I am grateful for this opportunity to raise on the Adjournment the determination of the status of refugees under the United Nations convention on the status of refugees. May I first congratulate my hon. Friend the Minister of State, Home Office on his appointment. May I also remind him that he was one of those individuals who inspired world refugee year. That was a noble gesture which did much to heal the wounds left by the last war.

The subject that I have chosen is perhaps an apparently esoteric one, but it conceals a deep well of human misery. I know that when my hon. Friend the Minister of State studies it and takes into account what is said in this debate, I trust by hon. Members on both sides, as well as all the volumes of information that there are about it, he, with his considerable intelligence and understanding of human problems, as demonstrated by his time in this House, will see at once that the present practice of the British Government—it is not worthy of being called a policy, because it has not even been properly considered—should be abandoned.

In saying that, I do not mean that the officials in the Home Office who are responsible for dealing with refugee questions are lacking in humanity and sympathy for the people who are concerned in their decisions—indeed, some of them are my friends, and I hope that they will remain my friends after this debate—but, like all civil servants at senior level, particularly those in the Home Office, they are prisoners of a system. They are enmeshed in the fine web of precedent, and the doctrine "We have always done it this way; you prove to us that anyone suffers" prevents them from taking a fresh view of what is undeniably a very important problem for this country.

It is, therefore, with great hope that I raise this subject, because now, with the onset of the new Government—which I hope and believe will be a reforming Government—is the opportunity to look afresh at this question. I am sure that my hon. Friend will be pleased to discover that in terms of support in this House it is largely uncontroversial, as I hope will be demonstrated later.

Britain has a long and honourable tradition of granting asylum to refugees. French Huguenots, Italians such as Garibaldi, Jews from czarist Russia and from Nazi Germany, Czechs, Hungarians and Poles fleeing from Communist aggression and oppression and Ugandans from African tyranny have all found a sanctuary in this country. But a clear understanding and definition of what we mean by "refugee" is vital. We cannot possibly absorb all those people around the world who wish to come here under the claim of being refugees.

From time to time in the recent past we have been flooded with masses of foreign immigrants, who have caused us acute social problems. We have admitted the majority of them because for too long we have clung to the sentimental idea appropriate to our Imperial past. In fact, few of those who have come here since the war in such large numbers as immigrants could be called refugees. In our agonising over the large scale of immigration, which must be stopped—and the present Government are pledged to stop it—and however painful to the conscience of the liberal lobby it may be, such a policy—

Do not spoil it.

I thought that I would venture into a certain amount of controversy in order to set the background to this matter at least factually and honestly.

The point is that we must not put obstacles in the way of genuine individual refugees. Large-scale immigration is one matter, but individual cases of requests for political asylum are another. It is just because of the emotive nature of immigration problems—the Vietnamese boat people being the current example—that the question of the definition of the word "refugee" and the means of determining by law who is or who is not a refugee becomes urgent.

There is a related problem in our nationality law. Because, like everyone else, we have always based our immigration law on the concept of local nationality, our nationality laws, which foolishly give British nationality to hundreds of millions of people around the world, must be changed; I think that everyone is agreed about that. I hope that the Government will not delay in bringing into this House their new nationality Bill in order to clear up the mess and let everyone know where he stands.

At the same time, with less difficulty, I believe, the Government must do the same for the status of refugees, which is bedevilled by the same problem inherited from our Imperial past. Indeed, it is further complicated by it in that we have in the past treated all Commonwealth citizens as, legally, British nationals and, therefore, not eligible for the benefits of the convention on the status of refugees.

The word "refugee" is defined only in and by reference to the 1951 United Nations convention on the status of refugees, as amended by the protocol of 1967, which—to summarise it—defines it as any person who cannot return to his home country because of a well-founded fear of persecution on account of his race, religion, nationality, social group or political opinion. The word "refugee" is nowhere defined in English law, and, because the convention to which Britain is a party has never been enacted into our domestic law, the courts of this country do not recognise the status.

It is important to recognise that the benefits of the convention apply only to those refugees who are in this country or who are, so to speak, on its doorstep. They do not apply to boat loads of people placed on the high seas with the connivance of their Governments, or political troublemakers, such as those in South America, whom their Governments would be only too pleased to export to us. It is impossible for any refugees in this country to go to a court and say "I am a refugee; I claim the benefit of the provisions of the convention." The main benefit is the right of asylum, in the sense that a refugee, once the status is confirmed, cannot, under the convention, be returned to the country from which he came.

Nowhere is "refugee" defined in English law. All that we have is a passing reference to political asylum based on the wording of the convention in the immigration rules. It is, in fact, a long-stop provision, inserted, one gathers, after the body of the rules had already been drafted. It is based upon the executive power of the Home Secretary to give instructions to immigration officers under the Immigration Act 1971. It may be applied—in practice, this is what happens—if there is no other category into which, whether as an arrival, as an over-stayer or as a prospective deportee, the refugee can be fitted.

But the immigration rules do not have the force of law. They are administrative instructions, which are, indeed, taken note of by the House of Commons but have neither statutory nor other legislative authority. They are certainly taken account of in the appeals system for immigrants which has been provided under the Immigration Appeals Act 1969, but in no other way are they recognised by the courts of this country.

The convention requires its participants to incorporate its provisions into municipal law. That, I think, is perhaps the first charge that the British Government have to answer. The convention has been in existence for some 28 years, and Britain has never formally incorporated its provisions into its domestic law. We have certainly ratified the convention, as my hon. Friend the Member for Burton (Mr. Lawrence) reminds me. We are full members of the convention. Indeed, we are more than that. We are members of the executive committee of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees' programme—one of only 31 members. We take an active part in its meetings. Yet, strangely enough, despite the wording of the convention, which obliges us to incorporate into our law those provisions of the convention which are not already part of our law, we have not done so. This is despite all the efforts of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Like most other important countries, we have in our country a representative of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees who is very active and industrious in the work that he has to do under the convention.

As I have already said, despite the membership by Britain of the 31-member executive committee of the programme, to which various British Governments have appointed distinguished parliamentarians as chief of the British delegation, including, for example, the late Airey Neave, this international backsliding by Britain has frequently been brought to the attention of British Governments and Parliaments by different people and different parliamentarians. It was discussed in another place almost exactly a year ago.

Following a memorandum which the United Kingdom representative of the High Commissioner for Refugees sent to the Home Secretary, suggesting ways in which the obligations under the convention could be honoured by Britain in the light of Britain's special constitutional position and the well-known fact that, when we make treaties, they are not enforced within our country save when an Act has been passed by this Parliament, the matter was discussed in the other place a year ago. Lord Wells-Pestell said on behalf of the previous Government:

"We are approaching our discussions on the memorandum in a positive and constructive spirit."—[Official Report, House of Lords, 22 May 1978; Vol. 392, c. 817.]

That was an example of someone adopting time-honoured language for doing precisely nothing, and that is what has happened.

The attitude of the previous Government was to defend the status quo and not make any positive move to adopt either of the two main recommendations of the representative of the High Commissioner. The first recommendation was to enact the main provisions of the convention into the law of this country. The other was to set up a procedure for identifying refugees and a system under which an individual could claim that status and have the right of appeal if his claim was dismissed.

The result of that enactment under all British Governments since ratification of the convention is that the benefits of the humanitarian ideas that Britain pioneered in the world are not available to genuine refugees in this country except by dint of overcoming large bureaucratic obstacles and running the risk of being deported.

First, the decision to admit refugees under the existing practice is a bureaucratic one, with no court involved. If a refugee can qualify for admission to this country under one of the recognised categories of immigrants—for example, as a student or visitor—he is admitted in that category and not as a refugee. That has important consequences. When a student's studies are completed or when a visitor's allotted time has expired, he is liable to be deported if he stays.

An appeal procedure is available under the existing immigration system based on case law and immigration rules appropriate to the terms of entry. The practice, therefore, is that more often than not a refugee's status as a refugee is not brought to the attention of the adjudicator or appeal tribunal, and the appeal is dismissed because time has expired or study is completed. In well-documented cases, adjudicators and appeal tribunals have often given only cursory attention to what should by international commitments be the fundamental factor governing the case.

In many cases the day of deportation draws near and only if he is lucky does the wretched immigrant, thinking that he has found sanctuary in the freest country in the world, find a Member of Parliament or voluntary organisation to prevail upon the Home Office at the last minute to prevent his deportation, give him asylum and remove the conditions of his stay. That procedure could have been undertaken with the correct result on entry with a proper system for identifying refugees and their claiming refugee status.

I quote from one of many documented cases monitored by voluntary organisations. I shall call it the case of Mr. X:

"Mr. X came to Britain in November 1975, with an entry clearance for a 'visit'. In his country he had been an active member of the opposition party, and its local Secretary in an area where it commanded strong support. The party was banned in February 1975 and many of its leaders and active supporters were arrested; the more reliable estimates of these arrests range between 13,000 and 20,000. Mr. X himself was arrested twice, and after the second detention, during which he was ill-treated, he left his country while out on bail.

Mr. X was admitted to Britain for one month. He asked for an extension of stay, and later for permission to remain here having married an English woman. The Home Office found that this was in fact a marriage of convenience and told him he was to be deported to his country of origin.

Mr. X was arrested and put in jail. He appealed against the deportation and pending the hearing was released on bail. His grounds of appeal included the fact that he was an active member of the banned party and that in view of the treatment of party colleagues he feared arrest and imprisonment for his political views if returned to his country. The lengthy Home Office statement submitted to the Immigration Appeals Tribunal on his appeal contained only a brief reference to this claim, which suggested that the Home Office had not investigated it; and subsequent communications of Mr. X's representative with the Home Office confirmed this.

The first opportunity that Mr. X had to explain his fear was during the formal hearing of his appeal in February 1976. He produced two documents and gave evidence of his political activities and arrests and of the current state of the banned party, the whole leadership of which was on trial by a special court. Following a brief deliberation the appeal was nevertheless dismissed.

After the hearing Mr. X was returned to prison to await deportation to his country of origin."

His case then became known to various agencies in this country that take an interest in these matters, and a series of interviews took place. Six months passed, during which Mr. X was held at Pentonville prison. There was no decision on his case and no response during that time from the Home Office to those who requested his release pending the decision. Eventually they were told by the Home Office that Mr. X was to be deported.

Other steps were taken, various agencies and the representative in this country of the United Nations High Commissioner intervened, and on 13 December 1977 Mr. X was released from prison. He had spent almost 11 months in detention, the last 10 of which had been continuous, without being accused of any offence and mostly awaiting consideration of his case by the Home Office.

"During the last period in prison and after release he has been depressed and, for a while, suicidal. He has also developed respiratory problems and has a duodenal ulcer. His status is not yet resolved."

That was in 1978. I am sure that hon. Members will agree that that is deplorable and must not be repeated.

No genuine refugee has, to the knowledge of those concerned, been deported from this country to the country from which he had fled, but the risk is enor- mous. It is estimated that between 1,000 and 2,000 refugees are admitted to the United Kingdom every year. No figures are kept because of the practice of admitting refugees on other grounds if possible. Of the 69,313 immigrants admitted for permanent settlement in 1977, an estimated 1,300—a total of 1·9 per cent.—were believed to be refugees.

All this time, several schemes have existed under which thousands of so-called refugees, whose status has not been properly determined as refugees under the convention, have been admitted as groups and in their thousands. That is plainly an unsatisfactory situation which is abhorrent to all who cherish Britain's reputation for tolerance and the preference of the British for handling emotive questions in the proper way.

The last Government were prepared to issue convention documents, in accordance with the United Nations convention, which recognised the status of the refugee. That could be said to be an improvement, and I understand that before the Dissolution it was proposed that a letter of recognition should be issued to a refugee whose status had been recognised. However, that is a half-hearted development and suffers from the absence of, first, a properly regulated and established procedure for identifying a person entitled to claim refugee status and, secondly, machinery with an appeals procedure to enable him to claim it. The last Government resisted requests for such action.

The previous Administration seemed to be satisfied with the existing system, which is conducted almost wholly within the Home Office. We know the pressures on Ministers. I get the impression that, however many there may be at the Home Office, there are so many questions of this sort to be considered that the decision in most cases is taken at a comparatively low level, though it is confirmed by a Minister, without proper consideration of the individual case from the political standpoint. The idea seems to be that this is a matter of executive power and that there should be no interference by a body of law controlling the determination of the status or by any authorities independent of the Home Office able to determine that status.

The case against the view that it is not necessary to enact the provisions of the UN convention into United Kingdom domestic law or to establish an independent procedure for the definition and determination of status in individual cases is supported by all those outside the Home Office who are concerned about the problem of refugees. They believe, as I do, that the convention should be enacted in some form into our law so that everyone may know his rights and obligations and be able to enforce them in the courts.

The problem is becoming too urgent and decisions are too agonising for us to rely on the judgment of bureaucrats. There are plenty of precedents for ministerial discretion being exercised by a tribunal on the Secretary of State's behalf. There are also plenty of precedents for the incorporation of the provisions of international treaties into British municipal law. For example, we have adopted, almost in toto, the provisions of the Tokyo convention, the United Nations convention on protected persons and the European convention on the suppression of terrorism. In all those conventions, a great deal is left to ministerial discretion. But we have a statute that determines the approach of the Minister in exercising his powers, and that is of great assistance to individuals when wishing to enforce their rights in courts of law.

The case for an independent assessment of a claim by a tribunal, rather than by the Secretary of State or anyone in the Home Office, is even stronger, particularly when a political element is involved. It is often argued that political matters are inherently the sort of problems which ought to be decided by a Minister, as a politician who is able to take the public interest into account.

It may be that Home Office officials have not noticed the change in practice in these matters over the years. There was a time when we had no appeal to a court on immigration matters. That position has been steadily eroded. The Immigration Appeals Act 1969 established such a system of appeals and provided that the immigration rules—the directions to immigration officers—should be published so that adjudicators, appeal tribunals and the parties involved should be able to refer to them.

Even when the national interest is involved on grounds of security, there is a system that allows a case to be referred by the Secretary of State to the so-called "three wise men". In all these cases, the Secretary of State has not deprived himself of the overriding power, but he is assisted by tribunals so that the individuals get some help—though perhaps not so much in the case of the "three wise men"—on how to put their case.

Our extradition law includes the provision that anyone accused of a crime overseas who is sought for extradition purposes by a foreign country may be exempted from extradition if he can show that his offence is one of a political character. One would have thought that that was eminently a matter for a Minister to judge, but the Extradition Act 1870 provides that the Secretary of State or a court shall, if it appears that the offence is a political offence, be able to order that no extradition should take place.

Such problems have, with safety and complete confidence, been entrusted over the years to a judicial apparatus in this country. Its rules are well known. It has been well tried and has given great confidence to those involved in it. The Government should adopt the same sort of approach, at last, to the position of refugees.

British Governments have undertaken certain international obligations. We have a tradition of adopting a humane spirit in dealing with such problems, but our Governments have not been prepared to enact the provisions of the UN treaty into our law. Decisions under ministerial power are taken in a hidebound way. In other spheres, such decisions are entrusted, at least for the purposes of advice, to tribunals with a regular procedure which can be used by individuals.

