will open it in a short speech and give some of my own views, and I hope that other hon. Members will do the same. It will be a debate on the Adjournment, so it will be wide enough to enable hon. Members to make any speeches they wish about the procedure and practice of the House.

When can we expect to see the White Paper on Public Expenditure?

Somewhere about the middle of next month, I think.

In reappointing the Select Committee on Cyprus, why have the Government, apparently without precedent, deprived the Committee of the right to send for persons and papers, which was in the original terms of reference last Session? Does the Leader of the House recall that the Select Committee was appointed very late last Session, that hon. Members worked hard all through the recess but could not send for all those persons and read all those papers which would have enabled the Committee to present a sensible and balanced report to the House? Will he therefore recommend the acceptance of the amendment on the Order Paper to reappoint the Committee with its original terms of reference?

I have not deprived anyone of anything because the motion has not been put yet—

It is on the Paper.

It may be on the Paper, but it has not been put—[HON. MEMBERS: "Why not?"].—As I said last week, because a number of my hon. Friends have been to see me about it. I agreed not to put it until I had had discussions and tried to find a solution to the problem. When I have done that, I will put the motion down, and I hope that it will be aceptable to hon. Members.

May I remind the right hon. Gentleman of the Select Committee Report on Violence in Marriage and of his promise that this matter would be given time for a debate early in the New Year? What is the position now?

There is great pressure on parliamentary time. For example, we spent four days on devolution recently. However, as soon as I can find time we shall have a debate on violence in marriage as well.

Will my right hon. Friend consider, in view of the importance of Thursday's debate, extending the time for at least an hour and a half?

It is a whole day's debate, but I will certainly look at that and perhaps discuss it with you, Mr. Speaker.

In connection with the debate on procedure on Monday week, will the right hon. Gentleman take into account the fact that there is now no Procedure Committee, which is unusual? From time to time, when matters are raised, we are told that they can be looked at by the Procedure Committee. In addition to the wide-ranging debate proposed, would he consider putting down a motion to set up a Select Committee on Procedure, as is normal?

Yes, Sir, I will certainly do that. As for saying that matters can be referred to the Procedure Committee, I do not think that so far I have said that this Session. However, as soon as any individual matters like that do occur, I shall be happy to do that. The purpose of Monday's debate is a much wider review. What I promised the House some time ago was a debate on the Adjournment in which every hon. Member would be free to say what he wished. I will consider the views put in the debate and then bring forward terms of reference for the Committee. This will be a listening exercise so far as we are concerned.

Can my right hon. Friend say when the Secretary of State for Trade will make the statement which the Lord President expected some time before the Christmas Recess? Will that statement include much tougher regulations on dumping?

I shall certainly call the Secretary of State's attention to my hon. Friend's observations.

In view of the special importance of this year's, albeit belated, Public Expenditure White Paper, will the Lord President give an assurance that there will be a two-day debate on that White Paper before the Budget?

It will depend on when the White Paper is published. It should be published about the middle of next month. We shall then know the date for the Budget and the amount of time available. I hope that we can debate the White Paper before the Budget. I agree with the hon. Gentleman that that is desirable.

In view of the importance of the oil rig construction industry in this country as a means of exploiting North Sea resources, may I point out to my right hon. Friend that 2.000 men in my constituency, who produced two of the largest oil rigs in the world, are now out of work? Therefore, will my right hon. Friend accept that at this stage we should consider having a debate on the oil rig construction industry and the work of the Offshore Supplies Office so that those who are directly concerned know that the House is sensitive to this urgent matter?

I appreciate my hon. Friend's concern about this matter and the concern in the North-East. The North-East Development Council is doing a great deal of work to increase work in the oil industry. I cannot promise any time for a debate on this subject in the near future, but I shall bear in mind my hon. Friend's comments.

I thank the right hon. Gentleman for his forthcoming answer to my hon. Friend the Member for Blaby (Mr. Lawson). It would be highly desirable this year to have a debate on the Public Expenditure White Paper before the Budget.

The whole House will welcome Monday week's debate on procedure. I take note of the right hon. Gentleman's answer to my hon. Friend the Member for Hampstead (Mr. Finsberg). Does he have any proposals which he wishes to nut on behalf of the Government? If he has, perhaps a short statement next week to air them might be helpful, so that the House can apply its mind to them.

When the Committee has been set up I hope that the Government will submit evidence to it. I hope that individual Ministers will feel free to submit evidence as well as all hon. Members. The purpose of the debate on Monday week is to listen to the views of the House about the kind of Committee that we should have and the extent of its terms of reference.

I agree with the right hon. Gentleman that last year the White Paper was overtaken by the Budget and there was not time for a debate. I hope that this year it will be published in time and that there will be a sufficiently big gap between the two to enable us to debate it.

Will my right hon. Friend arrange for a statement to be made or an inquiry to be held into the whole affair of property speculation in which Lord Ryder, the head of the National Enterprise Board, is to some degree, or else, involved? Will he not agree that property speculation is a matter of concern, whichever side is involved, and that we want to be absolutely certain that the judgment of someone who is accountable in the form in which Lord Ryder is accountable is not affected by whatever took place in those land deals? Will he agree that a statement or inquiry is called for? Further, has he seen The Guardian article on this matter today?

The answer to the first part of my hon. Friend's question is "Certainly not".

Can the right hon. Gentleman say when the proposed statement on defence cuts will be made? Will he give an assurance that after that statement there will be ample time for us to debate, in particular, the unemployment that will arise?

I do not accept in any way the hon. Gentleman's final proposition. The White Paper on Defence will be published a few weeks after the White Paper on Public Expenditure. We shall then find time to debate it.

Has my right hon. Friend's attention been drawn to the statement that was made last night but reported this morning by Leslie Male—the President and Chairman of the Police Federation—about the views of the overwhelming majority of our people on the increase in both muggings and violence to the person? If he reads the statement, will he bear in mind that every word is true and can be proved, and that the people of this country are getting worried about the situation? Will he ask his right hon. Friend the Home Secretary to be prepared to make a statement or to have discussions with the Police Federation, because in parts of London women, in particular, will not go out at night, go down certain roads or use the public services as they are afraid of being mugged by those who take the law into their own hands? It is a serious problem. Will he do something about it?

I read the statement and I know hon. Members' concern about this matter. The problem is not peculiar to this country. It is even worse in some countries, for example America, and has been for some time. I quite agree that that does not make the situation any better. It is serious. I agree with my hon. Friend and I shall pass his comments on to the Home Secretary.

Will the right hon. Gentleman take steps to re-establish the Select Committee on the Abortion (Amendment) Bill?

There will be a half-day debate in the week after next on the motion which is on the Order Paper to re-establish that Select Committee. There will be a completely free vote on this matter on this side of the House.

When will the House have an opportunity of discussing the many problems of Southern Africa, for some of which we are responsible, wherein, among the many pressing issues, the need for release from detention of Garfield Todd could be raised?

And Des Warren.

Certainly not next week or in the near future. However, this would be an appropriate subject to raise in a debate on foreign affairs, which we shall, I hope, have some time in the future.

Has the right hon. Gentleman's attention been drawn to the fact that yesterday morning the Standing Committee on Regional Affairs had insufficient time for the Minister to sum up because a number of hon. Members wanted to speak? Has he received my letter and will he make a statement on the situation?

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for letting me know about this and I intend to table a motion to enable that Committee to sit again. However, I can do that only by referring the matter to the Committee of Selection again. I hope that that Committee will select identical Members and then it can have a second sitting. That is the only way of doing it, but it can be done.

In view of the sad plight of so many firms in the radio, television and audio-manufacturing indusry, can we have a debate on this subject in due course, and in the meantime an appropriate statement from a Minister?

Not next week.

Has the Lord President not noticed that the Secretary of State for the Environment has published two circulars on the Government's views on the Dobry Report on Town and Country Planning? Is it not time that we debated the Government's decisions on this matter, because many people consider them entirely unsatisfactory?

One of the problems in the House and, I hope, one of the problems that will be discussed next week is the increasing difficulty of finding time for general debates. I agree with the hon. Gentleman that this matter is worthy of debate, but there is simply not time to debate such a matter, at present anyhow.

Will my right hon. Friend tell the House when the Government will be able to place before the House legislation to amend and clear up the conspiracy and picketing laws on which the trade union movement is pressing for a decision?

Can he arrange for a statement to be made on the activities of the Potato Marketing Board, because many housewives and small businesses believe that the large potato processors are being dealt with favourably? The price of potatoes has shot up so high that Parliament should now be seen to be tackling this question, or at least discussing the statement.

It is the Government's intention to invite the House to amend the laws of conspiracy, which I hope will be before long. I shall certainly pass my hon. Friend's second question on to the appropriate Minister. There is an Adjournment debate next week on the price of potatoes.

Has the Leader of the House seen Early-Day Motion No. 111, and is he aware that there is considerable disquiet throughout Scotland about the fact that this House has seen fit to exclude all SNP Members from examining in Committee a question which is vital to most of their constituents?

[That this House, noting that the Committee of Selection has consistently given over-representation to the Conservative Party on Scottish Standing Committees beyond the entitlement of that Party in terms of Scottish votes and Members, observes with disbelief that no member ofthe Scottish National Party has been appointed to serve on the Scottish Standing Committee considering the Freshwater and Salmon Fisheries [Scotland] Bill and declares that it has no confidence in the Committee of Selection.]

I must confess that I have some sympathy with the hon. Gentleman and his hon. Friends on this matter. I propose to have discussions with the other parties on this subject—I have not done so yet, but I shall do so—because I think that, in view of the number of parties that there are on the Opposition side of the House now, there is an injustice in this matter. However, the present Committee of Selection is bound to apply the present Standing Orders. Until they are changed, it cannot do otherwise. The Committee must reflect the whole United Kingdom strength, whether or not a Scottish Bill is involved. However, I shall have talks with all the other parties on this matter to see whether we can reach any proposition to put before the House.

When will the House be given an opportunity to debate world trade?

As far as I am aware, there is no opportunity for a general debate in the immediate future, but I know that this is a matter that concerns us all and I hope that there will be an opportunity before long.

Reverting to the point raised by my right hon. Friend the Member for Yeovil (Mr. Peyton), if the Government are to put forward specific points for the House to consider in the procedure debate, would it not be much more satisfactory if we had some notice of them, so that hon. Members in all parts of the House could consider what the Government have in mind, rather than come cold to it in the middle of a Minister's speech at the beginning of the debate?

No, Sir. This is purely an open debate. I shall be putting forward some of the problems as I see them, and I hope that all hon. Members who have views on the matter will put them forward during this exercise if they wish to do so. When the Committee is set up, I shall certainly give evidence to it, but at this stage the debate is a listening exercise for me. When I have listened to the debate and considered it, I shall bring forward terms of reference for a Committee to the House.

Has my right hon. Friend yet had an opportunity of deciding what action he should take to reduce the volume of printed material circulated by the Vote Office to hon. Members, to which reference was made last week?

There is some scope here, I am sure. I heard this week, for example, of a taxi taking a copy of Hansard to an hon. Member's house very early in the morning, and very often the Member himself was not there, and I just wonder whether that is necessary. I also mentioned last week the point about the orders of hon. Members having gone on for years. I must certainly get down to this matter and see what sensible economies can be made without impairing the efficiency of the House.

May I revert to the question about the price of potatoes and the promise or indication of a debate on the Adjournment next week? We are suffering at present from a series of short specialist debates on horticulture, which makes it very difficult to discuss horticulture in the round. Can the Leader of the House offer us a half-day debate on horticulture in which any horticultural topic would be in order?

No, Sir. I cannot do that. However, there are the regular Private Member's motions, and this would be a very appropriate subject for them. The Opposition have a Supply Day almost every week, and they could be invited to take one of those days to debate the price of potatoes or the horticulture industry.