I hope that other hon. Members will wish to pursue this matter. For that reason, I propose to leave it there, confident in the knowledge that the Minister will do something about this pressing problem.

rose—

I remind the House that this debate will conclude at 12 o'clock. The Adjournment time belongs to those who have been successful in the ballot.

I welcome this debate, and I thank the hon. Member for Orpington (Mr. Stan-brook) for raising a subject of deep concern. As the grandson of Jewish refugees from Russia, and as Member of Parliament for an area where we have many thousands of refugees from persecution in Africa, I pay tribute to the refuge which this country has provided for so many people in need for so many years. However, much of this has been left to administrative kindness and compassion, and too little is defined in our law. The hon. Gentleman is right: the word "refugee" needs definition, and so does the word "immigrant". In my constituency young people who were born in this country bitterly resent being called immigrants. They are British citizens with our rights.

We should define what we are prepared to do. We should let people know where they stand. We should have a law which can be administered with compassion and with generosity so that we do not have the sort of situation which, for example, exists today with regard to the boat people. No one, least of all them, knows what will happen to them. While the present arrangement exists, I hope that the Government will deal with the boat people with generosity and compassion. I hope that they will recognise that a thousand refugees rescued from drowning in the ocean of the East would be a drop in the ocean in the millions of our population.

I hope that before long the reform suggested by the hon. Gentleman will be put into force so that those in need who come to this country and those who live here as refugees may know where they stand and what rights they have. I hope that those rights will be far more generous than has been indicated in the Government's programme as put forward in the Conservative Party manifesto and in the Gracious Speech.

May I first thank my hon. Friend the Member for Orpington (Mr. Stanbrook) for his kind words of congratulation at the start of his speech. It is true that some years ago I was closely associated with the refugee problem. It is a matter in which I have retained an interest and one that I shall regard as a very important part of my present responsibilities.

I assure my hon. Friend that the great tradition of asylum to which he and the hon. and learned Member for Leicester, West (Mr. Janner) referred must certainly be maintained. One is very much aware that in discussing this problem one is talking about a deep well of human misery.

Like other hon. Members, I am descended from refugee stock. My forebears were Huguenots. They came a long time ago, but perhaps this background disposes me to understand the importance of the problem.

The debate has been of considerable value. I have no grumbles that it should have been initiated so early in the life of our new Government. My hon. Friend talked of our tradition as a country but was also critical of the way in which we handle the problem at present. Indeed, he argued that the Government's present position, which we have of course inherited from our predecessors, should be abandoned. In essence, what he was saying was that the law should play a larger part in the matter than has been the tradition so far.

As I have said, I think it right that the subject should have been raised. The contributions to the debate from both sides of the House illustrate our concern. Unfortunately, there is no sign that the problem is diminishing in scale. We are all acutely conscious of the massive difficulties faced by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, as well as by Governments.

In the past six years, well over 5,000 people have been recognised here as refugees to whom the 1951 convention applies. Most of these have arrived under special schemes providing for clearance overseas, but a number have applied for refugee status upon arrival at a United Kingdom port or after admission for another purpose, and it is to them that our internal procedures for the determination of refugee status relate. I want to concentrate on these internal procedures.

My hon. Friend has already reminded the House of what we mean by a refugee, but perhaps I may repeat that the criterion for the grant of refugee status under the 1951 United Nations convention is that a person who is in the territory of a contracting State is unwilling 1375 to return to his country owing to well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion.

The convention bites only when the refugee—or potential refugee—is within the jurisdiction of the State deciding the issue of refugee status. It therefore follows that these cases which, through the policy of the Government of the day, are considered from overseas do not come within the scope of the convention, nor are they covered by the immigration rules. They are admitted, with refugee status granted upon admission, under the discretion of the Secretary of State. They do not come within the scope of discussions of United Kingdom refugee procedures under the convention. The decision that people who are overseas should be admitted and thus acquire refugee status is a matter for ministerial discretion and must remain so.

Before I answer in more detail the particular points made by my hon. Friend, I should like as a background to refer to the representations made by the London representative of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Mr. Heidler, representations to which my hon. Friend referred. Mr. Heidler submitted to the then Home Secretary in March 1978 a memorandum in which he made a a number of proposals about refugee procedures in the United Kingdom. This memorandum, which received a wide circulation, covered a good deal of ground and made four main points, some of which have formed the substance of the debate so far.

Mr. Heidler said that Commonwealth citizens were not recognised as refugees and were therefore denied the benefits of the United Nations convention. He also said that the wording of the relevant immigration rules had the effect of making refugee status a category of last resort—that is, that if someone could be fitted into the student category, for example, he was not recognised as a refugee.

Mr. Heidler's memorandum included two specific proposals. The first—this is the point that was particularly stressed by my hon. Friend—was that the 1951 United Nations convention should be incorporated into United Kingdom law. Secondly, he proposed that the determina- tion of refugee status should be entrusted to an independent body and not to the Secretary of State.

Mr. Heidler's memorandum was carefully studied under the previous Administration, and a review was undertaken. Shortly before the general election the then Home Secretary announced the conclusions that he had reached. I shall refer to some of these.

First, there is the important proposal made by my hon. Friend that the United Nations convention should be incorporated into United Kingdom law. There is nothing in the convention which requires this to be done, nor is there any general principle under which international treaties or conventions ratified by the United Kingdom become part of our law. The normal procedure is to consider, before ratification, whether the existing provisions of the law cover any new obligations under a convention or treaty. If they do not, the law is amended and ratification follows. If they do, nothing further is generally seen to be necessary.

In the case of the convention, the Government of the day were satisfied that legislation coverage was adequate and ratification took place without legislation. That remains the position. No prima facie case of substance has been made out for the incorporation of the convention into our law. I am sure that no one in the House wants unnecessary legislation. We cannot legislate on the basis of theories. There must be a real need.

It is alleged that our present procedures result in refugees being sent to countries where they will face persecution. That, after all, is the crux of the matter. Indeed, Mr. Heidler has said that to his knowledge no refugee falling within the terms of the convention has been expelled from the United Kingdom in recent years. I think that my hon. Friend confirmed that. Therefore, I am not persuaded that the convention should be incoroprated into our law.

I am not sure that that is what Mr. Heidler says. None has been sent back to his country of origin, but others have been expelled from the United Kingdom and forced to go somewhere else.

If the hon. Gentleman would care to write to me about that, I shall look into it, but I believe that what I have said is the case.

Is my hon. Friend hinting that it is not proposed in the Government's nationality Bill to formalise any part of the refugee law? If that is the position, can he explain why it is necessary to have a difference between that part of our law concerning immigration which is formalised and that part of our law concerning refugees which remains unformalised?

These are early days in the consideration of our nationality laws. These are all matters that we shall have to look into when the nationality Bill comes before the House, but I do not want to be drawn into that.

I am sorry to interrupt my hon. Friend again, but he has misrepresented my argument. He said, no doubt reading from the official Home Office brief, that no prima facie case of substance had been made to justify the enactment of the convention into United Kingdom law. He sat there for 40 minutes listening to me make my case. Is he saying that his mind is closed, despite this debate?

I listened to my hon. Friend's arguments very carefully, and I shall think about them. If he claims that he has made a prima facie case, perhaps I shall not quarrel with him. However, I am not persuaded by the arguments that he has adduced, although I will think about them.

Disgraceful.

I turn to the question whether there should be an independent body to determine refugee status. Again, my hon. Friend talked about this and put forward the argument that our present system was a bureaucratic one. It is true that it is a system in which decisions are taken by the Secretary of State.

The 1951 convention imposes no obligation and contains no guidance on procedures. It does not, for example, specify the establishment of a body for the determination of refugee status. In its recommendations drawn up in 1977, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees' executive committee suggested as one of the basic requirements for the effective implementation of the convention that there should be a clearly identified authority, wherever possible a single central authority, with responsibility for examining requests for refugee status and taking a decision in the first instance. Nowhere did the executive committee stipulate that the authority should be independent.

The United Kingdom has a single central authority which examines cases and takes decisions in the first instance. It is the Secretary of State. Anyone who knows my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State will know that he is not a bureaucratic entity, and I assure my hon. Friend that Ministers consider these cases very carefully where that is appropriate.

It might be appropriate to cite an early dictum of the UNHCR's office:

"Eligibility according to the Statute of UNHCR and for the purposes of services by UNHCR is determined by UNHCR. Eligibility according to the Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees … and for the purposes of the Convention or for the purpose of the national law is determined by States parties to the Convention under procedures established in each State, which provide for varying degrees of UNHCR participation …"

I repeat that it is relevant that the London representative of the UNHCR has said that, to his knowledge, no refugee falling within the terms of the convention has been expelled from the United Kingdom in recent years.

We fulfil the criteria of the UNHCR executive committee in respect of determination of status. We have one single central authority for this purpose. There is no obligation to institute an independent body, and I am not persuaded that one is needed.

I come to the question of appeals. It is true that there is no formal right of appeal under the immigration appeals machinery in every case where a person claims refugee status. A would-be refugee has the same rights of appeal as anyone else. But a person does not have a right of appeal before removal if he arrives at a port without prior entry clearance and is refused leave to enter. Nor is there a right of appeal before removal in cases of illegal entry. A person loses his statutory right of appeal if he overstays.

However, the terms of the recommendation of the UNHCR executive committee do not require a statutory right of appeal. The recommendation reads:

"If the applicant is not recognised, he should be given a reasonable time to appeal for a formal reconsideration of the decision either to the same or to a different authority, whether administrative or judicial, according to the prevailing system."

I believe that our existing system will result in a would-be refuge, provided his application is not abusive, which is the term used by UNHCR, being able to have his application reconsidered. But I shall further look into this matter.

There are one or two other matters on which I want to touch. One concerns the immigration rules. The present wording of the relevant immigration rules may give the impression that the grant of asylum or the consideration of a person's eligibility under the convention is a last resort when qualification under other parts of the rules has failed. The practice, however, is different. We treat all applications for refugee status on their merits, and we grant this status when it seems right to do so without recourse to other grounds of entry or stay. My right hon. Friend the Home Secretary will consider an amendment of the immigration rules when a suitable opportunity presents itself.

Another aspect concerns Commonwealth refugees. The reason why Commonwealth citizens were not previously recognised as refugees under the convention were of a historical nature. As the House knows, Mr. Heidler made representations on this. The former Home Secretary considered them and agreed that Commonwealth citizens should be treated in the same way as foreign nationals for the purpose of the United Nations convention. Commonwealth citizens, therefore, are now being granted refugee status under the convention in appropriate cases, and clearly this is right.

There is also the question of an identity document for refugees. Article 27 of the convention requires this. We have not hitherto provided refugees with formal identity papers, no doubt because of the absence here of any national identity card system. However, it was the view of the UNHCR that in order to comply fully with the convention we should introduce a refugee identity paper which would con- firm the holder's status. It has been agreed already that such a document will be introduced. One has been prepared, comments have been made on it by representatives of the Standing Conference on Refugees at a meeting at the Home Office this week, and I hope that we can produce an acceptable version in the very near future.

The convention also requires contracting parties to issue travel documents to refugees lawfully residing in their territories. Again, I am able to confirm that the United Kingdom conforms fully with this requirement, subject to the applicant having had his refugee status determined and paying the appropriate fee.

I recognise that in a number of ways the British system for the recognition of refugees differs widely from that followed in some other countries which have a tradition of handling such matters in a more formal way. This is natural, given the different traditions of Government. But I feel that it would be a retrograde step to introduce here further formal procedures unless they were absolutely necessary.

The changes to which I have referred were designed to ensure that our procedures were in no way out of line with the detailed provisions of the United Nations convention. These changes were introduced by or foreshadowed under the previous Administration, and I support them. When they are implemented, we shall be in full compliance with the requirements of the convention.

As I said at the beginning of my remarks, it is important to emphasise that the United Kingdom's long and honourable tradition of granting asylum to refugees who have arrived here has always been maintained fully. The United Kingdom stands high in the league of refugee-receiving States. According to the estimates of the High Commissioner in 1977, there were some 150,000 refugees of whom 1,300 arrived during 1977. We have played a part in every international refugee exercise in recent years, and we have a notable record in the way in which we have treated refugees in our community.

I listened very carefully to my hon. Friend's arguments. They are important, and I shall continue to think about them. However, as matters stand at present, I believe that the counter-arguments which I have put forward today are justified and provide the basis for a fair policy in this very important matter.

I am very disappointed with the terms of my hon. Friend's—

I expect the hon. Gentleman is. However, he has already spoken in the debate. He cannot make another speech.

rose—

I am sorry about being unable to call the hon. Member for York (Mr. Lyon). I am afraid that time has defeat us.

May I have one minute, Mr. Speaker?

Very well; the hon. Gentleman may have one minute.

One matter the Minister does inherit is an application from me to the former Home Secretary to talk to him. I hope that he will regard it as a currant application to see him. The issue concerns what to do about the principal who actually takes the decisions. I suggested that the right step is to move him from Lunar House to Queen Anne's Gate and give him a separate status. That would make a great difference to the decision-making.

I wish to draw the attention of the House to the question of British trade with South Africa. I begin by giving a warm welcome to my hon. Friend the Minister of State, who, I believe, is appearing on the Government Front Bench for the first time. He cannot command success, but he certainly merits success. I and all my colleagues wish him well.

This hour-long debate gives the Government the opportunity for the first time to make clear their policy. It gives me the chance to suggest to the new Government what that policy should be. I am optimistic that by lunch time we shall not be too far apart. I am also conscious that in the last Parliament insufficient time was given to foreign affairs. That must be put right in this Parliament. South Africa will loom large in the next five years. Her fortunes will have a marked effect on our fortunes.

Let us consider the importance of our trade with South Africa. About 10 per cent. of all British overseas direct investment is in that country; the market value of it is about £4,000 million. Indirect investment is about £3,000 million. I accept that those are bound to be rough figures.

Britain's total gross income from trade with South Africa is about £2,000 million a year. Over 400 British firms have trading links with South Africa. Many of those firms have been trading with South Africa for well over a century. In 1978, our exports to South Africa were valued at £667 million, the second highest figure ever achieved and £81 million up on the previous year. The House will know that South Africa is one of the world's biggest holders of sterling.

Those who argue in the United Nations and elsewhere in support of trade sanctions and the withdrawal of overseas investment from South Africa do so because they dislike apartheid. Apartheid is not the issue before the House today. I dislike it. So, as far as I know, do the other 634 right hon. and hon. Members of this House. So do all the parties represented in the House. I regard apartheid as an economic nonsense, a social blunder and a moral outrage. So let us move on to the real issues.

On 17th March last year, the then Foreign Secretary made a speech in which he encouraged prudent business men and prudent investors to reconsider their involvement in the Republic. I doubted the wisdom of his comments then and I regard them as misguided now. He seemed to be pointing the way towards cutting trade with South Africa as a means of changing the internal policies of that country. If one takes Britain down that road, one ends up with Britain supporting trade sanctions against South Africa, as some Opposition Members would like and as some countries represented in the United Nations would like.

How does one enforce sanctions? At the end of the day, it is by force of arms, by shot and shell, by maiming and widowing, and by killing South Africans. Logically there is no other way. That is why I for one reject trade sanctions against South Africa.

What happens if one does not go as far as sanctions but encourages disinvestment and calls for a reduction of trade, as is presumably still the approach of the Opposition Front Bench, although Labour's programmes passed by a number of party conferences took a different line and were much tougher with South Africa? Here in Britain one would immediately bump into the leaders of the TUC who do not support total withdrawal of British investment in South Africa. They made that perfectly clear when the previous Foreign Secretary put forward his plans. The TUC leaders realised that up to 100,000 jobs could be at risk in this country. Is that really what the Opposition are encouraging the British Government to do?

As the right hon. Member for Plymouth, Devonport (Dr. Owen) told the Young Fabians in October 1977,

"Our economic links with South Africa could not disappear overnight without causing dislocation to the domestic economy and having severe repercussions on the level of employment. We are living in the real world, and this is a harsh fact which we have to take more into account than any other Western European country."

I doubt whether the right hon. Gentleman made much impression on the Young Fabians, but he was right. What about the unemployment that would be created in South Africa? The urban blacks would be the first to suffer. They know that; we know that. That is why many of the black South African leaders, such as Chief Buthelezi of the Zulus, want more foreign investment, not less. One must also remember that the jobs of many blacks from neighbouring countries would be lost. Most of the Republic's neighbours are heavily dependent on South Africa.

The raw materials of South Africa are vital to both Britain and the Western world. They could not be readily replaced, even at increased cost. Without platinum, chrome and manganese from South Africa, many firms in Britain would have to close. South Africa has a near monopoly in some critical metals. We would be playing into the hands of our trade competitors, many of whom, far from withdrawing, have been increasing their trade with South Africa. We would be playing into the hands of the Soviet Union. By evil chance of geography, South Africa and the Soviet Union between them produce 93 per cent. of the world's platinum group of metals. One can imagine the astonishment of the Soviet military and economic planners if we were ever to hack about ourselves in this way, not in some passing fit of madness but as a cold and calculated long-term plan.

It must be made clear that for many companies withdrawal would mean heavy losses, for their investment is in machinery and buildings. Alternative markets for other companies would be difficult if not impossible to find. If that withdrawal took place at the time other countries were also withdrawing from South Africa, the financial loss would obviously be very considerable.

We are to learn today the attitude of the new Government. My party made no mention of South Africa in its manifesto. It was not mentioned either in the Gracious Speech or in the speech last week of my right hon. Friend the Member for Chesham and Amersham (Sir I. Gilmour). Therefore, the Minister today is to make an important pronouncement that will be noticed at home and abroad.

What should be the attitude of the British Government? Unquestionably, in my view, we must maintain the trade and investment links that exist. If there is a flourishing economy in the Republic, the black South Africans are given better jobs and better wages if only because there is a desperate shortage of skilled labour. It will be difficult, if not impossible, for prosperity and apartheid to exist side by side. In the United States, the needs of industrial expansion did far more to help the blacks than legislation and speeches in Congress. In concert with our European partners, we should encourage as much contact as possible in both economic and political terms, thus increasing our influence on the Republic.

I believe that we should support the main recommendations of the 1974 House of Commons Expenditure Committee relating to the employment conditions of Africans in organisations where British companies hold 50 per cent. or more of the equity. We should continue to seek undertakings from companies to adopt the code of practice on employment conditions before they receive help, financial or otherwise, from the Government. By being in the vanguard of good employment practices, British companies can help to enhance the position of the blacks and set the trend for the improvement of earnings, social conditions, skill training and general education. We should certainly not give in to any future pressure that there might be from other countries—possibly even Commonwealth countries—which demand that we cease trade with South Africa or they will cease trade with us.

I trust that this Government and all future Governments will not allow themselves to be pushed around in such a manner. If we allow others to dictate our foreign policy, where will it stop? No doubt some countries would like us to comply with the misguided United Nations resolution of 1968 on Gibraltar and others might like us to leave NATO.

In February last year our outgoing United Nations ambassador, Mr. Ivor Richard, gave excellent advice. I pay tribute to Mr. Richard. I believe that he was a very worthy representative of the British people at the United Nations. He said:

"Our economic and trade relations with South Africa should be organised in precisely the same way that we trade with virtually everybody else. If trading carried a seal of approval or approbation there would be a very long list of countries that British exporters have been trading with for a very long time that would have to be drawn up.

It is therefore perhaps time that there was a degree of greater collective realism on the part of the West in their approach to the problem of South Africa. There should be a clear expression of disapproval and non-approbation of its policies, but then it should be treated in precisely the same way as any other country with which we have economic relations, but whose policies we do not approve of. It is not suggested, for example, that collectively we should try and democratise … some of the eastern European countries, despite the fact that we are prepared to trade with them. We should make that perfectly clear to South Africa and the world. Gesture politics does not work. It is transparent, intellectually dishonest and morally specious."

I find that I agree with every word of that.

Let our Government take the lead, not by lecturing the South African Government, for that would show ignorance of their very nature, not by pushing them into direct conflict with their millions of black citizens, for a peaceful multi-racial society is unlikely to emerge phoenix-like from bitterness and bloody chaos, but by helping them along the road to progress and reform. Change must come. It will come. But it must come in peace.

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Bexleyheath (Mr. Townsend) for his kind remarks. I hope that at the end of my speech he will not be too disappointed. I also congratulate him on winning this debate in the ballot.

The House might like to know that I am due to leave for Manila at 3 o'clock this afternoon. I shall be leading Her Majesty's Government's delegation to the UNCTAD V conference. I suspect that there are those who would say that a debate on South Africa was hardly a good warm-up for a visit to Manila and a meeting with the Group of 77. But it is an opportunity for the Government to answer the debate, initiated by my hon. Friend, and to express their views on the trade with South Africa.

The policy of Her Majesty's Government is that civil trade with other countries should be determined by commercial considerations, not by the character of the Governments of those countries. That point was made strongly and powerfully by my hon. Friend and was the theme of his speech.

In our short term in office my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Trade and I have met representatives of no fewer than 14 different countries representing a very wide spectrum of political systems of government. The one thing that we have in common with all of them is that we trade with them and that economic relationship in no way implies approval or disapproval of those countries' policies, internal or external, or of their politics. I suggest that is the context within which our trading relationship with South Africa is and should continue to be determined.

However, two points need to be made. First, my hon. Friend mentioned South Africa's racial policies and stressed his repugnance for them. I agree with him. He also mentioned that no member of the Government had expressed a view about South Africa recently and that it was not mentioned in the Queen's Speech. However, it was mentioned in a strongly worded part of the speech by my right hon. Friend the Lord Privy Seal during the foreign affairs debate on 18th May. He said that the South African Government's

"policy of apartheid … is a continuing cause of unrest in that troubled country, and one that we deplore. Our task … is to encourage by all available means the peaceful dismantling of that system."—[Official Report, 18th May 1979; Vol. 967, c. 565–6.]

Therefore, my hon. Friend was not quite right when he said that the Government had not expressed a view about apartheid or about South Africa. My right hon. Friend had already done so.

The second point concerns our international obligations. In November 1977 the United Nations Security Council imposed a mandatory embargo on arms and military and paramilitary equipment to South Africa. That Security Council resolution has been fully implemented by Her Majesty's Government.

In opening the debate my hon. Friend gave a number of interesting statistics which demonstrated the importance of South Africa to Britain as a trading partner. I should like to reply with a few statistics of my own.

We have been South Africa's principal trading partner for very many years. In 1978 we exported goods to South Africa to the value of £667 million compared with £581 million in the previous year and we imported from South Africa goods valued at £768 million compared with £880 million in the previous year.

South Africa is a valuable market for us. It ranks sixteenth in the worldwide export league for Britain. Its economy, which has been through a difficult patch, has started to come through the world recession, which started at the end of 1973, and it made a moderate recovery in 1978. Largely because of the sharp rise in the price of gold, South Africa was able to convert a visible trade deficit into a surplus in 1977 and 1978.

I mention these figures because there is a tendency in some quarters to regard our trade with particular countries as something of a national sideline that we can take up or put aside without much affecting our own way of life. That is quite wrong. Our overseas trade is our life support system. We need to export to provide our people with work and wealth and we need to import to obtain the materials without which we cannot manufacture.

We cannot allow our trade with a country such as South Africa to be reduced without endangering our own economic health. This is often overlooked by those who criticise our trade with South Africa. International trade is highly competitive and unless we strive to keep up our markets overseas and expand them, our competitors will readily take our place.

Our major industrialised competitors are already taking an increasing interest in the South African market. For example, the West German market share rose from 18 per cent. in 1977 to 20 per cent. in 1978, the Japanese from 12 per cent. to 13 per cent. and the French from 5 per cent. to 8 per cent. Our share of the South African market was 16·6 per cent. in 1978 and, although exceeded only by West Germany, was virtually unchanged from 1977.

Our prospects for increased exports to South Africa are reasonably good in the short term. Eight trade missions supported by the British Overseas Trade Board have been there so far this year and another nine are planned. Pointers to improved exports are suggestions by the NEDC working parties that there are appropriate opportunities in South Africa for the export of heavy electrical machinery, industrial electrical equipment and mechanical handling equipment.

Our imports from South Africa are mainly raw materials, which are of great importance for our economy. I underline what my hon. Friend said, that it is not only this country which depends on South African chromium, manganese, platinum and vanadium. He pointed out the strategic consequences of this dependence and outlined who controls the alternative sources of supply. It cannot be overstressed that these vital minerals are important to the West, not just to its interests as a trading bloc but to its defence. There is a similar dependency throughout the whole industrialised Western world. We also have significant imports of seasonal fruit and vegetables which would be hard to replace, but they are relatively unimportant.

Therefore, our bilateral trade with South Africa is not peripheral to our economy. It is of central importance. My hon. Friend mentioned the use of economic sanctions. That is of course a matter for my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs. Our policy is to press forward with negotiations on the problems of Southern Africa. We believe that it is in the interests of the people of Africa and of the whole Western world that these problems should be solved peacefully. Her Majesty's Government will do their utmost to see that these negotiations succeed. Talking about what would happen if they did not could undermine the negotiations. Thus, we believe that the question of sanctions is and should remain hypothetical.

My hon. Friend gave impressive figures about our investment in South Africa. It is for the commercial judgment of the British parent companies concerned to decide whether to maintain or increase that investment. It is not a matter for the Government. South Africa needs more foreign investment to promote economic growth, which brings the best hope of peaceful change.

I was in South Africa three years ago, when I realised that the expansion of that economy, creating a demand for skilled labour which could not be met from the white population, was forcing changes in those despicable job preservation laws. Helping those economic pressures to build up is the best way to ensure that there are the changes we want in South Africa's approach to its black citizens.

There are recent and welcome signs that attitudes are changing for the better, and we welcome them. Such changes as may take place will mainly have been stimulated by economic pressures and not by political threats. I am glad that British companies have generally recognised their part in this process and the fact that they have social obligations to their employees in South Africa as well as responsibilities to their shareholders. That is why the Government will continue to encourage British companies to implement the code of conduct for companies with interests in South Africa—a code which has been adopted by the Governments of the nine member States of the European Community.

My hon. Friend asked that we should not be deflected from our trade policies towards South Africa by threats of retaliation from other Governments. We are always willing to listen to views which are rationally expressed. We understand the deeply held views of many Commonwealth Governments on the issues of Southern Africa and we share their concerns. But we cannot and must not give way to threats.

However, we must not lose sight either of our important interests throughout Africa. We are aware that in 1978 our visible exports to Nigeria were worth almost twice as much as our exports to South Africa. That is an important factor, but we believe that the way to progress in South Africa is through peaceful negotiations.

I share my hon. Friend's wish that the United Kingdom's trade with South Africa, as with other parts of the world, should be maintained and developed. That is why the present Government place such a high priority on seeking solutions to the many difficult political problems of Southern Africa.

On a point of order. I do not know whether I am in order, Mr. Deputy Speaker, in pointing out that my hon. Friend the Member for Ealing, Southall (Mr. Bidwell) is due to take the next debate but I do not see him here.

That debate is timed for one o'clock, so the House will be suspended until one o'clock.

Before I call the hon. Member for Ealing, Southall (Mr. Bidwell) to speak on the events in Southall on 22 and 23 April last, may I remind the House that following the demonstrations and violence many people were charged with various offences. Some of these cases have still to be heard and are, therefore, sub judice. It is, of course, in order to discuss the general issues arising out of the events in Southall, but reference must not be made to individual cases which are still pending.

I thank you, Mr. Deputy Speaker, and I thank Mr. Speaker for giving me the opportunity to ventilate this matter today—the last day of the Session before the Whitsun Recess and the Euro-election period.

I shall try to conform to your request, Mr. Deputy Speaker. It may be a little difficult in one regard, because the death of a person arising out of those events has very much attended the whole atmosphere of what we are about to discuss. During my remarks, I certainly shall not suggest how the young man met his death because it has not yet been proved, although many people have formed opinions about how it occurred, but I begin by thanking the Chair for giving me the opportunity of referring to events in the Southall part of the Ealing constituency on 22 and 23 April.

It may be a surprise to some hon. Members that I couple the two dates, but it will come as no surprise to local participants. However, it is on the events of 23 April that I should like the House to concentrate its attention, because it was on that evening that a young man who came to demonstrate against the whole idea of the National Front meeting in the old Southall town hall met his death. I warned that those events would lead to violence on all sides. They led to mass arrests and to injuries to many others, including police officers, which were both severe and minor.

I believe that the national interest and the national attention paid to these events are due to wider considerations. There are three basic reasons for public concern about what happened in Southall on 23 April. The most important is the need to sustain and promote racial harmony in this country, a cause to which all hon. Members are committed, as are all decent people from varying philosophical and principled positions.

Secondly, there is the need to protect communities such as Southall against threats to their stability, particularly second and third generations of people originating from the West Indies and the Indian sub-continent. Their fathers and mothers came here from the middle 1950s and onwards and have helped the British economy and themselves, for the most part at the request of British em- ployers What is not generally understood in the country as a whole is that this development, which I have often described as "the presence of the babies of the babies", means more and more that any suggestion, from whatever quarter, that brown and black people do not really belong here is bound to be increasingly resisted by those most affected—by the brown and black Britishers themselves and by an increasing number of young white people of good will who wish to fight for a British future which guarantees the civil rights of all, regardless of racial or ethnic origin.

The third main point is that most British people, looking at the world scene, realise that in the global struggle for racial harmony our country above all the nations in the world must get it right internally. All eyes are upon us. So far we have had some successes, but in view of the events of 23 April I do not believe that we have made a very good fist of it.

Above all, we have not yet dealt effectively with those whose stock-in-trade, for barren political reasons, is to stimulate race hatred. I find it necessary to say this by way of preamble. At the Labour Party conference in Blackpool two years ago, I sought in a short speech to spell out what I thought we needed. I welcome the Minister of State, Home Office to the Front Bench. I think that this is his first major duty since he became Minister of State, and I congratulate him on his appointment. He should not be put off by the venue and auspices of that speech to which I have alluded. I ask him to look at it. It will not overtax him, because it was very short and to the point.

I pointed out that it was ludicrous to set up the expensive paraphernalia of the Commission for Racial Equality; and all the ramifications of the Race Relations Act 1970 may not realistically be able to deal with the stimulation of race hatred such as that put forward by the National Front and the other more obscure Fascist, racist organisations.

Of course, it must be borne in mind that during the election the National Front fielded a candidate whom I reckoned to be only a token candidate because he lived miles from the constituency. The House must address its mind to that fact in trying to determine whether it was a genuine local election meeting.