From time to time, and quite properly, we have debates on economic problems in Scotland, Wales and English regions. Is my right hon. Friend prepared to consider making time available for the House to debate the economic problems of Greater London, wherein one-fifth of the entire population of this nation lives, and which is now facing a serious problem of unemployment among its young people?

I cannot promise a debate in the House, but I should be happy to arrange a debate in the very near future in the Regional Affairs Committee if that would help my hon. Friend and other hon. Members.

Reverting to, and welcoming, what the Leader of the House said about his proposal to have talks about the composition of Scottish Committees, may I ask the right hon. Gentleman to consider looking urgently at the composition of the Committee on the Crofting Bill, which is due to start next week? That Bill applies to only six parliamentary constituencies, two of which happen to be represented by my right hon. and hon. Friends, and neither of them is a member of the Committee. That makes the House of Commons look quite ridiculous.

As I said in reply to a previous question, the problem is that the Committee of Selection must apply the present Standing Orders and must reflect the strength of the House as a whole. I personally think that this is unjust in the present situation. However, I shall have talks about this matter and see what we can put before the House on this subject, although I do not think that this would affect the Crofting Bill.

Is the Leader of the House aware that there is growing anxiety in the agricultural community about what is going on in Brussels in the price review, and that we ought to have a statement from the Minister of Agriculture next week on the discussions that he has held this week to keen us un to date about what is going on? Can the right hon. Gentleman assure us that the Minister of Agriculture will make a statement next week?

I cannot give an assurance about that, but I shall pass on what the hon. Gentleman has said to my right hon. Friend the Minister of Agriculture and ask him whether he is able to do that.

Does the Leader of the House realise what he said in response to his hon. Friend the Member for Warley, East (Mr. Faulds) just now? He said that the question of Mr. Garfield Todd's detention was a matter of foreign affairs. Does he really regard Southern Rhodesia as a question of foreign affairs?

I always realise what I have said. If the hon. and learned Gentleman had listened to the first part of my hon. Friend's question, he would have heard that my hon. Friend asked about South Africa. That is certainly a matter of foreign affairs—very foreign affairs. I said that this would be a very appropriate subject, the question of South Africa, to raise in a debate on foreign affairs. [An Hon. Member: "Southern Africa."] I thought that my hon. Friend said "South Africa." If he said "Southern Africa" that still applies.

May I enlighten the hon. and learned Member for Darwen (Mr. Fletcher-Cooke)? If he had been listening to my question, he would have heard me refer to "Southern Africa".

No, the hon. Gentleman can try to enlighten me or ask a question of the Lord President, but he cannot enlighten the hon. and learned Member.

I beg to move,

That this House takes note of the First, Second, Third, Fourth and Fifth Reports from the Committee of Public Accounts in the last Session of Parliament and of the Treasury Minute and Northern Ireland Memorandum on those Reports (Command Papers Nos. 6298 and 6286).

Before discussing the work of the Committee either in general or in the round—as my hon. Friend the Member for Maidstone (Mr. Wells) would say—or in particular, I should like to pay a tribute on behalf of its members to its many willing servants and counsellors, whose reward and justification is its success. I am very proud to be able to pay that tribute on behalf of the Committee as a whole. It is paid first to our Clerk, always patient and willing and so very helpful. It is paid to Mr. McKean, the Treasury witness, whose knowledge has been increasingly available to the Committee. I am sure that the members of the Committee would agree with me when I say that there is great need always for effective evidence from the Treasury and, indeed, a form of partnership with the Treasury is essential for the working of the Committee.

Then the tribute is paid to Mr. Sythes, in his first year as Comptroller and Auditor General for Northern Ireland. The Committee was most sympathetic to the difficulties that the Civil Service has in operating in that part of the United Kingdom. I think that we were all impressed with the consistently high standard of his work and that of all those who worked with him and the civil servants whom we saw. In the context of the Private Notice Question to the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland which we heard a few moments ago, I am very glad to be able to underline that point and to stress our confidence in those who are serving the community in Ulster.

I hope, too, that the Members of the Committee will allow me to pay them a tribute for their conscientiousness, devotion and tenacity. We had a heavy programme of work in the Session to which I have referred. It was a calmer situation than in 1974, when we were so tediously interrupted by General Elections. Parliament is the richer, and the public are well served, by my colleagues' unadvertised and dutiful application. I am grateful to them, too, for their many personal kindnesses to me and for their support.

As in former years, the Committee has carried on its work in an entirely nonparty spirit. Perhaps I might illustrate this feeling of unanimity of purpose by mentioning that all five of the Committee's Reports were agreed without the necessity for any formal Division on the terms of their wording. The House is never so effective as it is when it is bipartisan.

As you know, Mr. Deputy Speaker, our responsibility is to expose waste and incompetence by Departments. Ministerial ineptitude is quite another matter. Ministers are vastly more extravagant, whatever Government they belong to, than any civil servants could ever be, and they are more costly to the economy. Our job is to probe and examine and, I hope, thereby to promote efficiency and effectiveness in the public service.

In the debate on the Reports of the Committee in the last Session, I reminded the House that because of the sound basis for ensuring accounting regularity under the guidance of the Treasury—or, to put the matter in rather plainer English, because there are no longer defalcations on a massive scale, such as we might have been accustomed to a couple of centuries or more ago—the Committee was able to devote its time to examining the wider aspects of departmental control over spending. That has continued to be true. The Committee has again been able to concentrate on seeing whether Departments obtain value for taxpayers' money.

It is fair to say that the Departments seem to us to be conscious of the need to avoid waste and extravagance, particularly perhaps in these times of financial stringency. But administration is complex—increasingly so—and things do not always go as well as they might. We considered a variety of cases which demonstrated the need for better management or stronger control.

I can also assure the House that, cordial as the relationship between members of the Committee and the various accounting officers summoned to appear before them may be, an accounting officer does not receive the summons with any feeling of pleasure. A cross-examination of a Department's shortcomings by members of the Committee is an experience which I am certain any accounting officer would willingly forgo whenever possible. I fancy that in practice there is every encouragement to a Government Department to avoid putting him in that position.

Perhaps I may quote in aid an example which comes to mind from the most recent examination of witnesses. Members of the Committee were very struck by the evidence given to us on behalf of the British Museum. I confess to being an ardent partisan of the British Museum. When I was a Minister at the Treasury I was responsible for introducing legislation which reformed the constitution of that remarkable body, which is such a credit to the nation. We were obliged to be very stern with the witness from the British Museum and to be highly critical in our Report. I have since noticed the concern that this has caused not only to the administration of the British Museum but to many colleagues in the House who, like me, are strong supporters of that institution. I like to think, therefore, that the Committee, its Reports and its criticisms where necessary—sometimes we regret having to make them—undoubtedly have a great effect, perhaps much more widely than is always the case, on the public service.

The Committee has been fortunate in having members with a wide range of interests which enable them to apply their experience successfully to the many different subjects which come under their consideration, and to probe more deeply when necessary. I believe that that is yet another illustration of the advantage that there always is to the House when its Members have good practical experience outside it.

The Committee has the responsibility to be critical in its approach, yet to be fair and to seek to make a balanced judgment, recognising that perfection, much as it may be a goal to aim for, is frequently unattainable in practice.

I hope that when I turn to the subject matters in the Committee's Reports the House will agree that we have sought to be constructive in our criticisms, giving encouragement to the efforts that Departments are making to improve their systems of financial control, yet also being frank in expressing our displeasure when we consider that strictures have been merited, as they were in a number of cases which we had under examination.

I told the House in last Session's debate that I hoped it would be possible to speed up the dissemination of the results of the Committee's work by publishing our Reports more often. Every member of the Committee is only too conscious that with volumes of this size and nature, covering 10, 12 or 15 different subjects, it becomes difficult for the House and commentators outside easily to digest the work that we are doing. Therefore, we thought that it would be better if we could publish three or four Reports rather than two main ones.

We made progress by publishing our Third Report in July last year, a Report which covered the evidence taken up to Easter. The balance of our main work was covered in our Fourth Report and our Fifth Report, which related specifically to Northern Ireland. Both those Reports were published in September.

I hope that members of the Committee who are good enough to be here this afternoon will agree that it might be a good thing if we could make further progress in that direction. But last year we found that printing delays and the need to wait for the proofs of evidence to be checked for accuracy militated against as much speeding-up as we should like. The printing delays and interruptions that the House suffered last year were a positive disgrace and an impediment to democracy. It may be that we are spoilt in the House, because we are so accustomed to a very high standard, but there is no doubt that the work of the Committee suffered, like the work of the House as a whole, as a result of those interruptions and delays.

I recall that in our last debate on the work of the Committee the hon. Member for Norwich, South (Mr. Garrett) criticised the so-called inferior status of the auditors in the Exchequer because, as he said, most did not hold an external professional qualification. That point needs further consideration. However, members of the Committee may think that the hon. Gentleman's comparisons did less than justice to the professional competence underlying the Reports which came before us or to the specialised training which all the people concerned have undergone. But I know that successive Comptrollers and Auditors General have kept the training arrangements for their staffs under review, and the recently-widened charter of the Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy has made its qualification more relevant to the needs of Government auditing. The training of new entrants into the Department will now lead to qualification as members of the Institute.

Finally in this preamble, I pay a particular tribute to the present Comptroller and Auditor General, Sir David Pitblado, who will shortly be retiring. I have had the pleasure of knowing him for many years, both in Washington, where he was Economic Minister, when I was a Minister at the Treasury, and now as one of the chief servants of this House. His whole career has been a distinction. We are deeply grateful to him for his devotion, competence, loyalty and pertinacity. He has been an outstanding Comptroller and Audtior General. I am sure that the Committee and the whole House wish him and his wife happiness in their retirement.

There is another remark I am constrained to make. I noticed some observations of the Prime Minister a short time ago in which he suggested that the format of the PAC might be something that could be applied to Europe. I thought that that was wise advice and in so far as it is appropriate for the European Parliament—I dare say soon to be elected—to exercise an increased budgetary control of European affairs, I hope that some use will be made of what I regard as the quite outstanding British experience.

I come now to the details of our work in the last Parliament. Our First and Second Reports dealt, as usual, with some cases of excess expenditure in Great Britain and Northern Ireland respectively. Almost inevitably, when Departments are—with the encouragement of Parliament—drawing their estimates of expenditure as realistically and tightly as possible, there are, despite supplementaries, some cases of excess expenditure every year. We shall be looking at some cases in respect of last year in a day or two.

Dealing with last Session, we recorded that we saw no objections to the sums needed being provided by excess Votes, and the House subsequently voted those sums. We probed more deeply into two cases. One dealt with the National Health Service in England and the other with road services in Northern Ireland where, possibly as a result of reorganisation of duties between local and central Government, estimates were by no means as accurate as usual.

In Northern Ireland there was some over-enthusiasm in accelerating the payment of accounts at the end of the year and in bringing forward programmes of work which would normally have been done in the next financial year. That is a practice which is wholly wrong. There was no loss of public funds, however, and we were assured that proper controls were now in operation in Northern Ireland. I deal now with our Third and Fourth Reports which record the bulk of our work. These were based, as usual, on the examination of witnesses on subjects brought to the attention of Parliament in the Reports of the Comptroller and Auditor General on the 1973–74 accounts and also on subjects where we were following up the comments in the Treasury Minute on the Third Report of the Committee in the 1973–74 parliamentary Session. A study of the contents tables in those Reports, which I dare say many hon. Members have made, shows that we examined a wide range of subjects. There were 35 in all on which we considered it necessary to report. There were others about which we had no need to report. It might be helpful if I indicate the broad aspects of our work by summarising them under six separate headings.

First, we looked at control over revenue and in particular at the arrangements for introducing VAT from April 1973 upon the abolition of purchase tax. The revenue in the first year was about £1,500 million—a not inconsiderable sum. But it is now running at about double that figure. There are vast sums of public money involved in this one new tax.