I refer to Sunday 22 April. Arrangements were made for a march from Southall to the Ealing part of my Division to go past Ealing town hall, where petitions were handed in calling upon the local authority not to allow the National Front to meet in Southall town hall. I appreciate that this took place at the eleventh hour. That march became something of a shambles. I think that the organisers and the police imagined that it might be a defusing element. It was certainly from the police that I received the information that it was to come about. I took part in it, tried to lead it and to keep it moving. But the fact that it was a bit of a shambles had, I believe, some bearing on the subsequent events.

I refer to the march as a shambles because I believe that all those at the front, including members of the local authority and officials of the Southall Indian Workers Association, would agree that elements in that supposedly peaceful anti-National Front march helped to spoil an effective, peaceful demonstration by dragging their feet, halting the march and in some respects provoking the police during its early stages.

Some arrests and charges were made that day, therefore largely defeating its intentions. I am critical of those elements. I cannot tell exactly who those people were because when one is at the front of a march getting information from the police—not from the stewards, which is desirable—one does not always know whether it is right. Certainly those of us at the front could not have halted or dragged our feet more often than we did. We believe that at one stage some deliberate attempt was made to prevent that march from proceeding. The fact that there were arrests did not help the situation the following day. They were a prelude to what was to come. Most of us knew that the situation was likely to be inflammatory the following day.

It must be remembered that all this took place during the general election campaign, and the fact that there were seven candidates was bound to have considerable effect.

It is wrong for anyone to assume that the tragedy of 23 April—it cannot be called by any other name—was caused by outside elements seeking to capitalise politically, regardless of who got hurt in the process. If that is the picture of anyone outside the Southall area who did not observe the events, it is entirely false. They might well have aggravated the situation in some respects, but it did not help when a man with a loudspeaker continually bellowed abuse at the police lined up outside Southall town hall. I witnessed that because, in a sense, I was trapped in the centre of Southall, my Labour Party campaign headquarters being close by.

The gentleman with the loudspeaker was alluding to the ugly events at Leicester a few days previously, when many policemen and others were badly injured. Later, and within my hearing, a rumour was circulating in the police ranks that a policeman had been stabbed at Southall. I have never been a policeman, but I should imagine that such a story would tend to unnerve people.

I believe that the events in Southall were due to a considerable amount of misjudgment. There was a measure of misjudgment on the part of the previous Home Secretary, and I shall refer to an exchange of correspondence that I had with the former Home Secretary. I am a little handicapped because he is not present today. He told me that he would be in his constituency in Leeds.

I was so disturbed when I heard of the decision of the National Front—in my own language—to pick off Southall that I wrote to the Home Secretary in longhand and in a personal sense. Therefore, I shall not quote the letter exactly, but I simply refer to the contents of it.

I headed my letter "National Front Planned Meeting—Southall Town Hall, Monday Evening April 23rd". I wrote the letter on 16 April, seven days prior to the event. In my letter I pointed out that considerable community feeling was developing to prevent the provocative decision of the National Front to hold

"a public meeting at the small old Town Hall at Southall a few yards from my campaign headquarters at the Regional Office of the Transport and General Workers Union."

The Indian Workers' Association and the Ealing Community Relations Council would, I thought, call for resistance. In fact, it turned out that they wanted to have a demonstration which would be basically—I should say absolutely, from the point of view of the people who associate with the Community Relations Council—a peaceful demonstration to show the detestation of the local people for racists and the National Front and all they stand for. I also referred to other elements that were interested in the general election itself that I thought would try to make a meal of what was inevitably to come.

Southall Labour councillors, including Councillor Elliott, the Ealing borough minority Labour group leader, were trying to do everything they could to prevent the National Front meeting and were offering an alternative venue at the Ealing end of the constituency.

I told the former Home Secretary in my letter that I thought both property and staff would suffer damage. I asked him if he would help by contacting the Commissioner, perhaps to advise him to press the London borough of Ealing chiefs not to offer Southall town hall, which is not suitable for a public meeting of any size, let alone this one. It is a very small place. I believe that the seating capacity is 80, and even then it would be crowded.

I warned the Home Secretary that I thought both staff and policemen, among others, were bound to suffer injury because of the sheer impossibility of the situation. I wrote:

"The National Front has had no footing in Southall for a very long time."

I said that they would bring strangers, and that no doubt counter-demonstrators would also bring strangers. I pointed out that the National Front candidate was a mere token and said that I understood that the booking for the meeting was only provisional at that time. Therefore, there was still time to think about it.

I do not know what my right hon. Friend the former Home Secretary did or did not do; he must have been very busy in Leeds at that time. But on 23 April he sent a letter to me by special message. One of my handicaps was that I was a mere parliamentary candidate—one of seven—and therefore the media were not constrained to use anything I said about events in Southall. However, it did not stop the Press Association tele- phoning the following morning to tell me about the tragic death of a young man from East London, Blair Peach.

The former Home Secretary said that he appreciated my concern about the matter and that he had taken advice about the powers, if any, that a local authority may have to offer an alternative meeting room to a candidate during a general election. He then went on to say:

"My understanding however is that paragraph 3 of Schedule 7 to the Representation of the People Act 1949 provides that each local authority shall prepare for their area lists of meeting rooms which candidates in any constituency are entitled to use for public meetings in furtherance of their candidature. These lists are kept by the electoral registration officer and are made available to a candidate or his election agent. If, as I assume, Southall Town Hall is on this list then each candidate at the election has an entitlement to use it, providing reasonable notice is given and, for example, the use does not conflict with a prior letting agreement. The Act does not appear to empower the local authority to refuse use of a meeting room on public order grounds."

I emphasise those words because they are words that must continue to be heeded and discussed.

The Home Secretary's letter continued:

"as you know, the powers under the Public Order Act 1936 to ban marches do not extend to meetings".

He said that he had taken steps to ensure that the Commissioner was aware of my concern. He went on:

"The policing arrangements for this meeting will be an operational matter for the Commissioner and I have no power to intervene or give directions. I am in no doubt though that appropriate measures will be taken to preserve public order and prevent breaches of the peace."

That last sentence is laughable in the light of the events that followed.

I also questioned seriously the inability of the Conservative-controlled council on this occasion, in the two ways in which I have so described it. I watched that meeting assemble. I have no hesitation in declaring it as a farce, from a public meeting point of view—a tragic farce, to which no one should ever be exposed again. It would be no more than justice if all the Tory councillors concerned were surcharged for the whole extravagant police presence, which cost many thousands of pounds, and they would be lucky that added to that Bill were not several more deaths, damage to council property and injury to staff.

One of my major concerns was the personal safety of the black man from Trinidad who chaperones my normal local surgeries. But the police saw to that. They saw that he would be protected. I know the thug-like quality of the National Front membership because I have been on the receiving end of it in my time.

Why do I call the meeting a farce under the Representation of the People Act? No meeting staged first by the wrongful decision of the borough council and then chaperoned and virtually stewarded by half of London's police throwing a half-mile deep cordon around the centre of Southall, shepherding white morons of the National Front from eight miles away, can ever pretend to be a proper local election meeting by any stretch of the imagination.

Did not the chairman of the Inner London Education Authority correctly assess his situation when he refused to let premises, election or no election, to the National Front and the race haters? Did not the borough of Brent boldly, and courageously, too, also refuse to let to the race haters, who base themselves on the bestial doctrines of the German Nazis? Brent was prepared to test the law, and it was so tested when a National Front-inspired injunction failed against Brent very recently, since these events.

Were these matters ever carefully assessed by the more sober-minded of the Conservative majority on the Ealing borough council, or did they not give a tuppenny damn that the provocation was to be confined to the people of Southall? Are they not the guilty ones?

Of course, we have argued about this time and again, and one appreciates that as a substance of argument one could quote Voltaire. His famous saying was that he may not agree with what someone says but he would defend to the death that person's right to say it. It was something along those lines. But we, Parliament, since 1965 and section 6 of the first Act then, and the subsequent 1968 Act and the Race Relations Act 1976, have had a section of law which seeks to outlaw free speech in this regard in the crudest sense. The question of free speech has always been a matter of balance as to how far one can go. If it were not so, we would not have the law of slander or of libel, or laws preventing people from engaging in insulting behaviour. That is why these very words have been written into our enactments.

What about the police command itself? Do those who are assigned to the field of good race relations—there are now many of them—ever want to see a repeat performance in Southall? Of course they do not.

I am aware that all these matters are not easy. I have served for over 10 years on the Select Committee on immigration and race relations. I imagine that that Select Committee will be set up again in the not-too-distant future. I was in the Red Lion Square events of 1974. I am aware also that the police are inevitably conducting their own inquiry into their part in the Southall events. I have been trying to help them in that inquiry, in the narrow sense. I know that they, too, will eventually have to submit themselves to the independent complaints board. But that hearing will not be held in public and it will be mainly an inquiry into individual behaviour and not into what was in the heads of the police command on that day.

I submit that all that will be insufficent finally to answer the questions that I have posed, let alone the thousand and one questions that many others have been raising locally and in the press in general about the sad happenings in Southall, particularly on Monday 23 April.

Two days later I was speaking in the adjacent constituency of Hayes and Harlington. Naturally, I referred to Southall. I remember saying that if I had had a son or daughter in the police on duty that day, I should have been as much in fear as every Asian parent was in fear that day.

Therefore, we do not want merely an inquiry into the police behaviour and command plans for 23 April and beyond—and I say "beyond" because later there was a highly successful well-attended march for peace and harmony after the death of Blair Peach. The demand was bound to be raised that there should be a public inquiry if the truth was ultimately to be discovered. It is not surprising that relatives and all concerned want the most detailed public scrutiny. We have so demanded it. Opposition Members demand it. We have 147 signatures so far asking for a public judicial inquiry.

The hon. Member for Ealing, North (Mr. Greenway) is present today. I welcome his presence. He has not yet made his maiden speech. He is aware that the Conservative-controlled local authority accepted part of an amendment which calls for a public inquiry to be set up by the Home Secretary. I invite Conservative Members to put their signatures to my motion, which is also led by my hon. Friends the Members for Hackney, South and Shoreditch (Mr. Brown) and for Newham, South (Mr. Spearing). The reason why the name of my hon. Friend the Member for Hackney, South and Shoreditch appears in the lead on that motion is that Blair Peach was one of his constituents and his family are his constituents.

I do not expect the hon. Member for Ealing, North to agree entirely with what I have said, but I welcome his presence today. It indicates his continuing concern about this matter. It will continue to be a running discussion in the localities which he and I serve in the House.

I have described the special meeting and the early-day motion. In the lead, too, incidentally, is the hon. Member for Rochdale (Mr. Smith), and most of the Liberal Members have signed the motion. One Member of Plaid Cymru has signed it. I have not had time to approach the others.

The widow and family of the young man who died are resident in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Hackney, South and Shoreditch. Ultimately, whatever the apportionment of blame for his death, Blair Peach, together with young Kevin Gately, who died in 1974 in the Red Lion Square events, will be regarded by history as a martyr and a young courageous campaigner against Facism and racism. Their major crimes were that they loved humanity. Both young men reminded me so much of my involvement in earlier years.

I do not think that the House can do anything other than carry out what is suggested in my early-day motion and ask the Home Secretary to arrange this inquiry, at which every facet of infor- mation can come forth openly in public and he properly examined.

Perhaps I may have the indulgence of the House for a few moments. Blair Peach was a constituent of mine and I represent his family in this matter.

Blair Peach's family are very concerned about the inquest which is taking such a long time. It began by being told that the police would be examining the facts and presenting a report to the coroner within one month. That month has now gone and the police have asked for three further months, although the coroner has given them only two months. Nevertheless, by the time that this inquest gets under way, it will have been four months before anything is heard about the matter.

The family, quite rightly, are distressed about this delay. They want assurances that there is no attempt to delay this matter to the point at which it will be lost. The family want to know that everyone concerned in the investigation will pursue the matter urgently and will be in a position for the inquest to take place properly, so that the other things that flow therefrom, including the public inquiry—which I support—may take place.

Will the Minister assure the House today that no delay will be manifest in the work of the police in order that the inquest may take place and the distressed family of Blair Peach can at least have the satisfaction of hearing the result of it?

I first assure the hon. Member for Hackney, South and Shoreditch (Mr. Brown) that there is no attempt or desire to cause delay, and all inquiries are proceeding as fast as possible.

I am grateful to the hon. Member for Ealing, Southall (Mr. Bidwell) for his reference to myself and for raising the subject of the disturbances that occurred in his constituency on 23 April and the question of what our reaction should be. That subject is properly a matter of concern to him and to his constituents, but, as he himself has made quite clear, the issues raised are of great importance to all Members of this House and to the public at large. Therefore, although today cannot be the occasion for a wide-ranging debate on public order in general and on race relations, there are some general issues to which I should like to address myself.

The hon. Member for Southall has spoken of the importance of racial harmony, and I agree with him. I should like to make it clear at the outset that, in my view and in that of the Government, a continuing improvement in race relations is a central and essential policy. British citizens, whatever their race or colour or creed, are equal before the law and should be treated as such. Moreover, many members of all the ethnic minority communities in our country make a significant and valuable contribution to our national life. They can be fully assured that our policies will be based on a firm belief in the need for equal opportunities and rights for all our citizens, and that includes the right to expect equal protection from the law.

The maintenance of public order must also be a central concern of any Government, and the events at Southall involved a breakdown of public order. There were vicious attacks on the police, and the hon. Member for Southall referred to the abuse hurled against them. Those events and the loss of life were deeply shocking.

In that context I believe that the views of the National Front are odious and divisive. The Government have no sympathy with them, nor, it would appear, has the electorate. Similarly, I am opposed to the Socialist Workers' Party and others who seek to exploit racial tension to provoke confrontation and violence. Having made that clear, we must consider the problems posed to public order at Southall and the implications that they have for consideration of public order issues in the future.

The disorders at Southall were by far the most serious of a number of disturbances that took place during the general election campaign as a result of demonstrations against National Front meetings. The previous week there had been demonstrations against meetings in Battersea, Islington and Leicester that required a significant police presence and gave rise to disorder. The most serious disturbances, however, were at Southall on 23 April. Those disturbances were foreshadowed the previous day when a march was organised by those opposed to the National Front. The march began in Southall and followed a five-mile route past the town hall, finishing just past Ealing town hall.

That march itself was not without incident. On a number of occasions the march stopped and demonstrators sat down in the road. Nevertheless, the police managed to shepherd the march along its way and, although there were 19 arrests, there was no serious disorder.

Sadly, the following day events took a different turn. Some 3,000 demonstrators are estimated to have taken part in the demonstration and a similar number of police officers were deployed. Ninety-seven police officers were injured, 21 requiring hospital treatment. A number of the demonstrators were also injured and one sustained an injury from which he subsequently died. A total of 345 persons were arrested.

In these circumstances, it is right that we should ask ourselves whether all the necessary steps are being taken to inquire into what occurred and learn lessons for the future. As the hon. Member for Southall has indicated, various inquiries are already being undertaken. The Commissioner has undertaken to send to the Home Secretary, as police authority for the Metropolitan police district, a full report on the disturbances and the police handling of them. That is currently being prepared. When my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary has received and considered that report, it is his intention to make a statement to the House.