Second, we looked again at various aspects of Government assistance to industry, both in general and in particular in assisted areas, for instance to the shipbuilding industry and Rolls-Royce (1971) Ltd. Once again, large sums of money are involved. This is a continuing and I think worrying responsibility. It seems, if I may say this in parenthesis, that the sooner the House lays down firm guidelines for the way in which this assistance is organised and controlled the better. I hope that the PAC is already playing a part in that.

Third, we examined a number of different examples of the Government's purchasing arrangements for stores and their placing of contracts for large capital projects. Here again large sums are involved—£1,300 million on non-competitive stores contracts alone.

Fourth, we spent some time in examining the planning of several different computer projects. As hon. Members will know, either from general or personal experience, although we may live in a so-called computer age, computer projects have to be planned by fallible human beings. How fallible sometimes those human beings can be, even when they are civil servants! The longer I live the more truth I see in that statement by Mr. Patrick Hutber, the remarkable City Editor of the Sunday Telegraph, that only too often improvement equals deterioration.

Fifth, we looked at a number of aspects of the food and agriculture sector, particularly in relation to the United Kingdom's membership of the European Economic Community and the control of grants and subsidies.

Lastly, but by no means of least importance, we examined value for money and possible inefficiency, in a number of different types of administrative expenditure which the Comptroller and Auditor General drew to the attention of Parliament. These range over a wide list of matters as diverse as the operating expenses and maintenance costs of Government buildings, the operation of hospital laundry services in Wales and the cost of looking after a small bridge in Scotland.

I would like to say a short word about that item. This was the Inchinnan Bridge over the River Cart. It used to be looked after, and I dare say owned, by the local authority. In those days it took one man to open it and look after it generally. The maintenance was farmed out by way of contract. It was then taken over by the Scottish Development Department. A total of six men were employed full time looking after the bridge and maintaining it, at a cost of £18,000 a year. The bridge was opened only once or twice a year and the revenue gained from it was 80p, including VAT. It was a scandalous state of affairs.

The point is that here is a service which the PAC can render the House of Commons—by drawing attention to an apparently small item of this sort and asking the question: "How many other 'Inchinnan Bridge' situations are there under the control of different Government Departments where people are happily engaged in doing very little at public expense?" These are situations which must be exposed and will be exposed if we have diligent command in Ministries.

Under this general head of different types of administrative expenditure in some cases quite substantial sums of money were at stake while in others relatively small amounts were looked at. It was not just a matter of concentrating on the candle ends side of the economy. We were not concerning ourselves with candle ends as such but, as in the whole area of our deliberations, were seeking to ensure that the country's administrators do not adopt a complacent attitude towards waste and efficiency which, given more attention, could so easily be avoided.

I turn from that classic case of incompetence to some matters on which I wish to comment in some detail. Tax collection is never a popular activity in any country. In this country we take some pride in the effort which goes into operating fairly the administration of whatever taxes Parliament has authorised. If one individual or firm is able to evade tax—I do not mean avoid tax—the community as a whole is the poorer and there is injustice to the honest taxpayer. I am sure that hon. Members recognise the enormous task which faced the Customs and Excise on the introduction of VAT from April 1973, even allowing for the advantage which was taken of learning from the experience of other countries which had already operated the tax. Nevertheless, it was clear to the Committee that during the first year the controls over collection were less than adequate and that for reasons of policy the Department was deliberately adopting a velvet glove approach towards traders' failures. It relied substantially on the honesty and accuracy of traders in compiling their tax returns. This approach cost money.

What matters to this House is that it cost a great deal of money. The Customs and Excise Department made a statistical calculation for us showing that its tax losses in its first full year of control measures, 1974–75, were about £35 million to £40 million. We may therefore speculate that in the initial year, 1973–74, losses could have been substantially higher than that. We were deeply concerned about these substantial tax losses and recommended an urgent speeding up of more stringent enforcement measures. Paragraph 7 of our Third Report refers to that. In paragraph 9 we also suggested that more information should be made available to Parliament about the progress made in collecting the tax.

Quite frankly, we were not impressed with what the Customs and Excise had done under this head. I note that the Treasury Minute gives an assurance that the Customs and Excise Department intends to operate its enforcement procedures more rigorously. I have little doubt that the PAC in this present Session will wish to examine further the effectiveness with which this assurance is being converted into a reduction of losses of tax.

I am also pleased, incidentally, to see that the Department accepts the need for Parliament to be given more information about progress made in collecting the tax, so that if there were any further serious errors the Committee could inquire into the reasons.

While dealing with the income side of our finances, I should refer in passing to the Committee's examination of the control exercised over the level of fees and charges made for services provided by Government Departments. In the Home Office, in particular, there were delays in policy decisions on the appropriate proportion of costs to be recovered, so that charges were not being properly reviewed and income was not being increased to recover the full costs where they should have been recovered. We thought that the Home Office had been asleep, and we shall want to see how many other Departments have similarly slumbered and thereby lost revenue to the Exchequer.

I am pleased to note from the Treasury minute that steps have been taken to ensure that in future there will be a regular review at frequent intervals of the Home Office fees and charges and that action has already been taken to make a sustantial increase as soon as practicable in one matter to which we drew attention—the charge for vehicle removal.

I want to speak more fully now about Government assistance to industry. As I have said, this has been absorbing an ever-increasing amount of our national resources in recent years, both in general schemes of assistance and in intervention to help particular firms to remain solvent, and thereby—I dare say properly—to try to minimise unemployment. The Committee has continued to show a close interest in the general control arrangements for administering financial assistance under the Industry Act and we shall certainly keep these matters under review. We looked in particular at the progress made by Govan Shipbuilders and Cammell Laird towards attaining commercial viability. We shared the Department of Industry's concern about the unsatisfactory financial position of both these companies. We shall continue to watch the Department's efforts to ensure that they operate the effective financial controls which are a prime essential of good management.

The Committee also reviewed the current position of the relationship between the Government and Rolls-Royce (1971) Ltd. The Government's commitment here is now £168 million—a very large sum of money indeed. Here again, the Department of Industry is not yet satisfied with the company's organization and performance, and nor were we. In common with much of British industry the firm is experiencing a difficult time and has not yet paid any dividends. We can only wait and see what sort of return is achieved from this tremendous Government investment. I repeat that, on this whole subject of intervention in industry, it is essential that the House should lay down guide lines and that we should learn lessons from past experience.

One perennial theme flowing through the Committe's Reports is the failure of Government Departments to decide precisely their requirements and to draw up competent plans before placing contracts. As a result it seemed to us that many of the cost benefits of competitive tendering are lost by the subsequent amending of contracts to incorporate second and third thoughts and so on. This is noticeable particularly in the defence sector. No contractor can work with maximum efficiency if his customer keeps changing his mind about what he wants, or does not make up his mind at all on some requirements until work has actually started. That waste and inefficiency and those delays in completion of projects have to be paid for by the customer—in this case the taxpayer—not by the contractor.

One subject which illustrates this point is the hospital building programme into which we were inquiring. It is a disgrace that it has been necessary for three successive years for the Committee of Public Accounts to report on defects in control over hospital building. We have reported that the situation has been most unsatisfactory. We say so in paragraph 153 of our Third Report. Despite assurances from the Department of Health and Social Security that lessons have been learnt from past errors, I must say—and I am sure that my colleagues will confirm this—that we have yet to be convinced that those assurances have been transformed into achievements. The whole programme of hospital building in recent years has a thoroughly had record of waste and lack of control, and the House should not tolerate the situation any longer.

In a similar way, the military planners seemed to place production contracts for the main engine of the Chieftain tank—a very good tank—before its development had been satisfactorily completed. It took about eight years. believe it or not, to overcome the faults and failures which dogged each successive version of the engine and I am sure that the House will share our surprise—to put it no higher—that the Ministry of Defence remained satisfied at the end of those eight years—so it is said—that the development had at all times been conducted as efficiently and effectively as possible, and that no one—mark this—could be blamed for the failures. It may not be possible precisely to quantify the cost of these failures, but there can be little doubt that it must be substantial, and, again, it has to be borne by the taxpayer.

The same theme of inadequacy of planning ran through the various other matters. Lastly, under this head—the last one to which I want particularly to draw attention—the House will find our Report on various computer projects which have been seriously delayed. I give two examples.

There was the computer project at Swansea for centralising vehicle registration ad licensing and driver licensing. There, I am glad to say, the Department of the Environment recognised that in the formative stages planning had been defective and estimates of cost had been inadequate. That again puts it pretty mildly. It was a scandalous affair. It came on stream five years late. There is a staff now of 8,000, which is some 50 per cent. up on the 1958 estimate, although the number of vehicles with which they are dealing is less than originally estimated. The cost has gone up from £146 million to £350 million, two-thirds of which was made up of staff costs. I repeat that this was a scandalous affair, entirely due to bad planning, lack of planning, lack of proper feasibility studies and so on.

The second, similar example, although not so bad perhaps, is the Ministry of Defence's computer project at Bath and the Royal Dockyards. There were shortcomings in the system specifications and in the general planning and control arrangements. It was a very complex task—that we acknowledge—but the complexity had been underestimated. As a result, a less ambitious plan had to be devised and substituted, which of itself indicates the way in which the Ministry had embarked upon the project without taking sufficient care over the initial planning.

I leave the matter of planning to make another general observation. I hope that the House will not think that the Committee was concerned only with the mistakes of the past, to carry out inquests, autopsies as it were, into the bodies of the deceased. We were very concerned also about the future and, particularly in regard to the subject of computers, about the time when the scientists devise even bigger and better machines in the next generation of computers.

The work put into developing computer systems and writing computer programmes represents a very substantial investment of public funds. We do not want to see that investment dissipated at the end of the useful life of the existing computers. We want to see that advantage is taken of improvements in computer technology, but we say plainly to the Government that there can be no reason for new developments to be undertaken just for their own sake. If they are to be undertaken, let them meet real needs.

The Committee examined the subject of departmental control of administrative expenditure and grants. We looked at a number of cases where control on the part of various Departments seemed less than adequate. I regret that in several of these cases it was necessary for us to voice our concern, and in one case even displeasure, at matters which were brought to our notice by the Comptroller and Auditor General I shall not make detailed comments as I know that some of my Committee colleagues may wish to do so during the debate: I wanted to try to give the House a picture of the wide range of activities of the Committee.

I have already mentioned the Committee's Second Report dealing with Excess Votes required for Northern Ireland. As in the previous two years, now that this Parliament has responsibility for Northern Ireland, the Committee examined the Northern Ireland accounts on the basis of the Reports of the Comptroller and Auditor General for Northern Ireland. It then examined the Northern Ireland accounting offices in the normal way. Apart from the Excess Votes, we took evidence from the accounting officers on five separate matters. I am pleased to say that in spite of the difficulties in Ulster to which I have already referred, we had no serious criticisms to make in our Fifth Report.

So much for the work done by the Committee in the 1974–75 Session. I hope that the House thinks that what we have done and attempted to do has been useful to it, reflecting on Government expenditure and on our tasks in the House and how we discharged them.

I have had the honour to be the Chairman of the PAC for two years. It is the senior Select Committee and was founded by Mr. Gladstone over 100 years ago.

Hear, hear.

Perhaps the hon. Gentleman wishes to intervene.

No.

I shall come back to the credit that he is giving to Mr. Gladstone.

I have also had the honour to be a Treasury Minister in Mr. Harold Macmillan's Government and the founder-Chairman of the Select Committee on Public Expenditure. From that experience I hope that the House will permit me some short reflections on Government expenditure.