The Commissioner has also designated a senior officer, Commander Cass, to inquire into the circumstances of the death of one of the demonstrators, Mr. Blair Peach, with a view to reporting to the coroner and to the Director of Public Prosecutions. The Commissioner has given a public undertaking that that investigation will be pursued with vigour and unswerving determination to establish the truth. The hon. Member for Southall will agree that that must be the priority, even if it inevitably involves a certain degree of delay.

There are also, as the House will be aware, many cases arising out of the disturbances currently before the courts.

In addition, a number of allegations of excessive force have been made against the police. We ask a good deal of our police in requiring them to exercise restraint at all times, even when provoked and assaulted. But we do require that of them, and allegations should be pursued. The Commissioner has therefore appointed a senior officer to investigate such allegations in accordance with procedures set up by the Police Acts of 1964 and 1976. Any that involve allegations of criminal offences will be referred to the Director of Public Prosecutions. All the others will fall to be reviewed by the independent Police Complaints Board. If, having reviewed the complaints, the board judges there are aspects of the affair which should be drawn to my right hon. Friend's attention, it is open to it to do so, and I have no doubt that it will if that is necessary or appropriate. The investigations that are in hand are substantial, and I believe that they are of the right kind.

The hon. Member for Southall has argued that the local council was wrong to grant the National Front candidate permission to use Southall town hall for an election meeting. He has described representations that were made to stop that taking place. I cannot answer for the council and do not seek to do so, nor do I want to comment on an interpretation of law. That is for the courts. But one point is clear—that the law as it stands does not permit local authorities to discriminate in the allocation of rooms for election meetings on the ground that the views likely to be expressed are offensive to others.

One may find the views of the National Front or the Socialist Workers' Party deeply offensive, but the law does not empower meeting halls at election times to be refused to candidates of either party on that ground or even on grounds of public order. What is or is not a bona fide meeting can be determined only by the courts. There has not been an adjudication on the merits of that issue that would have enabled the council to say that it was not in law bound to let the hall to the National Front.

I said at the start of my speech that I thought it right to take this opportunity to present one or two general reflections and I shall conclude by doing that. The responsibilities and duties of the police at Southall were clear. They were not to deny the right of the National Front to hold a meeting if the law gave it that right. Many people seem not to realise that basic and fundamental limitation in what the police could or should have done.

Th police role was to use their best efforts to preserve public order, to prevent breaches of the peace and to enforce the law. A misunderstanding of what the law allows can lead to a misconception of the role of the police, and that is very dangerous. It can fix falsely in some people's minds that, in some way, the police are there to protect the National Front and to oppose those who seek to demonstrate against it. Nothing could be further from the truth or more contrary to the interests of the police, and I am glad to have the chance to underline that fact.

We place on the police the onerous task of helping us to strike the balance between order and freedom of expression which we, as parliamentarians, have sought to enshrine in the law. At Southall, those who wished to demonstrate against the National Front had the right of peaceful assembly and public protest. That is also an important and basic principle, but that right does not carry with it the right to break the law that governs public behaviour.

In the interests of the community as a whole, there is no entitlement in law to obstruct the highway and still less to bombard the police with bricks, bottles and flares. Disturbances of the sort that happened in Southall do not, in the words of the former Home Secretary, the right hon. Member for Leeds, South (Mr. Rees), promote even those causes that they are intended to assist and they are deeply offensive to the great majority of our people.

The steps now being taken and the various inquiries that are under way are the right and proper course to establish the facts of what occurred and to deal with the allegations and complaints. The hon. Member for Southall called for a judicial inquiry. My right hon. Friend will wish to consider that request in the light of the Commissioner's report. However, I am sure that the hon. Member, in calling for that inquiry, accepts that the inquiries in hand must be allowed fully to proceed and that action in the courts and the effective complaints procedure must be fully supported.

Looking to the future, we need to ensure that in considering the events at Southall we reflect on how to strike the balance that seeks to accommodate the exercise of the right of protest within a framework that enables ordinary people to go about their business without fear of injury to themselves or damage to their property. The vast majority of the people of Southall were not involved in the meeting or the demonstration, and we must not overlook the rights of the majority.

I hope that the hon. Member for Southall feels that we are approaching these issues in the right spirit. It is our aim, as it is his, to achieve healthier race relations and the establishing of the facts by the proper procedures and to support the police and all others involved in the maintenance of public order.

I know that responsible members of the ethnic communities want to see order maintained and must surely want to support and work with the police to that end. My right hon. Friend has already indicated in reply to a question from the hon. Member for Islington, Central (Mr. Grant) that he intends to consider whether any changes in the law on public order would be useful and desirable.

The important point that I should emphasise is that all of us should lend our support to the determined efforts of the police and others to build up co-operation with the ethnic communities in Southall and elsewhere. None of us wants that work to be undermined as a result of either hasty judgment or of a misconception of the role of the police and the law in this area. If the debate has enabled that fact to be clarified, it will have served a truly useful purpose.

The short debate that we are embarking on concerns a very different problem from that raised in the previous debate. I wish to raise the issue of the proposed construction of a large petrochemical industrial complex in Fife on or near the north coast of the Firth of Forth. The buildings will be sited in the constituencies of my hon. Friends the Members for Dunfermline (Mr. Douglas) and Kirkcaldy (Mr. Gourlay). My concern is the prospect for jobs arising directly from the construction of those buildings and from the industrial spin-off which we hope will occur when the project has got under way.

The current level of male unemployment in neighbouring Cowdenbeath has been well over 20 per cent. for a considerable time and I therefore have a large vested interest, as have the workers whom I represent, in the project going ahead as quickly as possible.

It may help if I fill in a little of the background to this matter. Since the 1950s, the area of Moss Morran, which is the relevant part neighbouring my constituency, has been recognised as a possible industrial site with potential to accommodate large-scale industrial development, but the site has not had any formal development plan recognition.

Since the early 1960s there has been interest in the site from time to time in connection with oil refining, petrochemical development, heavy engineering, bonded warehousing and the like, but only since the development of the Brent oil field, which produces oil and gas, has interest been expressed in the site by Shell Expro and other oil companies. In July 1976, Shell Expro contacted the Fife local authorities to discuss its proposals. It had originally chosen Peterhead as the site for its natural gas liquids plant, but it soon became evident that, for various reasons, the site was not suitable.

Concurrently with the inquiry by Shell Expro for the NGL plant, Esso Chemical Limited discussed with the Fife local authorities the potential of Moss Morran to accommodate an ethylene cracker. In order to get maximum advantage in terms of jobs from the siting of the ethylene cracker at Moss Morran, it was vital that the two projects went together because the cracker would attract further petrochemical industries using the ethylene, which in turn could attract other plants using their products—what is called downstream development. That is most important in the view of the local authorities for the job potential in an area which is desperate for such longterm employment potential.

From the outset, the local authorities realised that there would be safety and environmental hazards and they made clear that the two plants should be considered together and their effects evaluated, along with those of potential downstream development. The overall longterm implications for the Moss Morran and Braefoot Bay sites could then be determined more effectively.

Decisions were made in November 1976 by Shell Expro and in January 1977 by Esso Chemicals to proceed to submit their planning applications. To ensure a rigorous and independent analysis of all the possible hazards, the local authorities briefed the chemical, engineering and scientific consultants, Cremer and Warner, in January 1977.

The NGL plant application was submitted on 20 January 1977, the ethylene cracker application on 24 February 1977, and the application for downstream development of the remainder of the site on 21 March 1977. A public inquiry into all those proposals was held in Dunfermline from 22 June 1977 to 21 July.

At that inquiry all the arguments for and against the proposals were put forward. The arguments for the proposals were naturally enough put by the oil companies and by the three Fife local authorities. Against them were the Conservation Society, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, the Forth Yacht Clubs Association, the Combined Action Group, the developers of Dalgety new town, the Gray Park tenants association and about 40 individual objectors.

There were certain neutrals, including the Forth ports authority, Cremer and Warner, the Health and Safety Executive, and various representatives of local political parties, including my hon. Friend who is now the Member for Dunfermline, who gave his own independent evidence.

Some of the objectors were vehemently against the proposals, on grounds that we can all understand. There can be no denying that the way of life of the inhabitants of Gray Park, Dalgety new town and the small community of Aberdour will be gravely affected by the development of the project.

When the public inquiry came down in in favour of the project, the objectors became even more vehement, angry and frustrated. They felt that, as my hon. Friend said at the inquiry, the balance was unfairly weighted against them. The Government should take on board for any future inquiry of this kind the fact that there is a heavy imbalance against objectors to such a scheme compared with those who are putting it forward.

I do not complain about the unceasing campaign of opposition ever since the decision was announced. It has been a skilful, costly, persistent campaign, and no doubt it was sincere. I do not challenge that for one moment. To underline what I have just said, it is vital that in whatever decision the Secretary of State makes the interests of the three communities that I have already mentioned—Gray Park, Dalgety Bay and Aberdour—and all the inhabitants of the area are constantly borne in mind.

Though I do not know how it might be done, it might be considered appropriate to have a written agreement from the relevant oil companies that inconvenience to any individuals caused by the development, through the necessity to move home, the fall in the value of their property or anything else, shall be a proper liability that the oil companies must be asked to bear. I do not think that the local authority should be asked to bear the costs of that inconvenience and any compensation that might arise. That is a proper burden to expect the oil companies to bear.

The Health and Safety Executive has been intimately involved with the matter from the beginning. It has reported on the possible hazards associated with the two pipelines to bring the natural gas liquids down from St. Fergus in the north to Moss Morran and the other line carrying gas for fuel to the Boddam power station near Peterhead. We are not concerned with that now. The executive came to the conclusion that dangers undoubtedly existed, especially in the case of the pipeline carrying the natural gas liquids to Moss Morran. Nevertheless, it came to the firm conclusion, based on all known evidence—it would not base its conclusions on anything other than the evidence known at the time—that the worst possibility was an accident once every 22,700 years.

I do not know how these so-called experts arrive at that calculation. I speak only as a layman in these matters, but I believe that only a fool would accept those figures at their face value. Equally, they cannot be dismissed with derision, as they have been by the objectors. The objectors are no more expert in these matters than I am. One must take the evidence as one finds it and as one can assess it.

The pipeline from the north to Moss Morran will be 220 kilometres long, which is roughly 140 miles. It will carry highly flammable materials under high pressures. It is obvious that any leakage from the pipeline could create a great danger of fire and explosion, which in certain circumstances could be devastating.

The executive considered a variety of circumstances in which such a leak or leaks might occur, with reference to the experience of oil companies with other pipelines. It came to the conclusion, as we all must, that there can never be absolute certainty that serious accidents will not happen. But that is the case in many facets of life. Sinking a coal mine, building a motorway, and all kinds of other projects carry that kind of hazard. It must always be measured against the prospective advantages to the nation, the local community and the general standard of living of the people. One must be set against the other all the time.

It is not my intention, nor am I qualified, to go into any great technical detail or engage in extensive comment on the findings of the public inquiry or the assessment of the project made for the Fife local authorities by Cremer and Warner or any other investigations. However, it is worth putting on record a quotation from the overall conclusions of the local authorities' joint report:

"Should the application receive approval there would be some loss of natural resources particularly agricultural land. A much greater loss to the community could however be that associated with the impact of the proposed developments on the physical environment at Moss Morran and more particularly at Brae-foot Bay. Of even greater significance would be the fact that the two plants with their marine terminal could be a major hazard. Had it been the case that the evaluation carried out by the consultants Cremer and Warner had shown that any aspect of the proposals would constitute an unacceptable risk to life and property there would be no alternative to recommending refusal of the applications.

Cremer and Warner however consider that there is no reason to doubt that the plants and terminal can be designed, built and operated in such a manner as to be acceptable in terms of environmental impact and community safety."

It is important to get that on record, in view of the campaign that has gone on ever since the closure of the public inquiry.

Since all those reports were produced, there has been additional information in respect, for instance, of radio spark hazards. I understand that these hazards, too, have been investigated by the Health and Safety Executive and dealt with satisfactorily. Having talked to certain people in the Ministry of Defence, I know that the Ministry has been very closely concerned and involved in connection with its radar and radio equipment on vessels going up and down the Forth and in various other capacities.

At this point I want to express my gratitude to my right hon. Friend the former Secretary of State for Scotland for the meticulous way in which he gave the fullest possible consideration to all aspects of this problem and was on the point of making his decision—within weeks, if not days—had the general election not intervened with disastrous consequences for him, for us and, I think, for the people of Scotland. However, that is in parenthesis. I do not want to engage in a party political harangue, but I thought that I ought to say that as an objective assessment of the situation.

The former Secretary of State was under considerable pressure from the impatient local authorities which thought that a decision should have come much earlier. My right hon. Friend was right to say "No. I want to be absolutely certain that as far as humanly possible all the relevant factors will be considered carefully and meticulously." That is what he did.

In the House on Wednesday of this week, the Secretary of State was asked questions by me and others of my hon. Friends. I may say that there was no conspiracy. It was a case of private initiative all targeting on the same issue. We are all deeply committed to getting a good and positive decision in favour of this project going ahead. But, in the circumstances, the new Secretary of State for Scotland was right when he said very fairly that he must have time to consider the documents and all the very complex information now at his disposal. We have no objection to the right hon. Gentleman taking his time on that. It is much too important a matter for a decision to be rushed.

But, against that, we in Fife have been patient and forbearing for a very long time. I have no wish to ask the Secretary of State at this juncture to give a specific date, but I hope that he can announce his decision—and I hope that it will be a favourable one—before, say, the end of July. I know that the Under-Secretary of State who is to reply to this debate will not be able to be specific, but I hope that he will proceed with all expedition, because the longer the wait, the greater the danger of losing the project to Fife and to Scotland.

It is a massive investment of upwards of £400 million. I believe that it is an investment in the future of Scotland. There is no doubt that it is a high-risk investment, as all investments in advanced technology inevitably must be. It is of vital importance to the future of Fife and of my own constituency, ravaged as it has been over the past 25 years by the erosion of its coal mining base.

No objective person can make the charge that decisions on this matter have been taken hastily without full regard to the facts as currently they are known. All concerned—the oil companies, the local authorities, Government Departments and the independent Health and Safety Executive—have acted with a full sense of their grave responsibilities. No one has sought to minimise the possible dangers or to ridicule or silence or ignore the objectors, who take a contrary view. But I hope that I am not unfair in saying that they will be satisfied only with the complete abandonment of the project or its removal to some other site. If that were to happen, if there were to be any further undue delays in coming to a decision, the entire complex might be lost completely to Scotland and might even be lost to the United Kingdom. That cannot be allowed to happen. However important sectional minority interests may be, they cannot be paramount in this matter. The national interest and the interest of local people must in this instance be considered more important than the interests of any minority group.

Fife has suffered enough over the years from industrial depredation. The Fife mining communities have known and still know what it is to run risks of death, serious accident and injury at their workplace. Several members of the local councils now considering this project are miners or former miners who know very well the risks that will be run by the workers and by the people in or near this project. They know there could be all kinds of misfortunes. Nevertheless, they want, the three Labour Members of Parliament want, the three Labour-controlled local authorties want, the large number of unemployed in the area want and I believe the great majority of the local populace want an early and favourable decision to go ahead with this project with all speed.

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Fife, Central (Mr. Hamilton). I hope that he will not think that I am being patronising towards him if I congratulate him on the excellent way in which he presented the case.

Before I move to the main body of my speech, I might say that I gave notice to the Leader of the House that I intended to refer tangentially to an issue which confronts hon. Members who seek to raise matters in this House, especially matters of great complexity such as this one.

I am trying to promote, defend and elucidate the interests of my constituents. As my hon. Friend said, I attended the public inquiry. I have a huge file at home dealing with these topics. However, should I wish to transport that file to this House I should have no place in which to store it. I have no room, and no telephone. I hope that the Leader of the House will recognise that, although it is an honour to be in this House, in the past—in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—Members of Parliament did not have to deal with issues of this complexity. Hon. Members cannot defend, promote and advance the interests of their constituents unless they are given adequate facilities.

Let me put it plainly to the Under-Secretary of State that the proposed development of these sites has been imposed upon us by nature. It is not one which we seek. Some people have said that it is Scotland's oil. Others say that it is Shetland's oil. Some, such as my right hon. Friend the Member for Greenock and Port Glasgow (Dr. Mabon), say that it is God's oil and that we ought to thank God for it. Almighty God in His infinite wisdom might have been a little more generous and not mixed up oil and gas in the ratios that he has, especially in the Brent field. The Brent field has a very high gas-to-oil ratio. Therefore, a number of choices are presented to the developers of that field.

That field, along with the others in the North Sea, was vital in the past, is vital at present and is essential to this nation in the future.

I do not know other people's predictions about the price structure for oil, but I am told reliably that the gate price for refining at Galveston at the moment is $25 or $26 a barrel. We are in the midst of a very severe crisis brought upon us by the machinations of certain countries in the Middle East which, rightly or wrongly, are looking after their own welfare. I would not take a bet with anyone that the OPEC price for oil would not be $30 a barrel by the end of this year.

We cannot afford to waste any of these resources. The alternatives for the companies involved—I am not a promoter of those companies and not necessarily a friend, although I have many friends in the oil companies—are to keep putting the gas back into the reservoir, which might destroy the reservoir, or impair it, to liquefy it offshore at huge cost, or to bring it ashore. The decision, taken some time ago, is to bring it ashore. The consideration before the public inquiry, as I said at the time, is to be convinced that the sites suggested for development by both Shell and Esso are unique—I underline the word "unique"—for their set of purposes.

I attended the public inquiry and went through those lengthy procedures. I congratulate the reporter of the time, Mr. Bell, and I also congratulate the legal side of the profession on the openness of that public inquiry. But, as my hon. Friend the Member for Fife, Central has indicated, these public inquiries are biased, because Shell and Esso, the multinational oil companies, and the local authorities have access to resources that objectors cannot command. One cannot face the resources of the multinational oil companies and the local authorities with a collection of tea and coffee money in order to sustain an objection with counsel. It cannot be done.

I have, therefore, continuously been on the side of the underdog in relation to these public inquiries. We suggested in the Select Committee on Scottish affairs report that some form of legal aid should be given to objectors. I know the difficulties, but we should look at the matter because we shall face issues of equal, if not greater, complexity.

The public inquiry reported in March 1978. The Secretary of State said in paragraph 5:

"The Secretary of State has considered the Reporter's conclusions, together with all the objections and other relevant factors emerging from the evidence. There have also been numerous representations and submissions made since the report was received. None of these at present leads me to disagree with the Reporter's findings or recommendations, or to consider that the inquiry should be reopened.

Subject to what I said in paragraph 9"—

which deals with the hazards of sparking—

"he is proposing to accept the recommendation that outline planning permission be granted subject to conditions in respect of all three applications."

That was in March 1978. This public inquiry is in danger of getting into the "Guinness Book of Records" as the longest running public inquiry on record. I have indicated the cost of delay. If the decision is to be "No", let us know it and the local authorities and the companies can make an adjustment.

I recognise and have great sympathy with the incumbent Secretary of State. He needs time to digest the multitude of papers and technical evidence before him. If he did not do that, he would leave the way open to objectors and others to take him to court on grounds not of planning law but of natural justice. He has to safeguard himself. I have no doubt that my right hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow, Craigton (Mr. Millan), when he was Secretary of State, took good care to examine all the evidence before him. But the time is now ripe, indeed overripe, to make a decision. I am proceeding on the assumption that the decision will be positive. If it is negative, the companies will have to look afresh at what they do with the gas and the gas fields. That will be very complex and costly for them. It will also be very costly and complex for the nation.

A decision has to be made reasonably soon. My hon. Friend has suggested a time scale—the end of July, I think. I do not think it is pressing the issue too greatly that we should know one way or the other by that time. If the decision is positive, what should people in the area expect? Nothing characterises the difficulties of political philosophy and outlook between the two parties more than this. If each individual is to pursue his own individual advantage, there is one conclusion. If one has to decide on the national advantage another conclusion may be required. The Secretary of State for Scotland has to look at the national position, taking cognisance of the impact on the community.

The objectors, rightly or wrongly, are asking what will be the impact on them as individuals and their families. They are perfectly at liberty, provided they proceed within the law, to do that. The nation has to say what is the advantage to the nation as a whole. The Secretary of State, speaking for the nation and the national interest, has to determine it.

The Secretary of State, when looking at the impact on the locality, especially in relation to hazard, spells this out in his letter of March 1978. He singles out the hazard and safety considerations. He says:

"A full hazard and operability audit to take account of the design and construction of the NGL feed line within the site, NGL plant, product pipelines and terminal facilities shall be carried out prior to the commissioning of the plant to the satisfaction of the planning authority in consulation with the Health and Safety Executive."

Fortunately or unfortunately, events have moved on since then. We are entitled to repeat the words of Lord Rothschild:

"Comparisons, far from being odious, are the best antidote to panic. What we need, therefore, is a list or index of risk and some guidance as to when to flap and when not."

I am asking that when the decision is made, assuming that it is positive, the Secretary of State should look at the recommendation in paragraph 29, consult the Health and Safety Executive and look at the safety and reliability directly of the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority. He should strengthen that recommendation and, if possible, get the maximum hazard analysis prior to the consideration stage. I hope that the Under-Secretary of State will reply positively.

I begin by complimenting the hon. Member for Fife, Central (Mr. Hamilton) on raising this subject in a very fair and constructive fashion. He emphasised that, as in all planning matters, there are two sides to the case and he put forward the arguments and concerns for those on both sides of the issue in a fair and helpful way. I would also like to thank the hon. Member for Dunfermline (Mr. Douglas), who has an obvious constituency interest and clearly had strong feelings on the matter, even before he became the hon. Member for Dunfermline. The points made by both hon. Members have been of great help to me.

The fact that the two hon. Members have been so helpful makes it all the more regrettable that I have to be so sparing in the response that I make. As both hon. Members are aware, debate on an issue of this type, before the Secretary of State has come to a decision, places grave restraints on what can be said that will be of help to either hon. Member. Both hon. Members will know from their previous involvement in these matters that the position of the Secretary of State is a difficult one at this stage. When a planning application is before him, which is the position here, it would be improper for him to discuss the merits of the case with individual parties or in this House. I therefore cannot comment on much of what has been said. I apologise if that seems unhelpful, but it arises from the quasi-judicial role of the Secretary of State when deciding planning applications. He must behave with the same neutrality as a judge and cannot express views on a matter on which he has still to reach and announce a decision.

The hon. Members will, I am sure, be familiar with the broad history of these applications. Shell originally applied for planning permission for a natural gas liquids separation plant near Peterhead as far back as February 1976. A public inquiry opened into the application in May but was abandoned at the request of Shell when it reached the view that the cost of the harbour works at Peter-head would be exorbitant. Shell then applied in January 1977 to build the same plant at Moss Morran in Fife with a jetty at Braefoot Bay to ship out the product. The following month Esso applied for planning permission to build an ethane cracker on the same site to produce ethylene—a key petrochemical intermediate product. Esso also made an outline application for industrial development at Moss Morran.

The previous Secretary of State called in all the applications and arranged a public inquiry in June of 1977. The inquiry was a lengthy one. The reporter recommended to the then Secretary of State in November 1977 that planning permission should be granted for the petrochemical projects proposed by Shell and Esso. The then Secretary of State, having considered the report, announced in March 1978, on a provisional basis, that he was minded to accept the Reporter's recommendation to approve the applications subject to a substantial range of conditions. However, the then Secretary of State went on to say that, since the inquiry, a subject which had not been discussed at the public inquiry—the possible risk of hazard resulting from radio transmissions—had been raised. Before reaching any final decision the Secretary of State said that he would want to consider any representation which any of the parties wanted to submit to him on this issue. He gave the parties until the end of April to submit representations.

The Secretary of State then asked the Health and Safety Executive for its views on these representations. In July 1978 the Health and Safety Executive sent the Secretary of State a report compiled after the investigations of its specialist inspectors and setting out its conclusions and recommendations on radio transmissions. This report was then circulated to parties, who were given until 4 September, subsequently extended to 24 October, to comment. The further representations made led to the Health and Safety Executive carrying out further tests and research. The result of this further work was sent to the Secretary of State in March 1979 and circulated to parties, who were invited to make any further representations by 28 April. Clearly a considerable amount of time has elapsed since the pre- vious Secretary of State announced, on a provisional basis, the decision he was minded to make. However, it has been spent in the investigation by the Government's statutory advisers on safety of a complex issue which arose following the public inquiry.

I do not think that either hon. Member will complain about these exhaustive inquiries into the safety aspects. Both said that they realise the necessity.

All this material is now before the Secretary of State, who has been in office less than a month. I would say that the results of the election were not quite as the hon. Member for Fife, Central said. My right hon. Friend must accept the responsibility for any delay incurred over the past 22 days, but on any other delay it would be more appropriate for hon. Members to address the previous Secretary of State, who had all the factors before him.

However, my right hon. Friend appreciates the need for prompt decisions in all planning cases, especially those involving major industrial proposals. There will be no unnecessary delay in dealing with this or any other application. We recognise what has been said about unemployment and the other concerns felt by those who hold contrary views on this matter.

I cannot say when a decision will be made. The Secretary of State must carefully consider the material before him in relation to the planning applications in terms both of further procedure and of merits.

Clearly we accept the need for a decision. All points of view would welcome an early decision, so as to know the exact outcome of this application. I thank both hon. Members for what they have said and emphasise that there will be no unnecessary delay in reaching a final decision.

I am very grateful to Mr. Speaker for the opportunity to raise at this early stage in the new Government's life a matter of particular interest to my constituents—the local government structure and its financial position on the Isle of Wight.

The three authorities there, especially the county council, face a perilous financial situation. I hope that we shall be able to resolve soon the strong feeling that is building up that the structure of government on the island is not the right one, based as it is on a two-tier system, for a permanent residential population of between 112,000 and 115,000.

The fight for special recognition in our rate support grant settlement goes back many years—certainly to 1962 and possibly before. It was recognised then that we had a particular problem. The Edwards report of that date, for instance, said that we had approximately a 4 per cent. higher cost of living.

The case is well documented, particularly recently, in the archives of the Department of the Environment. In case the Under-Secretary has not seen the principal documents, I draw his attention to one of February 1977 dealing with the case for island recognition in the Government grants system—bound in blue, appropriately enough, since this Government came to power—and one in October 1977 about the argument for a special factor in the rate support grant to meet the island's needs.

Two deputations from the island met the former Secretary of State and the Under-Secretary. To précis a long and exasperating story, after the two deputations and a series of meetings between our able county treasurer, Mr. Donald Tuck, and officials at Marsham Street, it looked as if we had at last won our case. We got the timing right last year. One lives and learns in this place, and I believe that I have the timing right now, since the crucial decisions are made when the Secretary of State and other Ministers meet local authority association representatives towards the end of July. Our timing was not so good the year before.

I draw the Minister's attention to a letter from his Department dated 18 July 1978, sent to our county treasurer and signed by Mr. G. H. Chipperfield, in which the latter recognises the extra costs which the island faces as being entirely due to our severance from the mainland by sea. On the subject of road materials, he says:

"We can agree with you a figure of £227,000."

There is another paragraph on building materials.

However, Mr. Chipperfield did not accept our argument on food costs. On education costs, he said, the matter was open to argument, but he agreed a figure of £20,000 for transporting goods across the Solent and £18,000 for the extra transport costs of Isle of Wight members, officials and clients. That totals over £250,000 and there was still over £500,000 outstanding, which we were still arguing about and on which we believe we have a good case. We wanted this to be paid through a special factor written into the rate support grant formula or in some circumstances through the transport supplementary grant.

Therefore, we had high hopes when the then Secretary of State, the right hon. Member for Stepney and Poplar (Mr. Shore), met the local authority associations on 24 July last year and indicated that he was minded to back our argument and to feed in some special factor for the Isle of Wight. I think that he was somewhat surprised—certainly my local authority friends and I on the Isle of Wight were—to be rebuffed by the representatives of the Conservative-controlled ACC and ADC who felt that it would lead to a proliferation of demands from other counties. I think that they had in mind the sparsity factor which applies in some Welsh counties—Dyfed, Clwyd and others. But surely we are unique. We are the only county constituency surrounded entirely by water. We have no bridge or tunnel. Therefore, everything which comes across costs more. In the event, we got only a promise to look at the whole structure again, including those counties with sparsity problems. All that was to take place during the ensuing 12 months—a period which is now rapidly coming to an end.

The last letter that I received on the subject, because I have been prompting the former Secretary of State on this matter over a considerable period, was dated 27th April this year. In that letter the right hon. Gentleman said:

"My Department has discussed this with the local authority Associations at official level, and I understand that the Associations do see considerable difficulties in this exercise. However, as you know, I wanted to discuss this further with the Associations at member level in the Consultative Council."

That would have to wait until after the outcome of the general election.

I am now looking to the new Government to take it on from there. We have a new Secretary of State. My constituents want to know his attitude and that of his Department to their claim. I confess that I have not been happy about the noises that have been coming from the Department of the Environment. I put a question directly to the Secretary of State recently on the whole construction of the regression analysis formula of the rate support grant and asked whether he could do anything in time for this year's settlement. I am sure that he accepts that it has many anomalies certainly. Tory Members representing shire counties will support that view. They did when they were in Opposition. However, the Secretary of State did not feel that he would have time to do much about it. I suppose that I cannot complain too much about that, because there is not a great deal of time and this is a complicated subject. But certainly the Secretary of State can look at the island's case.

The Isle of Wight is now one of the highest rated authorities in the country. The average county rate is 85p; our county rate is 95·3p. This spring we had a sizeable rate revolt on our hands. It takes a long time for the mild-mannered citizens of the Isle of Wight to get worked up, but they certainly got worked up this year when they were faced with a 31·3 per cent. increase in the county precept. Unfortunately, the county council did not publicise this matter as much as it might have done. Members here will realise that it would be less by the time it reached the two boroughs because of the change in the needs element distribution. Nevertheless, the rates have gone up by between 22 per cent. and 24 per cent., depending where on the island one lives. About a quarter of my constituents live on fixed incomes and they are finding the rate burden extremely heavy.