I state as a fact, and not for the first time, that it is now clear to us all that Government expenditure is out of control. The House of Commons is quite ineffective in establishing command. Indeed, it is against the interests of Ministers and of the Government of the day that the House should establish effective command. I am sure that unless we radically change our approach to this matter Government expenditure must continue to be out of control. So great are the pressures, both political and otherwise, that Government expenditure is almost forced to increase: those pressures are forcing it to increase inexorably. On the part of Ministers I believe that there is inevitably almost a conspiracy against Back-Bench influence.

It is also a fact that the House is failing in what I regard as its primary duty—namely, controlling the Executive through the control of the purse. In the lectures that we give to sixth forms and to others we state that we are proud of the principle of grievance before Supply. We have a Supply Day today, but this is an exception to the general rule. Most Supply Days are now mere formal debates with pre-arranged conclusions on party lines. The debates which should be most relevant to the control of expenditure—for example, debates on the Reports of the PAC, the Expenditure Committee or the annual White Papers—are tending increasingly to be benefits for the same small knot of specialists and a holiday for the majority. That is if, of course, we can arrange debates in the first place.

On two occasions as Chairman of the PAC I have had to stand in my place on a Thursday to ask the Leader of the House why we have not been debating the Reports of the most senior Select Committee. There is always trouble about getting time to debate the Reports of the Expenditure Committee. For example, we heard at Question Time today of the delay that takes place in producing the Public Expenditure White Paper. There is no guarantee that time will be allowed to debate it.

Incidentally, and not least important in this catalogue of matters which I thought it right to state plainly at the conclusion of my Report, the heavy expenditure of the State is increasingly a discouragement to personal or corporate effectiveness instead of the spur or example that it should be. We have only to look at the nationalised industries to understand the truth of that remark. I believe that that opinion will be common ground on both sides of the House. Indeed, on this matter there are not two sides, only one. There should be unanimity among Back Benchers on this matter.

If that is a matter of common ground, so too is the fact that the increasing and excessive central and local government expenditure that is likely to take place in the next decade is likely to remain the most potent inflationary force in the economy in the years ahead. I hope that I do not have to argue any further the need for better control and better methods of control.

If we consider the role of the PAC in these matters, I believe that it does excellent and necessary work, although its work is limited. I was pulling the leg of the hon. Member for Cornwall, North (Mr. Pardoe), but he is quite right to take pride in the fact that it was Mr. Gladstone who established the Committee. It was necessary then and it is necessary now.

I have some small but significant suggestions to put to the House in an attempt to improve our methods of control and to use the PAC more effectively. First, we must adhere to the proposals and forecasts of expenditure presented to the House year by year. In fact, we never adhere to them. Let us consider current experience within the time range of the Reports. The 1971 White Paper forecasts on expenditure were exceeded in 1974–75 by more than £5,000 million. The Public Expenditure Survey Committee system, which I strongly supported, has degenerated into a matter of academic forecasting and mere record keeping.

Thus it is that the figures are twisted and exaggerated to accommodate policies. Thus it is that policies are no longer made to accord with specific forecasts. The House should say "This will not do in future. It must stop." The basic system should be reinforced. I think that the PAC might well be given the job of acting as a monitoring committee. If that were done, no spending would occur outside the framework of parliamentary control—namely, back-bench control.

We can no longer allow the budgetary system to be solely concerned with taxes. Ministers' spending policies must have their taxation consequences plainly spelled out when decisions are made, and they must be argued for openly.

Support for Chrysler was decided by the Government in isolation. No one said "If we put this money into Chrysler it will mean an extra 6p on income tax", or whatever the calculation might be. It seems that we deal with only one side of the equation. We never deal with both sides together. That must change. There must be debates on revenue and expenditure.

I do not doubt that many civil servants in the Treasury and many officials throughout Government, in Cabinet Committees or in Cabinet, engage in such discussion and debate. I have been present and I have seen such debates take place. However, they should take place on the Floor of the House and not in private.

I also believe that new spending proposals must be balanced either by new tax proposals, argued at the time at which the spending proposals are made and agreed by the whole House, or by cuts in some other programme, with the Public Accounts Committee as the monitor.

The very least advantage of such a system—a radical change from the way in which Gladstone saw the PAC, but times change and the day of the inquest alone is over—would be that if public expenditure increases it would be only after the House had made the fullest inquiry and given its clear approval to such a course. Such matters as cash limits, departmental budgets, and so on, might be important parts of this apparatus of control. We must seek to bring control to the Floor of the House, which is where it belongs and certainly where it does not at present reside.

In addition, the efficiency of public spending could be consistently monitored on behalf of the House as a whole by the Select Committee on Expenditure. That body could examine alternatives in great depth and serve the House in future as well as it is serving us at present. That is what it was designed to do, but it has never been fully allowed to do so.

I suggest that it would be a good thing if we were to attempt deliberately in this House to popularise the process of control. We must see that what we are endeavouring to do on the Back Benches is better understood by the population as a whole.

As Members of Parliament, we are rather like icebergs because the public see only one-eighth of our work and the other seven-eighths of it is below the surface. That certainly applies to the PAC. Hon. Members from both sides of the House spend many hours of careful preparation and undertake their work with diligence, but the tonnes of evidence and recommendations produced by the PAC are mostly filed away and the House tends to debate those Reports only once a year. I hope that I am not advancing too radical a proposal when I suggest that the television cameras should be brought into the PAC. It would clearly demonstrate Parliament effectively at work. However, perhaps that proposal goes a little too far. I should like the House as a whole to seek to identify the process of control and to give the population in general more idea of our work. If the method I recommend is not suitable, no doubt the Government can propose others.

Perhaps all this is a little wide of the motion before the House, but I hope that the House will regard these reflections and proposals as relevant to the work and responsibilities of Members of Parliament and of the PAC.

My concern can be simply put. The public trusts us to be effective sentries of public expenditure. We can no longer pace out properly the perimeter of our guard. We must reform the system and the sooner the better. In the meantime, I pray for the blessing of the House on the work of the PAC.

In supporting the motion, I wish first to be associated with the remarks of the right hon. Member for Taunton (Mr. du Cann), the Chairman of the Public Accounts Committee, in offering congratulations to the Committee's staff for the work which they have undertaken for the Committee, the House and the country as a whole. I wish particularly to be associated with the right hon. Member's thanks to the Comptroller and Auditor General, whom we shall be losing soon and whose patience and helpfulness to the Committee will be sadly missed.

I have been a member of the Public Accounts Committee for four years. Each year the work becomes more interesting because one becomes more familiar with it. In general, there is continuity of work from one year to another, and I believe that continuity of the Committee's membership is of some significance.

During my time on the Committee we have had three different chairmen, all of whom have been extremely good in that job because they have been patient and exceptionally keen in cross-examining witnesses. I very much admire the work of the present Chairman who has brought some innovations to the Committee which have been of value. The right hon. Gentleman believes in work-sharing and in giving everybody in the Committee the opportunity to play a leading part in its work. Such an attitude is valuable, and creates more interest for hon. Members.

The right hon. Gentleman's speech was an exceptionally fine analysis of the five Reports. I support every word he said in dealing with them. However, I part company with him in his conclusions. I do not go as far as he did in his criticism of public expenditure. I do not believe that it is out of control. I concede that it is very difficult to contain, but all of us are in some respects responsible, because we sometimes wear different hats in our demands on one side or the other. I offer this as no criticism of any one section of hon. Members, for demands tend to come from both sides of the House. On the one hand we call for cuts in expenditure and taxation but on the other we privately push for increased expenditure, in our constituencies, on hospital building and improvements, and all the rest of it. I have frequently asked for more money to be spent on such facilities in my constituency. Therefore, I am not critical of the Government on that score. Furthermore, I do not share the right hon. Gentleman's criticisms of local government expenditure.

It is disappointing to see such a small attendance of hon. Members in this debate, as on previous occasions when we have discussed PAC Reports. One may ask whether debates on these Reports are as important as the work in Committee. The PAC is often referred to as the most powerful Committee in the House, which is always flattering to one's ego when one is a member of such a Committee. I believe that that power, if it exists, derives from our Reports and from the action taken by civil servants following publication of Reports, rather than flowing from debates such as today's.

I believe that we should still be as powerful were the House to take these five Reports "on the nod". Almost everybody here for the debate today has served on the Committee, past or present. Hon. Members who have come to hear the debate out of interest, having read the Reports, are few and far between. This is difficult to understand because the Reports, despite their sombre and dull appearance, are a treasure-house of information for any hon. Member who wishes to make a name for himself and obtain a little publicity. The Reports contain some marvellous jewels for hon. Members who care to find them. The Press pick up only one or two items from the Reports and much information is there for the choosing, following a little examination of the contents. Therefore, if any young hon. Member who is keen to make a name for himself happens to be reading this debate, perhaps he will take a tip from me and make sure he obtains a copy of our next Report.

Perhaps the step suggested by the Chairman and welcomed by the Committee, that we should publish our Reports more frequently, would help. It is difficult to encourage interest in a Report that is half an inch thick and deals with many subjects. We must try to make our Reports attractive, so that anyone who sees them is encouraged to read them. Once people begin reading the Reports, their interest will carry them along and, perhaps, encourage them to take part in these debates.

As a member of the Committee, I have had the opportunity to put my point of view and express my misgivings about various events which have occurred, but we must not get things out of perspective. It is possible to come away from the Committee feeling a little disheartened, because it appears that everything the Government touch turns into a disaster. Of course, many things done by the Government are very successful, but it is no part of our job to go into these in any depth. The Comptroller and Auditor General directs our attention to matters that he thinks we should look at, and we usually consider only things that have gone wrong. In these circumstances, we might get a wrong picture of events and we should bear in mind that the vast majority of work done by civil servants and in local government goes right.

Unfortunately, things that go wrong sometimes turn out to be disastrous. I have a particular interest in the hospital building programme, because, before coming to this House, I worked for 16 years on the capital building programme team of one of the regional hospital boards. I have seen these problems from both sides and I know there is great difficulty in containing expenditure within estimates. Sometimes this expenditure gets completely out of hand, and I wonder whether we are not inclined to employ consultant architects too frequently. Hospital design is a very specialised job, and perhaps we should try to build up a larger staff in our own teams so that they can become specialised and more knowledgeable in this work.

Sometimes the Committee considers things that are so tragic they are almost humorous. The Chairman has already referred to the bridge over the River Cart, which has attracted some attention in the Press. Having a cynical turn of mind, I wonder whether it would have been noticed if there had been no income from the bridge. It was the enormous disparity between income and expenditure that attracted our attention. Some other bridges probably cost just as much to maintain, but, because people are not charged for using them, there is no income, and it cannot be said that six men are working to obtain an income of 70p or 80p a year from them.

If I had been a civil servant anxious to avoid the attention of the Committee, I would have abolished the charges, because no attention would then have been drawn to my activities. Of course, that would not have been proper, but another possibility would have been to waive the charge of 30p to the firm that floated boilers down river every six months or so. The bridge could have been kept open and cars charged 25p each to go across. That would have been a more buoyant source of income. I hope that our Report will at least result in some savings. I think the Chairman was rather hard on the six men involved. An attempt was made to convince us that they were assisting in the upkeep of nearby roads. It would have been far too boring for all six to sit waiting every day for the bridge to be lifted. I am sure that they found something useful to do.

Another disaster has been the motor vehicle licensing fiasco at Swansea. A little common sense at the outset would have prevented this. One of the great difficulties that computers have in dealing with applications is that many forms contain mistakes, or are not properly completed. Anyone who has had to queue to get a car or driving licence will have seen that almost every second person makes a mistake on the application form. Before this so-called improvement was brought about these used to be ironed out very easily by the clerk at the desk. I have frequently had to wait up to 20 minutes before I could get a licence. Now we hear boasting that the waiting period is down to 10 days—not including the time taken by the post, which could easily add another 10 days. I receive many complaints from my constituents about this service, and I sometimes feel like complaining myself. I bought a new car in December, and I am still awaiting the registration book. I take with a pinch of salt the assurances that we have received about improvements at the centre.

The work of the Committee is very interesting. I hope it is worth while and that we merit the praise of being the most powerful Committee in the House. I hope that civil servants feel a little afraid when they are called before us to explain a dreadful mistake. If that is the case, there is at least a vestige of power left to Back Benchers, and this is to be welcomed.

I begin also by thanking the Chairman of the Public Accounts Committee, my right hon. Friend the Member for Taunton (Mr. du Cann), not only for the way in which he introduced the debate and for the very full account he gave of our work, but for the way in which he helped to organise the Committee and for his encouragement for those of us who are newcomers to it in the work that we have to do. I agree with the hon. Member for Oldham, East (Mr. Lamond) that this is an interesting Committee by any standards, and one feels that the work and inquiry that we are putting in are well worth while. The only point on which I might disagree with my right hon. Friend concerns the possible introduction of television. I can see a number of advantages in introducing it, but I believe it would make it extremely difficult for some of the accounting officers in replying to cross-examination from the Committee, and it might also to some extent inhibit the Committee's questioning if the cameras were present. As we have to sit on hot and stuffy afternoons through June the television lights and cameras might not be so attractive to Members in a small Committee room.

As my right hon. Friend said, the Reports of the Committee are published regularly. I believe it would be helpful to the House and to the Committee if there were not such a long delay between publication and the debate on the Report. With tonight's debate we have probably incurred the longest delay ever. Members of Parliament are nowadays confronted witth so much material to read, and this long delay may be the reason for such a light attendance in the House this afternoon. As every year passes it seems increasingly difficult for Governments to organise their timetables to cope with the increasing amount of legislation that comes before Paliament. I hope that those responsible for that timetable will arrange for the debate to take place some time before Christmas.. I believe that would be helpful to the Committee and the House.

Since I joined the Committee only in April and have therefore been concerned only with the Fourth and Fifth Reports, I shall be brief. The impression that I have gained during the short time I have served on the Committee is that since 1861, when it was first set up, central Government expenditure has increased dramatically. Since only 14 Members of Parliament are charged with ensuring that Government Departments obtain the best value for taxpayers' money, it must be appreciated that as each year passes the work of the Committee becomes more formidable. The Comptroller and Auditor General and his staff provide an excellent service to the Committee.

There are in the Committee's five Reports some remarkable examples of poor management in the spending of public money. It is traditional for hon. Members in this debate to refer in detail to one or two examples that particularly concern them, and I shall do that in a few moments. It is worth noting, however, that these are the only examples which the Committee of 14 has had time to examine in depth, and perhaps we should therefore consider how many instances it has not proved possible to bring to the attention of the Committee.

This year we have dealt with about 35 subjects. Most people will recognise that the Committee cannot hope to examine any more than a fraction of central Government expenditure, and of course there is also local authority expenditure, where extravagances have been known to take place from time to time and are currently causing considerable public concern. As a member of the Committee for only a short time, therefore, I find myself wondering what has happened to expenditure outside the narrow beam of the Committee's searchlight. How well equipped are we in Parliament and outside to examine and control to the best advantage the spending of taxpayers' money? Quite frankly, when our constituents complain of public expenditure running out of control, can we expect them to be satisfied with the work of the Committee, in view of the magnitude of its task?

There is, therefore, the wider point to consider. Do the procedures of this House for examining public expenditure amount to an economic reality? Most people would agree that in this country we need far better management information on Government spending programmes and far stricter budgetary control within Government Departments. The hon. Member for Oldham, East and my right hon. Friend the Member for Taunton have both dealt with the Inchinnan Bridge. As the hon. Member said, if the bridge had not had an income of about £1·20 in one year and £1·40 the following year, the situation might never have come to the attention of the Committee. It was explained to us that the manning level was necessary to keep the bridge operative and to protect it from vandals. That argument could be adopted with a lot of other bridges where there is a risk of vandalism, but it is not a very satisfactory argument. The whole affair caused a great deal of concern to all of us on the Committee.

Another cause of great concern was the hospital laundry reorganisation in Cardiff. The project was subject to many problems from the start. There was the delay in completion of the buildings; there were problems in training the staff; difficulties were encountered in the transfer of work; and the costs of operation escalated. Also, there was obviously something wrong with the design and ventilation of the building. Absenteeism because of the working conditions in this new laundry was running at nearly 30 per cent. The laundry was designed to handle about 2,000 articles a week, yet when it began operations it could take only just over half that number.

It seems strange that although a well-known firm of consultants had been employed, there had been little consultation with the laundry industry. The machinery cost £282,000. Senior people had visited the makers in Germany to see it working, but after it had been installed the engineers did not remain to see it working with the employees. The laundry service staff was not given time to train on this new and sophisticated equipment, which it had not seen before. Accordingly, the laundry was unable to meet the demands of the area.

No commercial operation in this country would consider buying new and complicated machinery without insisting upon those responsible for installing it remaining to see it in proper working order and meeting its production specification. The laundry was planned to run at 30 per cent. below average costs of other laundries in Wales, yet its costs were 11 per cent. above the average and, the following year, 6 per cent. above the figure for the rest of the hospital laundry services in Wales. That is a remarkable story. If only normal commercial practices had operated, many of the difficulties would have been overcome.

The third and final example that I wish to mention is the centralisation of vehicle registration and licensing and the issue of driving licences. I had the same experience as did the hon. Member for Oldham, East. I applied for a licence on 5th December and did not receive it until 7th January. In the 15 years in which I have been a Member of Parliament I have had few queries about the registration and licensing of vehicles, or about driving licences, but I know that all hon. Members are now getting queries about delays. The machinery that was installed is incapable of handling the problems that arise, and the escalation in price is terrifying.

The Public Accounts Committee could not have worked harder at its task than it did last year, yet in December Supplementary Estimates amounting to £3,160 million were presented to the House.

In reading the report of our debate on the same subject in 1975 I noticed that the Chairman of the Committee said:

"In my view, it is time to re-appraise the system of financial control exercised by the House of Commons."—[Official Report, 13th January 1975; Vol. 884, c. 51.]

The Chairman repeated that remark this afternoon. That must surely be right.

In our previous debate my right hon. Friend the Member for Taunton said that our expenditure of the taxpayers' money was not fully effective, and that that was a tragedy. He suggested that we should improve the ways of examining and controlling public expenditure generally. Developments over the past 100 years warrant a general investigation into the size, powers and future programme of the Public Accounts Committee. If the scope of the Committee is widened and if information on Government spending programmes can be more comprehensive, from year to year there will be fewer instances of wasted Government expenditure, and there will be better control over taxpayers' money generally. If we achieved some of those goals, the Public Accounts Committee would provide an even greater service to the House of Commons.

I join my hon. Friend the Member for Richmond, Yorks (Sir T. Kitson) in congratulating the Chairman of the Public Accounts Committee on the excellent way in which he has presented the Reports, which is typical of the way in which he conducted the business of the Committee.

I do not agree that the proceedings of the Committee should be televised. In the Reports which we present to the House of Commons many items are sidelined and cannot be disclosed even to the House. If the proceedings were televised some witnesses might excuse themselves from giving answers which are necessary to enable the Committee to make a sound judgment.

The hon. Member for Oldham, East (Mr. Lamond) made an interesting speech which contained one regrettable remark. I am sorry that he is not present to hear me say this. He made a comment to the effect that the witnesses who appear before us should feel frightened at being before the Committee. That is a dreadful thing to say. I consider that the Public Accounts Committee and Members of the House of Commons are part of a team which is helping to save the taxpayers' money. As a member of the PAC I do not con- sider that I have been appointed by the House to frighten civil servants. We should feel that we are there to put up a mirror so that the civil servants can see themselves. More important, we put up a mirror so that when he reads the Report the Minister will know what is going on in his Department.

I have been a Parliamentary Private Secretary in five Government Departments. That means that I acted as a fag or office boy, but the office boy often sees more of the game. I have always been amazed at how little a Minister knows, or can know, about what is going on in his Department. He cannot possibly know, because he is there for too short a time and is surrounded by a team of civil servants. When a Minister takes over a Government Department, during the first six months the Department is weighing up the Minister. During the next six months the Department is carrying out his instructions. The civil servants get to know his favourite subjects and, naturally, tend to concentrate on them.

The basis of the Report is exactly the same as the basis of an auditor's report of a public or private company. The Comptroller and Auditor-General is the auditor who points out on the Department's balance sheet items which he thinks require attention. The PCA is equivalent to a board of directors which queries with the staff concerned why the auditor has had to put a qualification on the balance sheet. The House of Commons can be compared to the meeting of the public company. There are even fewer present here than there would be at a meeting of a public company. It may be that some public companies serve gin after a meeting whereas the House of Commons does not.

We should not be critical of hon. Members who are not here. I reckon that I spend 200 hours a year on the work of the PAC. To re-read the Report took me 20 hours, and I knew the subject. The House of Commons probably has to consider between 150 and 200 Reports. Is it fair to criticise fellow Members because they have not had the opportunity to read the Report and, because they have not done so, are wise enough not to speak about it?

The Chairman of the Committee should be congratulated on overcoming the printing difficulties of having the Report published in five volumes. He explained to the Committee that he did that because he wanted to get the Report out as quickly as possible and felt that it would be wise that the Press should get an early intimation of what it contained. Unlike other Chairman under whom I have worked, my right hon. Friend had a Press conference. The Press performs a great service for the country, but the Inchinnan Bridge story was the only one that hit the headlines.

My hon. Friend the Member for Richmond, Yorks said that we should make our Reports more interesting. By all means let us do so, but I sometimes wonder whether, to get more Press publicity, they should be more sensible. I do not want the Committee to have Press publicity, but I want the public to know that the accounts are subject to scrutiny and which people are carrying out their work well and which are not.

I hesitate to give advice to the Press, but our Reports are full of technical items which should be of interest to the trades. I do not remember seeing any technical paper in which I have a professional interest any serious reports about the work of the PAC. There are a great number of people in industry who should be informed about any day-to-day apparent waste in Government Departments. Members of the technical Press do not know how to draw attention to this matter. After all, probably the Government Department concerned is their client—in many cases their best client—and they do not like to criticise their best client. They know well that if they complain to the Department, with which they must have good relations to enable them to carry on business, their complaint will be taken straight to the senior man and the individual who is responsible for the waste will get a kick and will not remain on friendly relations with them. However, I suggest that if members of the technical Press wish to bring this to our attention more often, they should see their Member of Parliament or a member of the Public Accounts Committee.

If a constituent writes to a Member of Parliament asking him about what is being done concerning a firm which makes laundry equipment, I am sure that there would not be one hon. Member who would fail to be in his place, however late at night, to raise the matter. One reason for lack of interest in this matter is that it has not been given the highlights which it should have been given. I promise not to speak about the Inchinnan Bridge. However, I shall refer to a subject which has come up for the third time of asking—hospital building. I say "for the third time of asking" because I believe that anyone in a new enterprise or who is opening a new programme is entitled to make one mistake. If he makes a second mistake it is carelessness. If he makes a third mistake it is almost criminal negligence. We have not yet found who is the culprit but I think I know who it is and I shall explain to the House why I think I know who it is. We cannot blame the people who gave evidence to the Committee because when it comes to buildings of great magnitude it is basically the whole political system which is wrong.

The Report deals with five hospitals. In each hospital there is a common factor which comes out extremely well in the evidence. In the Third Report, page 145, when the Under-Secretary in charge of the Health Building Division of the Department of Health and Social Security gave evidence, he said:

"I would not pretend that these are the only skeletons in our cupboards. I say "our cupboards" deliberately, because this is something in which both the Department and authorities are involved. We provide the financial resources and lay down procedures, but we are not a building agency. … There is one common feature in all these five schemes on which you in this Committee will shortly cross-examine me. They were not as fully prepared as they should have been when the contracts were let. This is a common feature running through all of them. When they went out to tender the hospital boards were under considerable pressure …".