I gave some official figures—that the average household income spent on rates had not gone up over the last 10 years but had stayed fairly static at approximately 2·1 per cent.—but I was immediately challenged on that matter. I now accept that many of my constituents are paying between 7 per cent. and 10 per cent. of their household income on rates. That is another good reason for changing the rating system, but that is not the subject of this debate.

Some facts should be taken on board by the Department of the Environment. We had to impose a high rating increase—I do not criticise the county council—because we received per 1,000 population grants amounting to £14,510 less than the average. Specific grants from central Government to the county council were £4,913 less per 1,000 population. Even the transport supplementary grant—and we got a good one last time—was £27 less, and the needs element in the rate support grant was £9,570 less. We suffer in that way. Frankly, our expenditure per 1,000 head of population is not high. We spend £748 less than the average shire county, so no one can say that we are throwing money around.

Moreover, our ability to take money from balances—our balances are completely run down—was £3,284 per 1,000 population less than average. I doubt whether we have more than a penny rate in balance now—approximately £200,000.

I note that the Scilly Isles receives no less than £224·21 in needs element per head compared with our measly £66·98. I do not know whether it has anything to do with the fact that an ex-Prime Minister lives in the Scilly Isles. If reports are correct, the right hon. Member for Sidcup (Mr. Heath) is supposed to be looking at houses in my constituency. Perhaps I should encourage him to get on and buy one as we might then do rather better with our needs element.

The present Secretary of State is on record as having great sympathy with our position. On 15 December 1977 he said:

"There is one other special case which merits attention from the Secretary of State"

—he was then referring in reverse position to the right hon. Member for Stepney and Poplar—

"in the deliberations on the rate support grant. That is the case which has been put to him and to me by the representatives from the Isle of Wight. We all know that there are many involved calculations and considerations, and I shall certainly not stand here and say that it is possible on the Opposition Benches to work out the intricacies of the particular claim of the Isle of Wight, but I believe that the representatives have put forward one special claim in their memorandum which merits the consideration of the Secretary of State.… The Secretary of State will see that on page 6 of the memorandum submitted by the Isle of Wight there is a list of the sorts of costs incurred by local government and reflecting the distance and the special travelling problems associated with the island status of that authority. Although I would give no personal commitment, I believe that it is something that in Government we would look at without any hesitation at all."—[Official Report, 15 December 1977; Vol. 941, c. 953–4.]

My Conservative opponent in the recent election claimed that he had a firm commitment of additional help from his party. I accept, and made clear during the election campaign, that no such commitment had ever been put on record in the House.

Where do we stand now? Our services are at full stretch with an ever-increasing old-age population and an increasing school population. It is an amazing situation. Our school population of 20,000 is still increasing, largely due to immigration, and so is the old-age population. Nevertheless, we are spending less than average on social services, police, education, refuse collection and town planning and slightly more, as is to be expected, on coastal protection, roads and libraries. We have practically nothing in balances. A supplementary rate demand coming on top of the recent huge increases—especially if we are to keep our teachers, as we surely must, following the recent pay settlement—could lead to civil disobedience.

There is one way in which we should be able to save a little money and at the same time provide a more understandable local authority structure in the Isle of Wight, and that is for us to merge our three main authorities—the county and the two boroughs—into one all-purpose unit: in other words, the old county borough status. That was the argument which the former county council, on which I served, put to the 1970–74 Administration at the time of local government reorganisation.

We were certain that we were right then. Unfortunately we had a number of smaller authorities, all of which had different ideas. Some wanted to split the island east-west—the traditional way—and some wanted to split it north-south. Some wanted us to go into Hampshire. Unfortunately, we never reached agreement between the authorities. Only the county council put the idea forward. It has been of great benefit, for instance, to the Highlands and Islands in Scotland, which have their all-purpose authorities. For a population of under 115,000, it surely makes sense on the island.

Take the case of the South Wight borough council. The administrative centre is in Newport. The chief executive is there. The housing manage is in Shanklin, the financial officer is in Sandown, while the technical officer is in Ventnor. For the 8,000 or 10,000 people who live in Freshwater, it takes a whole day to go by bus to Sandown to see, for instance, the housing manager and to return. There is pressure in that authority to house all these officers under one roof. There is a design to build new municipal premises in Sandown. Architects have been retained to draw up plans. If we are not careful we shall be set on a path for building municipal offices there. However, we should look at the total structure beforehand.

Sensibly, we established an area planning officer to serve all three authorities. We should now bring them together, subject to the proviso that we establish successor town councils or urban parishes at the same time. There are now rural parishes—but there is no one to speak for Cowes, Ryde, Newport and other urban conurbations. That is what the majority of my constituents would like. The Isle of Wight alliance of ratepayers' and residents' associations is pressing for that. The chambers of commerce and trade think that it makes sense. However, I do not claim that the proposal is universally popular with local councillors or local government officers.

I ask that we be given the opportunity to put the matter to the people of the Isle of Wight in a referendum. I think that the scheme would receive overwhelming support. If the Government mean what they say and want to see the most efficient and cost-effective ways of administering ourselves established in local government, they should allow us to do just that, and act upon the outcome of a referendum. Let the Government admit past errors. They should allow us to put our house in order. I am sure that the Prime Minister would agree with that if we could show that we could make savings in housing policies. If we can make further savings amongst the chief officers and administrators, we should do so before putting down bricks and mortar and building permanent offices for the two borough councils.

We do not want the Isle of Wight to be included in Hampshire. It was tried in 1888 but abandoned after two years. The people of the Isle of Wight like their independence. They know that they can run their own affairs adequately provided that they are permitted to get on with it in their own way and given the same resources as their neighbours to maintain adequate levels of services as required by the Government. We receive constant reminders from the Department of Health and Social Security that we are not maintaining the required services, especially for the elderly. We are conscious of that. However, as there is no recognition of our case for additional help, that makes it difficult for us to carry out this work.

We hope and trust that, despite the outcome of the election on the Isle of Wight, we shall not look in vain to the Ministers. On the Isle of Wight there is a Conservative-controlled county council and a Liberal-controlled district council. We know that we have friends among the new Ministers at the Department of the Environment. I ask them to look at the facts for themselves and not allow themselves to be knocked off course by any obstruction from the local authority associations.

First of all, I should like to congratulate the hon. Member for Isle of Wight (Mr. Ross) on a very interesting speech and for providing the House with an opportunity to debate the structure and finance of this unique local authority. The Isle of Wight—apart from being a most attractive and agreeable place—is, after all, our most heavily populated island and is the only island county council in England and Wales.

However, I think it is only fair to point out that the hon. Gentleman—he mentioned this—is by no means the only one to draw attention to these issues, particularly the question of financial support for the island. The Isle of Wight county council itself first raised this issue several years ago. It has been the subject of dis- cussion and negotiation with central Government on a number of occasions since then. I assure the hon. Gentleman that I have seen the two documents that he produced in the House.

The hon. Gentleman raised a number of points in his speech and I should like first of all to deal with those relating to the structure of local government on the island.

The hon. Gentleman is an impartial Member of this place, as we well know. The instance he gave of suggesting that he would agree to the demolition of a Liberal-controlled council is proof of his impartiality.

The main proposal which the hon. Gentleman made here is that the Isle of Wight should become a single all-purpose authority. I fully recognise his reasons for proposing this and, if I may say so, he has certainly made out a plausible case. However that may be, I am sure he will understand that our situations are very different. As a constituency Member of Parliament he is entitled, indeed obliged, to pursue the individual interests of those he represents. He does not need to consider the wider implications, which I may not disregard. As a spokesman for the Government I must look at his proposals in the context of the overall organisation of local government in England.

First, I remind the House of the background. One of the aims of the 1974 reorganisation of local government was to replace the 1,200 authorities in England with a rationalised system which would reduce considerably the number of units with executive responsibility. The Conservative Government's basic approach involved the creation throughout England of a two-tier system of county and district councils. The system was not entirely uniform—it created both metropolitan and shire areas—but the two-tier approach applied in both types of area.

Within this basic framework the Government's original proposal for the Isle of Wight was that it should become a district of the county of Hampshire. I remember the vigorous battle that the hon. Gentleman's predecessor successfully fought in Committee to maintain the identity of the Isle of Wight, in view of its geographical situation.

I have no doubt that local pride too—and quite naturally—played a part in the desire to retain an identity separate from Hampshire. The island's campaign was highly successful. The second tier of administration was provided by the formulation of two districts, Medina and South Wight.

The hon. Gentleman has argued forcefully that this arrangement is illogical and wasteful and that it puts a great strain on local finances because three separate bureaucracies have to be supported by his 110,000 constituents.

It is early days for this Government, but I must remind the hon. Gentleman that the perilous financial situation to which he referred is not contained only in the Isle of Wight. The Government are deeply concerned at the possible increases in rates which will face the whole of the United Kingdom.

Let me say first of all that I do not agree that, prima facie, an organisational case can be made out for cutting the three local authorities down to one. But that is not the whole story. I question the argument that a reduction in the bureaucracy could of itself go a long way towards solving the Isle of Wight's resources problem. The savings would simply be insufficient to make a real dent in it.

I did not say that it would cure the financial problems. I said that it would go some way towards doing that. It makes more sense to the electors and it should save some money. I accept that it is not the cure-all of the situation. That will remain. The county council was consistent in its wish for an all-purpose authority and twice voted for it. I accept the role played by the previous Member of Parliament representing this constituency. He played a good role. He told us that he had to accept a two-tier structure or the Isle of Wight would be incorporated in Hampshire. It was a "Take it or leave it" situation.

I accept the hon. Gentleman's correction on the question of what contribution his proposal would make towards the saving of resources The hon. Gentleman is right on the second point. But I argue that it would not be feasible to make an exception. I shall continue the argument.

The first essential difficulty is that the population of the island—only 110,000—is sustaining very costly services such as education, which in most other parts of England are sustained by substantially larger populations. I do not wish the hon. Gentleman to think that I am unsympathetic to his constituents' problems, but it is fair to point out that in pressing for county status in 1972 the Isle of Wight must have recognised the inevitable difficulties it would face in sustaining the full range of services.

Leaving that argument aside, there are still compelling reasons against making the Isle of Wight a unitary authority—and here we must consider the implications for the rest of England. If the Government decided to accept the hon. Gentleman's proposal, that would create one glaring exception to the two-tier system of local government in England. This might of itself be no more than undesirable. However, it would be extremely difficult for the Government to make an exception for the Isle of Wight and then refuse to consider the claims of other areas. I accept that the Isle of Wight is a special case but, as we all know only too well, a special case is not necessarily a unique case. There can be no doubt that other areas of the country would be able to make reasonable cases for the establishment of unitary areas which the Government would have great difficulty in resisting, having set a precedent. The result would be a return to the fragmented structure which the 1974 system was designed to eliminate.

This latter objection to the hon. Gentleman's proposal must weigh very heavily in the balance. However, I should make it clear that the Government are not unsympathetic to the Isle of Wight's difficulties. If the isle's authorities decided to propose that they should be unified, we would, of course, give full consideration to their case, but we could not ignore the wider implications which I have set out this afternoon.

Let me now turn to the question of financing local government on the Isle of Wight. The hon. Member has provided the House with a useful description of the extra costs which local authorities on the island face as a result of their severance from the mainland.

He has also reminded me that my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State said in Opposition in the annual rate support grant debate in December 1977 that a Conservative Government would be disposed to give careful consideration to the Isle of Wight's case for some recognition of the special costs it faces. My right hon. Friend was careful to emphasise that he could give no personal commitment in this. The hon. Member referred to what was said during the election campaign, but, as he well knows, what matters is what is said in this House.

The hon. Member has asked the Government to confirm their willingness to look at the island's case, and has suggested that a special factor should be included in the rate support grant distribution formula to reflect the extra costs faced by the island.

Let me say at once that we have considerable sympathy with the island's case. As the hon. Member knows, an extensive study was undertaken last year by Department of the Environment officials in conjunction with officials from the county council into the island's costs. Although it was not possible to reach complete agreement with the county council on the magnitude of the costs involved, certain extra costs, relating mainly to ferry charges on materials imported from the mainland, were identified. I have seen the letter to the county treasurer, dated 18 July last. So there is no doubt that the island faces some special costs and that these costs are unlikely to be fully reflected in the rate support grant formula. But to provide compensation by incorporating some sort of special Isle of Wight factor in the grant distribution formula would pose considerable problems, both in practice and in principle.

To explain why that is so, I need first to give some indication of the general principles on which the rate support grant system rests. It is a very complex area, and I hope that the hon. Member will bear with me for a few moments. The first point is that rate support grant is a block grant. It is provided in support of local authority expenditure generally, and no part of it is earmarked for any particular service. It is for authorities themselves to allocate their resources as they think best.

The second point is that the distribution of the grant is designed to secure a precise objective of enabling local authorities to provide a comparable standard of services for a similar rate in the pound. The needs and resources of local authorities differ so widely that the grant must be distributed so as to compensate for differences in authorities' expenditure needs and for differences in their rateable resources, so that no authority is placed at a disadvantage as a result of either high needs or low resources.

In the Isle of Wight's case we are concerned with the question of expenditure needs and how they are assessed. If we are compensating authorities throughout the country for differences in their needs, it is fundamental that those needs should be measured on the basis of a common yardstick. In practice this means that we must have some sort of generalised formula for measuring needs which is applied equally to all authorities and which uses only data which is available for all authorities. The inevitable consequence of this is that such a formula cannot take account of problems which are unique to individual authorities—such as the Isle of Wight's severance from the mainland.

There is, of course, a good deal of argument about the way in which this formula is derived. The method used over the past five years—multiple regression analysis—has, for example, resulted in a steady and substantial shift of grant away from the shire countries, which has given rise to a good deal of criticism. There has been—and will doubtless continue to be—much controversy about the best way of deriving the formula. But the fact remains that the block grant principle and the objective of equalising expenditure needs mean that there must be a general formula—however it is derived—which is applied equally to all authorities. The only alternative to this approach would be for central Government to make a subjective judgment of the needs and circumstances of each individual authority.

Quite apart from the considerable time and effort that would then be involved, this would seriously undermine the principles of local democracy and would flatly contradict this Government's policy of reducing central Government involvement in the detailed affairs of local authorities. I have no doubt that this would be quite unacceptable to all the parties involved. As this stage I take note of the hon. Member's suggestion for a referendum, but I am sure that he does not expect me to express an opinion in this debate.

It follows from this that to start introducing special factors into the present formula to take account of the particular problems of individual authorities would undermine the principle that rate support grant should be distributed on the basis of a general formula without discrimination in favour of—or against—any individual authority. It would also involve the Government in making subjective judgments about the special needs of authorities, which would only be the subject of endless argument and controversy.

As the hon. Member may recall, it was these considerations which led the local authority associations to opopse unanimously any special treatment for the Isle of Wight in the last rate support grant settlement. Their view was that the island was unlikely to be the only authority with special problems. Some authorities, for example, face higher building costs on account of mining subsidence. Others face higher labour costs because they need to provide services at night. Their view also was that to give recognition to the Isle of Wight's case for aid in respect of specific costs through the rate support grant mechanism could create a precedent which would ultimately weaken the block grant principle, on which the rate support grant system rests and which the local authority associations support.

The previous Administration accepted the associations' views and made no special provision for the Isle of Wight in the 1979–80 rate support grant settlement. I have to say that in the face of the firm and unanimous opposition of the local authority associations this Government would probably have reached the same decision in the circumstances.