They were under considerable pressure from Members of Parliament, from people who have been pressing for hospitals for years. The Treasury suddenly lifted the lid of Pandora's Box and everyone said, "Let's have it." It happens every time. The Under-Secretary then said:

"… in some cases after long years of planning—to make very early progress in using the financial resources then available for hospital building".

That common factor runs through all the hospital building programmes. I shall deal with the observations of the hon. Member for Oldham, East about consultants in a moment, but it is a different issue.

In the hospital plans for one hospital there are 400 variation orders. Those who do not know what the technical term "variation order" means can take it from me that it means that someone has changed his mind 400 times. That is a common factor in the construction of any building. As the building goes up, people see aspects they want to alter.

Unfortunately, hospitals are built basically by hospital committees. When a committee visits a building under construction everyone wants to change something and no one is strong enough to say, "No, it will cost too much". When I was the managing director of one of the larger construction firms we made the decision to build our own office. We held a board meeting at which every member of the board had a copy of the plans in front of him. The chairman then laid down that no member of the board was allowed to visit the building while it was being constructed except the director in charge. No one, including himself, could ever give a variation order without the whole board being informed of what was happening. He saved us hundreds of thousands of pounds.

In this instance we are talking in terms of saving a million pounds a hospital, and I shall tell the Treasury how it will be able to save on future hospitals. If it does not accept the advice which I and other hon. Members are humble enough to give it, once again it will waste money. We have a tremendous unemployment situation. Among those out of work at present are skilled workers and technicians. The Treasury should immediately announce that at a specified time in the future it will build some hospitals. If it does not do so, someone will suddenly turn on the tap and say, "Let us get on with it". Therefore, we should be planning those hospitals now. We should spend up to £1 million on planning 10 hospitals, and we should save on every one we built. It would be the greatest investment we ever made. The time to do it is now. The technicians will have more time to carry out their duties. The architects could visit existing hospitals, see the mistakes and benefit from them. Hospital management committees could have some members who have knowledge of big building projects and they should also be told that subsequently they must keep away until the construction is finished.

Doctors are a peculiar breed when it comes to dealing with hospital building. I have been responsible for building hospitals in Asia, Africa and Europe. The one common factor is that most doctors never have time to look at the plans in detail. Indeed, sometimes I suspect that they do not know how to read the plans. When the construction is finished they become like prima donnas who say, "We shall not operate on that stage", or "The light switch is in the wrong place". They want everything altered. It happens all over the world. It can be stopped by telling them that they cannot do it. However, everything can be made Sensible if the Treasury says Immediately".

People ask what the Tories are doing about expenditure and they say that the Tories always want to increase expenditure. This expenditure will save money. It is an expenditure which will build up this country's resources.

The hon. Member for Oldham, East thought that we should employ fewer consultants but have more architects run by a Department. I thoroughly disagree with him. If buildings are designed within a Department we shall lose competition and the variety or mix of architects' ideas. Moreover, if the Department has its own architects we shall not build up a team of architect consultants who can work throughout the world. There are many opportunities in Saudi Arabia and Africa. Indeed, the whole world is crying out for hospitals. We should train and give experience to our architects in designing more hospitals.

There is one thing fundamentally wrong with Departments dealing with consultants. I have suggested to the Chairman that we must put this matter right in the Public Accounts Committee. So far the only witnesses we have had have been civil servants and others directly employed by the Departments. However, on many occasions the civil servants concerned have said, "It is the consultants' fault". We never get the consultants before us so that we can put to them, "Is it your fault?" It is a one-way trade.

Another point is that when a Department employs a consultant it seems to think that it has to be the consultant as well. When a great firm wants to build a great building, it generally employs an outstanding architect, having made certain that he has been responsible for similar buildings. It examines the buildings which he has built before selecting him. A private client probably picks an architect because he has seen him playing billiards in the local club. That is not so with a great firm. The Department should do what the large firm does when choosing an architect and then leave it to him, saying, "This is the amount you have to spend. It is up to you to produce the goods." The Public Accounts Committee should be given authority by this House to cross-question the consultants who are employed.

I do not intend to detain the House any longer. I have concentrated on hospitals, because I know in my heart that this is an area which would help to ease the unemployment situation and hold down the cost of future hospital building. If we can get an assurance from the Minister that he will do what I have suggested, the work of the Committee and this debate will have been worth while.

The hon. Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Mr. Costain), at the outset, referred to the comments made by the Chairman of the Public Accounts Committee, the right hon. Member for Taunton (Mr. Du Cann), who, turning into radical highways and byways, said that it would be a good thing if we opened up the PAC and other Committees to the television camera. I am familiar with the reasons given by the hon. Member for Folkestone and Hythe for turning down that suggestion. His words, if he cares to look them up, were almost identical with the words he used when answering a similar suggestion which, when I was a member of the Public Accounts Committee, I put forward in the debate which followed the report that year. The hon. Gentleman has not changed his views.

However, I am glad that the right hon. Member for Taunton has come round to that point of view. I believe that the importance of control over the Executive would be enormously enhanced if we could make this part of the work of Parliament more exciting by giving it—putting it in the vernacular—a little more political sex appeal. If we introduced the television camera—certainly the radio—in order to get more Press focus on this aspect of parliamentary work, we would be doing a great deal for Parliament's effective control over the Executive.

I congratulate the Chairman not only on the work of his Committee and its Report but on the splendid presentation which he gave with it this afternoon. I should like to join him in congratulating and thanking the staff of the Committee. I am sure that the right hon. Member for Taunton will agree that the staff are the essence of the whole thing. It is not just that they are good staff, but they are very numerous. This is the only Committee of this House which is adequately staffed. That is perhaps why it is the one Committee which gets down to the bits and pieces and under the surface.

We are all well aware of the dangers of increasing public staffing generally, but I think we should beware of applying that principle to the staff of the Committees of this House on which we are endeavouring to exercise our role as watchdogs over public expenditure. The PAC, as the Chairman indicated, is heavily dependent for the quality of its work on the staff. I wish that the Expenditure Committee—if it focused its attention more on expenditure than on general areas of policy—had the staff to do that job. If it had the staff, we could get better results.

I should like to follow the right hon. Member for Taunton in his remarks concerning our control over the Executive and its expenditure in particular. I appreciate that he made that reference with respect to all Governments, no matter what their political complexion. Public expenditure has, to a large extent, grown out of control under all Governments.

The latest manifestation was Wynn Godley's marvellous assertion that the Treasury had somehow mislaid £4·9 billion of our money. I was interested in the reply to that assertion given by the Chief Secretary in a speech to the Association of Health Service Treasurers on 14th November 1975. The right hon. Gentleman said:

"I am bound to say that my task of cutting public expenditure, and it has to be cut, at any rate from 1977 onwards, is not made easier by bogus talk of public expenditure being out of control. … This ignores the realities of the world in which we live. Parliament changed and the Government changed between 1970–71 and 1974–75."

According to the Chief Secretary, the major reason for the non-parliamentary expansion of public expenditure is the continual change of Governments. We have it summed up in the philosophy that elections are highly inflationary. Indeed they are, and that might be a good reason for having fewer elections.

I turn now to some of the details in the Report. I do not intend to wade through the whole lot, nor to touch on many of the points to which reference has already been made. I should like to raise queries on three matters on which I hope there will be some comment from the Treasury Bench.

The first point concerns the Department of Industry and its control over financial assistance. The Treasury, in its comment, stated:

"Viability has remained of prime importance in considering applications for assistance, though it is not the sole consideration."

I should like to know whether that is still the situation following the adoption of the new industrial strategy. I should have thought that viability was, if not the sole consideration, virtually the sole consideration if one were picking winners.

The second point relates to Cammell Laird Shipbuilders, which is 50 per cent. Government owned. The Government undertook support to the extent of about £25 million in 1972 and £14 million of capital work. The cost of the capital work had already reached £27 million when the Committee investigated the situation and it was likely to reach £32 million. In its comments the Department appears not to regard either of those commitments as open-ended, but apparently

"felt committed to complete the proposed reconstruction schemes."

I should like to raise a query on that matter. This House will increasingly be confronted with situations where the Gov- ernment, having put in a first or second instalment, just have to go on because, in the words of the Department's evidence, they

"felt committed to complete the proposed reconstruction schemes."

It would appear that, having started, we cannot go back. But it was specifically on that point that the House was reassured by the Prime Minister, on behalf of the Goverment, about injections of public money into British Leyland. We were told that it would be a step-by-step process. I wonder whether this House is in any position at any point, when something has been started, to say, "No, no further". I suspect that we shall get into a Concorde situation. We shall be unable to draw back. This situation will arise with every injection of public cash into industry. I hope that we shall receive some comment on that point, too.

Again, in the case of Govan Shipbuilders, the further loan to the company, and the extensions of the support period, are subject to certain conditions, according to the Treasury. In the Treasury Minute no specific account is given of those conditions. It may well be that they were given to the Committee and that the Committee did not think it worth while reporting them. But if we are to be assured by the Treasury that there are specific conditions on the extension of support and further loans—and throughout the whole area of financial assistance to industry—those conditions must be laid down and made public.

Those are just some of the details of the Report. It is a tremendous minefield of information about the way we conduct our public expenditure and our public sector. Earlier in the debate, questions were asked about the rest of the waste that is taking place, the waste that the Committee did not look at, much of which does not even come within its terms of reference. It is helpful for the Committee to look at hospital building programmes and to discover that there has been excess investment, but if we look at another aspect of the Department of Health and Social Security, what do we find? In an article written in Social Worker by the Chairman of the Supplementary Benefits Commission, he mentions the hostility of the public to the handouts to scroungers and layabouts, and the tottering Christmas tree collapsing under its own weight. That is in the latest issue of Social Worker, and it is written by Professor David Donnison. I have always taken him to be a good social democrat in these matters, and not on the side of viciousness towards needy people.

There is undoubtedly a great deal of this kind of waste occurring, and it is a pity that the Public Accounts Committee cannot turn its attention to those aspects of that Government Department. After two visits to the Department of Health and Social Security in my constituency last weekend, I fear that the offices of the Department all over the country are, unfortunately, presiding over a colossal fraud. They know it, and there is no way in which they can do anything about it. It is undermining the morale of the staff of the Supplementary Benefits Commission, and I was delighted that the new Chairman of the Commission has decided to draw public attention to it.

Concerning methods of control for the future, I was delighted that the right hon. Member for Taunton turned his attention to this in the latter part of his speech. One of the best surveys of the problem was contained in an article in the November issue of The Banker, on "Public Spending", by Professor Sandford and Ann Robinson, both of Bath University. They discuss not only the growth of public expenditure and Parliament's effective—or ineffective—control over it. They talk about the Supply Day debates, having clearly conducted a survey of them and of what is discussed in them. They state that

"A close examination of what Members actually talk about during these 26 Supply Days reveals that they do spend a considerable amount of time discussing public spending."

The authors go on to comment that

"The general impression conveyed from reading these debates is that when Members make references to expenditure they are generally suggesting to the Government that expenditure on a particular function or item is too low and ought to be increased."

Later in the article the writers state that

"the House becomes not a debating Chamber but a stage or platform for a series of unrelated demands."

We ought to take account of that outside criticism. It is a very fair analysis of what we do. We spend far too little time on those Supply Days, and far too little of our time generally in this House, in considering in great detail the whole question of public expenditure, which has grown so fast. Parliament, indeed, is not now an engine of control over public expenditure, or over the Executive at all. It is, if anything, an engine for the enlargement of Executive power. I suggest that we start to reverse this process from today onwards.

We have been promised earlier by the Leader of the House, during business questions, a debate on the new Government White Paper on Public Expenditure. We have not yet had that White Paper but we shall have it very shortly. I suggest, Mr. Deputy Speaker, that through the usual channels we might well consider a new experiment this year—joining the debate on the White Paper on Public Expenditure with the debate on the Budget.

I know that the objection—which I can already see being raised by the hon. Member for St. Ives (Mr. Nott) from the Conservative Front Bench—is that if we do this there will probably be a cut in the number of days allocated to the two subjects. Surely it is not outside the realms of sanity in this House to arrange an extended debate to cover both subjects.

If we put public expenditure and taxation together we shall be able to get at the essence of the whole problem. If the attention of the public could be focused on those two matters together, we ought to be able to control public expenditure much more effectively.

The mechanics of public expenditure are in a terrible state. This is partly due to the strain of administering huge additional public projects, but it is mainly due to the absence of scientific cost control in most branches of Government. The Public Accounts Committee's Report draws attention to this in a large number of isolated cases. We need a Department-by-Department examination of expenditure on a properly costed basis. It should be done in much the same way as advocated by the Economist in May last year. That method has now been adopted in a major way by the Liverpool City Council.

This House neds cost estimates of individual services—the cost per head of every service offered to members of the public as individuals—so that we may have before us the basis on which to take decisions about the allocations of priorities and can see whether we are getting cost-effective value for money out of these services.

In this context I was amazed recently, in an Answer to a Parliamentary Question, that it transpired that the cost of educating a primary school child in Cornwall in the last fnancial year was around £180. In England and Wales generally the cost was £220 per child. In Inner London it was £330 per child. We all know about teachers' London allowances, but these cannot possibly account for that difference.

Drawing an analogy between money and quality, is it to be assumed that the quality of primary education in Inner London is 72 per cent. higher than in Cornwall? My own daughter goes to a primary school in London; therefore I can compare the two areas quite easily. The quality of primary education available at the higher figure in Inner London is certainly no better than in Cornwall. Perhaps we ought to draw the conclusion that all English children should be sent to Cornwall for their education, because it offers better value for money.

This example raises fundamental questions about the value obtained for the expenditure of a certain sum of money. We need to consider why it is costing so much more to educate a primary school child in London than in Cornwall. It would be helpful to have that sort of comparison region by region and area by area.

I hope that the right hon. Gentleman and his fellow Committee members will not mind my saying that there is no indication in their Report that any international comparisons have been made. Having been a member of the PAC in the past, I am not aware that it is even within the Committee's terms of reference, but it is a pity that we do not have a far better basis for international comparison of the cost effectiveness of our public services. I often wish that we were able to see in much greater detail how the costing is done in other countries, so that we could compare their costs with our own and any increase in costs one way or the other. It would give us a standard of comparison in the areas of public monopoly in which there are no market forces to guide us, and no real choice by the consumer. That kind of international comparison would be helpful.

It is therefore with pleasure that I again congratulate the Committee on its work. I hope that this debate, poorly attended though it is, will enable the House to think through to the new ways of controlling public expenditure which are so urgently needed.

The House may be poorly attended, but that is not due to the quality of speeches since the admirable standard set by my right hon. Friend the Member for Taunton (Mr. du Cann), the Chairman of the Committee. My right hon. Friend referred to the Reports of the Committee possibly being relegated to the files, hinting that that might be done too quickly. That is not my view. Nor do I think that the report of this debate will be relegated too quickly to the files. At least, I hope that it will not. That certainly should not happen to the report of my right hon. Friend's speech, an outstanding contribution which showed his remarkable grasp of the work of the Committee which he chairs with such distinction. He came to it after having chaired the Expenditure Committee, which succeeded the Estimates Committee, and with experience of the Treasury Bench as well. We are in his debt today for the lead that he has given us. I hope, Mr. Deputy Speaker, that you have not been bored by the proceedings and will not be bored from now on.

I am obliged for the hon. Member's concern. I have been greatly interested in all that has been said. The only pity is that the television cameras have not been present, since attendance might then have been better.

Only a few minutes ago there were no fewer than three Treasury Ministers on the Front Bench. I am sorry that two have left, but we are glad that the Financial Secretary is here, because he is closely connected with our Committee.

My right hon. Friend looked forward almost in an outline of political philosophy to the future of the Committee, which he thought might be changed. One of his proposals was that it should monitor the spending proposals to ensure that they were properly balanced. I agree that auditors normally look at the balance sheet and that it is logical, therefore, to assume that Parliament's auditor, the Public Accounts Committee, should see that the Government's expenditure programmes are properly balanced.

My right hon. Friend defined balance as the necessity to show how increased expenditure, if proposed, would be met—whether from taxation or from cuts in other expenditure. That is an interesting proposal, but, although without my right hon. Friend's authority and experience, I question whether the PAC should seek to enter into Government forecasting and policy making. Should it not rather stand back and keep its hands clean? After all, for over 100 years it has stood back and criticised and made recommendations. It has never tried to discuss whether the Government's policies were right or whether they were balancing their accounts properly.

I question whether this proposal is wise at this stage. I should be interested to hear further views on this matter, not only today from the Financial Secretary but at a later stage. I hope that the idea will be developed, here and outside. It is very important for us and people outside concerned with the functioning of our democratic system to consider the efficiency of the balance between the power of Parliament and that of the Executive.

My right hon. Friend also considered the question of giving Parliament's examination of Government expenditure more popular appeal. Expenditure today is enormous. Expenditure by Government Departments, overseen by the Treasury, is approaching 60 per cent. of the wealth of the nation, the gross domestic product. It is now so huge and complex and distributed over so many departments and agencies that it is difficult to keep track of. Those few hon. Members who work on the Committee have their work cut out to keep pace. We are greatly indebted to the Comptroller and Auditor General and his staff. We could not even face the senior civil servants who come before us if we were not so well served.

It would not be a bad thing to popularise the Committee and to introduce radio and television. My hon. Friend the Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Mr. Costain) was cautious, because he felt that it would inhibit witnesses. The Press and public have been admitted to other Committees and when a witness wants to say something in private, he can intimate beforehand that he would like them to withdraw. Surely that would not be impossible if radio and television were introduced. The public would be very interested to know how we try to safeguard their interests and deal personally with those responsible for carrying out this expenditure.

Something which has not come out today but has been discussed on other occasions in the last few days is the question of who should appear before Committees. There has been some argument about whether certain Ministers should appear before the Expenditure Committee. I will not express a view about that, but I am glad that Ministers do not appear before the PAC, that we concentrate on the accounting officers. At least we can always be sure that civil servants will turn up. In dealing with senior civil servants, we are dealing with the right people at the right level.

There is a historical reason for this. The PAC has always worked at the level of the Civil Service rather than seeking to bring in the policy makers.

Would my hon. Friend not also agree that this is the ultimate sanction that an accounting officer has against his own Minister? If a Minister tells him to do something that he knows is wrong, he can always report the matter to the Public Accounts Committee.

I am grateful to my hon. Friend, who has also drawn on his long experience in the Committee.

I want to refer to one item which is contained in our Report. It concerns the hospital building programmes, which were already dealt with at some length by my hon. Friend the Member for Folkestone and Hythe. I am one of the few hon. Members who are members of a regional health authority. Therefore, I have seen at one stage down the line how the administrative expenditure of the Department of Health and Social Security is conducted. I am a lay member, not an officer.

When the Public Accounts Committee examined the accounting officer, the Permanent Secretary of the Department of Health and Social Security, I was extremely interested to learn something of what had gone wrong in the case of five hospital building programmes. In those programmes there was a lack of control which resulted in a waste of about £5 million. It is not the Committee's duty to discuss a figure of £5 million in a year when the particular Department spends £4,000 million. It is its duty to show where weaknesses in administration lie and to penetrate and find out why those weaknesses have occurred. The Committee must then make a recommendation to the Department concerned and the Treasury about what should be done. However, the Committee does not have to say precisely how those weaknesses should be corrected. It is up to the permanent official, the executive head of the Department, to take serious note of what the Committee says and not to put its Reports in a file or on a shelf.

It is the third time that we have had to report our concern about the Department of Health and Social Security to the House. We are talking not about a £5 million extravagance but about a serious case of maladministration. In this case we have discovered that the maladministration is down the line and not in Sir Alexander Fleming House.

Today the National Health Service is the biggest business in Britain, employing 9,500. It has recently been reorganised. I make a plea in mitigation for those health authorities that are involved. For them to go through the traumatic change which has affected the Health Service in the past two years has been a staggering experience. I speak from my knowledge of those with whom I have worked on the South East Thames Regional Health Authority. It is remarkable that so little has gone wrong. I know that many officials have burnt the midnight oil to enable them to keep pace with change and the problems in their profession and big business.

The Permanent Secretary told the Public Accounts Committee that in these five hospital building programmes matters had gone sadly wrong. He said that there had been inadequate control, that departmental precepts were not precisely obeyed, and that the Department recognised that a state of confusion and apparent deficiency in the control of hospital building programmes existed. It is as well that that deficiency in the Department should be highlighted today.

I want to comment on the weakness in the administration of this vast business of health. I hope that you, Mr. Deputy Speaker, will not rule this out of order, because I believe that it is relevant. There are two types of health authorities—the regional health authority and the area health authority. However, for the purpose of my argument we can think of them generally as health authorities. Within those two authorities two types of people are responsible. There are the officials or the civil servants and the members—those who are appointed to represent the public and the patients—the consumers of the Health Service. It is difficult to know how to perform as a member against an official. It is not quite like being on the board of directors of a company and hearing a financial director's report. The relationship is not the same. It is difficult in our public lifetime sometimes to identify the functions and duties of a member appointed to administer in the name of democracy these large sums of money.

I want to quote part of an answer that I received during the examination of the Permanent Secretary before the Public Accounts Committee last March. I asked him about the relationship of health authorities. At page 156, Question 848 of the Third Report, the Permanent Secretary said:

"… health authorities are in the strict sense of the term agents of the Secretary of State, accountable to her for what they do financially, and I, as accounting officer, am responsible for what they do."

That is a perfect description of the function of a public servant in a health authority. I questioned the Permanent Secretary further about the function of that other person, the member, who I maintain also has a part to play in safeguarding the expenditure of public money. I said that I was critical in my understanding of his duties. The Permanent Secretary replied:

"It is difficult for a member, in the case such as we have before the Committee or the succeeding ones, to operate effectively. I do not think that I would say that it is impossible. I think that it is a matter of the authorities working out the procedures which will enable him to do so, and I would have thought it most important that they should, because otherwise he is put in an impossible position."

That was a valuable observation and I offer no criticism of it. It is important that it was said.

There are 14 regions in this country and the members of these health authorities have a responsibility, which they must begin to shoulder, to work with their officials to ensure that they, as the democratic representatives, try to put the matter right. The question of public expenditure is a vast one. It involves great delegation of authority from the centre down the line. It is not the concern only of the officials. In some ways, as we have said, there are democratic representatives, and those also have a duty.

That was the only detailed point of our report to which I wished to refer. However, in conclusion I want to say something about the function of this Public Accounts Committee, of which I have had the honour of being a member for about a year. It is Parliament's oldest Select Committee, having been established in 1886—I thought that it was established then, but I have heard mention of 1861; we need not argue about that. It has the assistance, as we know, of the Comptroller and Auditor General and the Exchequer and Audit staff, of over 600 people. Very few people realise that this Select Committee has such a powerful staff behind it. It has earned an international reputation wherever parliamentary democracy is studied. It has great authority in this House, and it has been described as the terror of the Departments. That is not a derogatory term; it is one that I have taken from a distinguished civil servant, Sir Richard Clarke.

The Committee's function is to audit the accounts of Government expenditure. It is concerned—we should not forget this—with ensuring honesty and propriety in the handling of the nation's money—the taxpayers' contributions. As Government intervention in so many sectors of our lives has developed and is now so involved, these days, within the commerce of the nation, we must not relax our vigilance for a moment in seeing that our standards in the administration of the people's moneys are without any taint of corruption. We hardly mention this as a concern. Nevertheless, one of the functions of the PAC is to observe that there is no corruption. I am glad to say that it is not something that features in our Report. Nevertheless, we must never relax our attention to this sort of thing, particularly as expenditure is delegated and devolved.

Government expenditure is on such a vast scale these days, and so much of it is delegated from Whitehall, that we must satisfy ourselves that the rules are being observed and that the responsible Departments are ensuring that this is so. The independent outside audit is a vital component in our Government system. The operation of the PAC is a linchpin in the structure of our parliamentary democracy. As such, it is widely respected. As I have said, I feel very honoured to be one of its members.

To be Chairman of this body is one of the most responsible appointments that the House can offer, and it requires a competence no less than that of any Secretary of State. That has been the tradition of the Committee, and our present Chairman has proved that he can fulfil these demands with unruffled ease. He approaches this task in a traditionally English Way, at least as far as his manner shows. He conducts our inquiries in a very gentlemanly fashion. His manners are, of course, perfect, and no civil servant need ever fear that he will not be questioned and listened to in an atmosphere at least as friendly as that in the Reform Club and quite the opposite of that found when a person is summoned to appear before the Stewards of the Jockey Club. But the accounting officers and the Departments should not be deceived by appearances and the quiet dignity of Committee Room No. 16. The Reports can leave them in no doubt about the serious attitude with which the Committee and its Chairman approach the task of watching their affairs on behalf of Parliament and the people.

It is our duty to examine the efficiency of the Government machine and to make recommendations. A member of the Committee could easily be over-awed and even overpowered by the senior men and women of the Civil Service, who come before the Committee well briefed and well backed up by advisers. They pack the room. These senior people from Whitehall are used to answering and even advising Ministers. On the other hand, a member of the Committee could, if he were so inclined, resort to the rough tactics of bullying and scorn that are easily picked up in this Chamber. I have seen very little of either of these tendencies in our Committee. However, to guard against the first—being over-awed—requires a certain amount of application and reading, while to guard against the second requires a certain amount of understanding and respect. That is certainly present on the Opposition side of the Committee.

It is Parliament's job to ensure and to encourage the efficiency of Departments. I use my words advisedly—to encourage, as well as to ensure. The PAC can best do this by putting the responsibility for achieving efficiency firmly where it belongs—with the Departments.

I agree with the comment made some three years ago by that distinguished civil servant, Sir Richard Clarke, who said:

"The responsibility for this must be riveted on the Departments, and audit is one of the Permanent Secretary's main arms for this purpose. The auditor should be his ally, and not his arraigner and inquisitor in public when some weakness is discovered; the higher management should be trying to find weaknesses, not being criticised in public when weaknesses are found."

Those are the views of a civil servant, and they sound like them, but to my mind they illustrate the best relationship that should exist between the Executive and Parliament—the best we can attain; perhaps perfection. Parliament must always be watching this kind of relationship, because we do not intend to have a cosy one. Both sides should be seeking ways to achieve better government, rather than one side trying to defend itself while the other side makes sport of the attack.

I believe that the PAC can enhance its present achievements by pursuing its course as Parliament's auditor. This is a single but vital function in our system of government. Some argue today that we are the Committee that is for ever shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted. I do not agree. The whole pur- pose of our audit is to find weaknesses and to get the Government to put them right. We are not only looking backwards; we are using our past experience to guide us in the future.

I think that it would be wrong to consider merging the PAC with the Expenditure Committee, as some have suggested. Each has a different function, and to my mind they should be separate and distinct. I regard the Expenditure Committee as an important new arm of Parliament's power to examine and check the Executive, but it should not be confused with the singular and concentrated attention of the PAC, which stands as the guardian of the nation's efficiency in the management and expenditure of what I have termed already as the people's contributions.

I do not wish to detain the House any longer, Mr. Deputy Speaker, and I hope that you will forgive me for taking a lead from my right hon. Friend the Member for Taunton in philosophising a little towards the end of my speech.

It is with some trepidation that I have sought to catch your eye, Mr. Deputy Speaker, because until now the standard of contributions to the debate has been uniformly high and because I cannot speak with the authority of someone who has been a member of the Public Accounts Committee. That means that it is denied to me to make any suggestions about the further development of this Committee. All that I intend to do is to content myself with commenting briefly on two items that are reported on in the Fourth Report. They are the Chieftain tank engine and the bulldozer kit.

I am not singling out these items because they are necessarily the worst excesses to which the PAC has drawn attention—although, goodness knows, they are bad enough—but simply because I have a certain interest in and a knowledge of defence matters.

The fantastic story of the Chieftain tank engine is proof of the old adage that truth is stranger than fiction. It reveals a state of affairs in Ministry of Defence procurement that would have failed Marlborough and Wellington. The engine took 17 years—from 1957 to 1974 —to develop. As I read the verbatim reports of the Committee sittings I had to try to keep a balance between horror and suppressed hysteria. At times I could almost hear the voice of the late Gerard Hoffnung intoning some of the comments. At the beginning of the first sitting at which the Committee considered the Chieftain, General Sir John Gibbon set out exactly what had happened. He said:

"What happened in this case was that we placed two design studies, one with Rovers and one with Leylands, in 1955. That was all part of a co-ordinated plan for the design and development, and eventually the production of a new tank. We did it in that way because we wanted to exploit the previous experience in engine design of the Meteor petrol engine which had been used in the Centurion tank, the predecessor of the Chieftain tank, and a Leyland design which would be a multi-fuel engine based on the conventional diesel engines of that time. Both those approaches failed, and, of course, all the time that they were failing the design of the tank hull was going ahead and the design of all the things that would have to go inside he tank hull was also going ahead. By the time we got to 1958, when it was decided to adopt the opposed piston two stroke engine, the shape of the Chieftain hull was becoming fairly firm. The space available for the engine, when everything else had been taken into account, pointed to a tall and a narrow engine, which in fact, very luckily, exactly suited the shape of the opposed piston type engine … I think that it is probably not quite fair to say that we had to make an engine that fitted into the tank. Of course, if the engine had not fitted in and we had had to re-design the tank and perhaps make it rather bigger, it would have been heavier and we should have had to take much longer over the design of the hull itself."

It seems that the Ministry discovered project managers some time in 1967, though that sort of management expertise had been known to the rest of industry for several decades.

The problem facing a Committee examining that kind of case, where the project has gone on for such a long time, is the recurrence in the evidence of the phrase "I was not there at that time, I am afraid." The witnesses, however expert in their own right, often have to refer back—in the Chieftain case, as much as 15 or 16 years. Not surprisingly, they cannot directly account for what went adrift.

The amazing saga continues. An engine was chosen for the tank—one that had not been used in fighting vehicles before, and then, piling horror upon horror, a decision was made to go ahead before it had been proved in trials or there had been further examination. Sir John Gibbon was asked whether the decision in 1963 could be justified by the military prognostications at the time

"vis-à-vis our relationship with the Warsaw Pact".

He replied:

"I believe that I should take exactly the same decision in those circumstances as somebody did in those days, in that the British Army needed a new tank and needed it as quickly as was reasonably possible."

Any hon. Member, whether or not he had knowledge of military affairs, would also believe that it would be useful if the tank actually functioned. It is all very well asking for it quickly, but if the engine does not work it will not be a great deal of use, whatever may be the balance of armaments between the Warsaw Pact and ourselves. I found that answer curious.

Reading between the asterisks, as one must on these top-security matters, I became aware of the export success of the Chieftain. My hon. Friend the Member for Horsham and Crawley (Mr. Hordern) asked about that in the Committee. The export success has been considerable, but there is a sad postscript. It was once hoped that the tank, or a derivative, would be a main contender for a NATO standardised tank. It now seems fairly obvious that in about a year the decision will be made between an American tank, known as the XM1, and the German Leopard II AV. Whichever is chosen will obviously be suitable for the United States Army and the whole of the NATO forces, and it will go right through the 1990s. By then, the Chieftain will be totally obsolete. That will mean that the part of our defence industry building tanks will be producing a foreign design on a subcontract basis. The Public Accounts Committee can look at a series of terrible mistakes, as it has done here, and see what are the consequences for the United Kingdom's export opportunities.

The Chieftain tank bulldozer kit makes a little story all on its own that bids fair to be a script for a horror film. It would probably not be accepted by the television stations, because it is too farfetched. The kit was approved in 1962 and production started eight years after the project began. The problem seems to have been to fit the kit on to the front of the tank. The Military Vehicles and Engineering Establishment was involved. Sir John Gibbon said:

"The MVEE at the time were dealing with the main battle tank itself, with the whole family of armoured reconnaisance vehicles and they were also dealing with various logistic vehicles."

That was suggested in the evidence as a reason why the Ministry of Defence and the MVEE were incompetent in their supervision of the project. The reason is said to be that they had so much other work to do, yet we are told elsewhere in the evidence that the establishment at the MVEE, although the work load was quite heavy, was about right. It is difficult for the Director of the Establishment to have it both ways.

My right hon. Friend the Member for Taunton (Mr. du Cann)—the Chairman of the Committee—asked the witness about production beginning in 1970. He said:

"you did not hold a final trial. Was that because the project was already five years behind schedule?"

Sir John replied:

"No, I think it was really because they said they had amended all the defects."

The Chairman continued:

"Let us go to paragraph 85. There it is stated that you allowed a month before main production started in order to test one complete production bulldozer so as to eliminate minor snags, but those tests, of course, showed that there were, in fact, some pretty extensive faults. Why was not production stopped at that time?"

A little later he asked:

"One of those faults—I can appreciate that they were thought to be minor—struck me as perfectly extraordinary, if you do not mind me saying so. Why was it that the bulldozer kits would not even fit about 20 per cent. of the tanks?"

We are talking not just about incompeence but about monumental incompetence. Sir John's answer was:

"The point about this is that what was arranged to be done was that these bits of bulldozer kit should be fitted to the two towing eyes which are on the front of every tank so that it can be recovered from the battlefield. The incompatibility between the towing eyes is only a quarter of an inch and it is a perfectly simple matter to chop them off and re-weld them on again. But the real difficulty about this was in the thickness of the armour plating, because as it comes from the foundry it can vary by up to a quarter of an inch."

This is an amazing story. I regret that this Report is not likely to be widely read outside the House. I hope that this debate will help to draw more attention to it.

A little later on the Report says:

"In this instance, I think that the MVEE probably ought to have spotted the fact that the two towing eyes on the front of every tank had to be manufactured to exactly the same distance from the top of the nose on the plate on the front, so that one could fit this bit of kit on."

In other words, it would have been a good idea if they had worked. The Report goes on:

"The other modifications that are required, I think, are just the hazards of doing something new, and it is new to try and put a power pack on the outside of a tank, on the mudguard."

This is a pathetic story, which gives me little confidence in the Ministry of Defence or the MVEE. My hon. Friend the Member for Canterbury (Mr. Crouch) said that it was not unknown for civil servants, put into this kind of situation, to say, "It was not us, it might have been the contractor." To be fair, there is no question of individual alibis here. Everybody has an alibi. The blame could not be apportioned to anyone. Not only is there no control over these projects; it is not possible to determine, at the end of over 17 years for the engine or eight years for the bulldozers, who was to blame. That is some measure of the sort of competence displayed.

In the cold, hard world of outside industry this would certainly have led to people being dismissed. I hope that some service has been performed in drawing attention to this small but important part of the Fourth Report. I have been most impressed by the standard and quality of all five Reports and the way in which they were introduced by my right hon. Friend the Member for Taunton.