However, in rejecting the Isle of Wight's case the previous Government commissioned a general study of the extent to which local authorities—not just the Isle of Wight—face special costs arising from unique circumstances which are not reflected in the rate support grant formula. I understand that officials from central Government and the local authority associations had considered the im- placations of this study and were about to report to the consultative council on local government finance when the general election intervened.

To be frank, I understand that officials foresaw some major difficulties in such a study. But I do not want to prejudge the issue, and I believe that the case for this study—which is of course very pertinent to the Isle of Wight and to the hon. Member's constituents—should be considered by Ministers and members of the local authority associations in the consultative council. I shall, therefore, propose that the officials' report should go forward to the consultative council in the near future, and I hope that, after it has had a full airing, the hon. Member and I will meet on some other occasion.

I am grateful for the opportunity to refer to an extremely serious episode involving the practical administration of value added tax. Mr. Bedward is a constituent of mine who runs the Crooked Beams restaurant in nearby Christchurch. He was subject originally to a claim of underpayment of £7,646 from April 1973 to January 1977. After prolonged negotiations, that sum was reduced to £3,821. It was reduced again, finally, to £1,597. As my constituent was convinced that he owed nothing, he refused to accept even that final figure and the whole matter went to appeal in November 1978.

After a two-day hearing, the tribunal accepted Mr. Bedward's evidence. The VAT assessment was withdrawn and costs were allowed against Her Majesty's Customs and Excise.

Within these broad facts there lies a disturbing story concerning the methods and processes used by VAT officers in establishing their case. Doubtless they thought that they had a case against Mr. Bedward, as the lengths to which they went demonstrate. The tribunal's report revealed the flimsiness of the foundations and evidence of their case. The cost of their judgment, or misjudgment as it proved to be, to the taxpayer amounted to £1,300. That represents an approximate total of 250 man hours expended by departmental staff. The award of costs claimed against them was an additional £2,000 for the year's work by a solicitor and accountant for Mr. Bedward's defence, apart from the cost and time of the tribunal itself, involving three members of a panel, one clerk and six VAT repretatives.

The Customs and Excise investigations included a number of interviews with Mr. Bedward. The House should know of my constituent's version of the meetings. He says:

"Instead of asking questions in a civil, orderly manner, I was interrogated by two officials. Before I could answer the first officer, the second would fire away with another question. Then, before I could answer that one, the original man would come in with yet another question."

On one occasion Mr. Bedward said to the officer:

"Are you calling me a thief?"

He replied:

"Yes, I am."

Furthermore, Mr. Bedward was informed by some of his regular customers that they had recognised two VAT officers known to them from Southampton, which is another area, posing as customers and dining in his restaurant without revealing their identity. In a letter that I sent to the chairman of the Board of Customs and Excise, I asked whether the visit was part of the investigation. The chairman replied that on three occasions officers kept observation from outside the restaurant. Presumably they became hungry and went in for lunch.

I turn to the case against Mr. Bedward that was submitted to the tribunal. It was presented in the form of an extremely elaborate 12-page schedule with columns of figures and calculations on percentages of mark-up on some 59 items of food and drink served in the restaurant. In the course of preparing that evidence, Mr. Bedward was asked specifically how many prawns he put in his prawn vol-au-vents and the number of peas that went into a portion of peas. The VAT inspector conceded to the tribunal that Mr. Bedward was completely honest in the preparation of all the calculations, save in respect of the amount of gristle and fat trimmed in the preparation of fillet steak and the number of portions served from a 19 oz. tin of carrots.

In its report, the tribunal accepted Mr. Bedward's evidence that his tax return was accurate, allowed his appeal and, despite opposition from a Customs and Excise lawyer, awarded him costs. That conclusion was reached after it was noted that the chief VAT officer had not taken up Mr. Bedward's invitation to inspect a delivery of meat and to watch it being trimmed of fat and gristle to determine wastage, and that VAT officers had failed to appreciate that of a 19 oz. tin of carrots the carrots themselves weighed only 11 oz. and the liquid in which they were preserved weighed 8 oz. Indeed, the hearing had to be suspended to allow a VAT officer to go off in search of a tin opener in order to weigh both the carrots and the liquid.

Although Mr. Bedward won, the amount of stress and strain the prolonged case had on him, as one can imagine, produced a breakdown in his health, necessitating a period in hospital suffering from complete exhaustion. He also incurred additional expense employing extra staff while he was opposing the case, for which, of course, he received no compensation.

My hon. and learned Friend the Minister of State may refer in his reply to other details that I have not mentioned, such as the fact that Mr. Bedward may have merited investigation initially because, when he applied to be registered for VAT, he did not understand that, as he was in partnership with his wife, her name should have been included on the form. That led to some administrative complications. My hon. and learned Friend may also refer to the fact that there were delays in the submission of Mr. Bedward's tax returns, which was due to his period of illness. However, I hope he will accept that those are details that are irrelevant to the very disturbing questions arising from the case which I wish to put to him.

Before I ask those questions, I should tell the House that the case of Mr. Bedward is not an isolated one. There was a remarkably similar case, involving the proprietor of the Double Luck Chinese restaurant in Wilmslow last year. Acting anonymously, VAT officers visited the premises and purchased meals. Using opera glasses and binoculars from a car park 100 yards away, they attempted to count the number of people taking meals in the restaurant, a check which the tribunal rejected as unreliable.

Undeterred, the VAT men attempted to find a formula which could be used to determine the turnover, based on the sizes of the portions of chips and rice that were served. Here again they fell into their own trap, because they miscalculated the weight ratio of uncooked rice to cooked rice. The method that they used when taking samples was an English method where the damp rice was strained and not the Chinese method where the rice was cooked dry, leaving no moisture to be strained. In that case, an underpayment of £11,000 was reduced to £3,500 and further reduced to £2,700. The tribunal found in favour of the restaurateur and criticised the commissioners on their judgment.

The experience of my constituent, Mr. Bedward, the Double Luck restaurant and other small self-employed business men at the hands of VAT officers poses a number of questions that I hope my hon. and learned Friend will answer when he replies.

My first question refers to the methods of investigation that were used. Here I might refer to what the chairman of the tribunal, the noble lord Lord Grantchester, said of Mr. Bedward, who is a Dunkirk veteran and served as an officer in the Coldstream Guards. The noble lord said:

"We hold that Mr. Bedward is a witness of truth."

If there is any truth whatever in Mr. Bedward's description, I hope that the new Government will review the Soviet-style methods of interrogation and subterfuge which, together with the power of breaking and entering which Her Majesty's tax inspectors acquired during the period of office of the last Government, constitute the hallmarks of a dictatorship.

Secondly, can we really permit a system which, in Mr. Bedward's case, allows an incredibly high assessment of £8,000—in other words, accusing Mr. Bedward of not declaring approximately £20,000 worth of turnover for his, if I may so describe it, modest restaurant—to end up by being reduced to a claim for less than £1,500? Is this not an attitude which is morally wrong, right from the start, based as it is on a threat? More- over, it was a claim based on such trivia as the amount of wastage on steak and the weight of carrots in a tin. What kind of basis is that for judgment? What kind of practical training and experience do VAT officers have in the day-to-day running of small businesses?

Is it a case of "If you cannot succeed, become a VAT man"? Even more seriously, how many small business men, when faced with a claim for assessment with which they do not agree, nevertheless pay up just to avoid the aggravation and considerable time, effort and expense involved in challenging Customs and Excise, which Mr. Bedward courageously did? Undoubtedly, he would have faced bankruptcy had his appeal gone against him. Therefore, what safeguards does my hon. and learned Friend propose?

Thirdly, there does not appear to be one hint of admission by Customs and Excise, in the light of the tribunal's findings, that it just might have been wrong in pursuing Mr. Bedward in the way that it did. There was absolutely no apology to Mr. Bedward, who, as I have said, had to employ additional staff during the case and who suffered a breakdown in health as a result of it. There must be an end to the attitude, which the last Socialist Government created and encouraged, that every business man is on the fiddle and that he must be guilty before he proves himself innocent.

Finally, I put the fundamental question. Is there any need for smaller businesses to be subjected to VAT registration which necessitates an army of inspectors to administer such bureaucratic controls? Is my hon. and learned Friend aware that if the tax threshold were raised to an annual turnover of £20,000, no fewer than 500,000 small businesses would be freed of the burdensome commitment of charging and administering VAT? According to a reply to a written question of mine on 31 January last year, the loss of revenue to the Exchequer would be a mere £40 million a year, which at £80 per business would be made up in no time at all through the additional taxation on the increased profits which small business men would produce as a result of the extra time and effort they would have available to get on with the job. Surely one of the clearest messages that came through in the recent general election campaign was the need to set the small business man free and to get the Government off his back.

I am grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Bournemouth, East (Mr. Atkinson) for raising this matter, since it affords an early opportunity in the life of this Government of going into a subject which, as he emphasised, touches on the more general problems of small businesses, in which, like my hon. Friend, I have a strong interest.

Before I deal with my hon. Friend's comments, it may be helpful, if a little trite, if I attempt to put the matter in some perspective. VAT is, of course, a self-assessed tax. That is to say, registered traders are required to declare once a quarter or once a month the tax they have paid to their suppliers and the tax they have charged to their customers, and to pay or reclaim the difference.

Customs and Excise has various means of checking the accuracy of these declarations, the most important being the visits to traders by prior appointment—I emphasise "prior appointment"—by local VAT officers to verify the accuracy of the traders' declarations. Where an officer has good reason to believe that a trader has under-declared his tax, he is empowered to make an assessment. I regret to say that the levels of under-declaration are often found to be considerable. In fact, an assessment is raised on one visit in every three, and the total amount of tax involved is of the order of £60 million a year.

But the visits by officers are not always painful, and I should like to reassure my hon. Friend on that. On over 10,000 visits a year they are able to tell the trader that he has over-declared his tax liability, and about £4 million is thus identified and repaid. This may come as a slight surprise to the public outside and possibly even to my hon. Friend, although I note that he takes an expert interest in these matters.

Where a trader does not accept an assessment, he can apply to the local VAT office to have it reviewed and where, as in the case of Mr. Bedward, regrettably an agreement cannot be reached, the trader has the opportunity of appealing to the independent VAT tribunal. In the last financial year just under 500 traders notified appeals to the tribunal, when the accuracy of the trader's declaration was in question, though the majority were withdrawn before the hearing. To give my hon. Friend a standard of comparison, the total number of assessments made was about 150,000. A total of 109 cases were heard and decided by the tribunal; 10 of these were allowed in full, admittedly; 27 were allowed in part, and in the remaining 72 cases the commissioners' assessment was upheld.

Turning now to the case mentioned by my hon. Friend, I do not think that it would be right or even productive at this stage to delve too deeply into the details of Mr. Bedward's business. The technical partnership point was, of course, commented on by the tribunal, and I certainly do not want to take up the time of the House and divert my hon. Friend's attention from the matters of substance which he has raised.

The tribunal found in Mr. Bedward's favour and awarded costs. I hope that Mr. Bedward will accept this as a full vindication of his integrity. But the tribunal found—it is right that I should emphasise this—no cause to criticise the officers' actions in making the assessment in the first place or in the subsequent negotiations which led to a considerable reduction in the amount originally assessed, which was a point on which my hon. Friend rightly touched. Indeed, what emerges from the judgment is that the tribunal specifically identified some of the difficulties with which the officers were faced in trying to establish what were the correct amounts of tax involved. It explains, I hope, the original large estimated assessment which was raised in the first place.

I hope, though, as I have emphasised, that Mr. Bedward will accept the decision as vindicating his integrity, and, indeed, there was the specific finding that he was found to be a witness of truth. I am glad about that, of course.

There is always, of course, an element of high farce when the number of carrots in a tin, the weight of uncooked rice or the number of prawns in a vol-au-vent case have to be canvassed in an inquiry or a court. But it should be appreciated that this House has placed on VAT officers the often difficult and delicate duty of trying to establish the true liability when faced with an apparent under-declaration of tax. Obviously, in the case of a business buying and selling goods, it may be possible to check the level of declared takings by reference to the value of purchases, with adjustments for profit margins and for such variables as stock changes, special offers and wastage. However, restaurants present special difficulties in that there is no simple relationship between the value of food purchased and the value of meals sold.

It is sometimes necessary for the officers to undertake observations or what is charmingly described as test eating—no doubt a pleasurable activity in the case of Mr. Bedward's restaurant. I emphasise that we have not been able to identify any claim for expenses by officers of the Poole area, so I hope that my hon. Friend will accept that no visits were made, at any rate, in the course of duty. They may well have been drawn by the reputation of Mr. Bedward's restaurant so that they went there in out-of-duty hours, but that is hardly a matter of which, I am sure, Mr. Bedward or my hon. Friend would want to complain.

I emphasise that I shall wish to be satisfied that such activities are kept to a minimum and are used only where strictly necessary. I am happy to tell my hon. Friend that I find that as a result of the commissioners' review of this case and the Double Luck case to which my hon. Friend referred, the Customs and Excise has already tightened its instructions to its staff on these matters. Therefore, I hope that my hon. Friend will detect a perceptible improvement in the months to come.

I am particularly sorry that this special inquiry coincided with a period of ill health for Mr. Bedward. I recognise the great service which he gave to his country in the last war, in a very distinguished regiment, and I hope that he is now completely recovered.

The verification of restaurant declarations is clearly a difficult area; but the Department has had a number of successful investigations in this field. It would clearly be wrong for the commissioners, with their responsibility for the care and management of the tax and for protecting the interests of honest traders and taxpayers generally, simply to ignore the possibility of evasion because of the complications involved.

Allegations are made, and regrettably will probably continue to be made, that VAT officers have misused their powers and intimidated traders or acted without due consideration. It is perhaps too much to expect that every single officer always behaves correctly. Indeed I have in the past complained about officers' activities. In all fairness, however, the overall position is good and each complaint made is thoroughly investigated. There is a complaints mechanism which traders are encouraged to use, and their attention was drawn to that in VAT News number 9. In the last resort, it is always open to a trader to have his complaint investigated by the Ombudsman.

The commissioners are most concerned to ensure that nothing is done to damage relationships with the trading community and paid particular attention to that in their review of the administration of the tax last year, the report of which was presented to this House last December. I was surprised to learn from the report that since the introduction of VAT in April 1973 only 30 cases concerning the tax had been investigated by the Parliamentary Commissioner for Administration, and that in less than one-third of the cases so far reported on has any degree of maladministration been found. That is surely not an unsatisfactory record given that in the same period some 2 million visits have been paid by VAT officers to registered traders.

I am sorry that Mr. Bedward continues to feel that he was harshly treated by the officers concerned. I can assure him through my hon. Friend the Member for Bournemouth, East that their activities were afterwards thoroughly investigated by senior officials. All the papers in the case were carefully examined personally by the chairman of the board of Customs and Excise.

I would be deceiving myself and attempting to deceive the House if I pretended that the collection of a tax such as VAT can be popular. A balance has to be struck between economy and efficiency of collection on the one hand and the convenience of the taxpayer on the other, between the too enthusiastic pursuit of the tax evader and the need to safeguard the country's revenues.

It would be wrong for me in the early days of this Administration to suggest that I am satisfied or, indeed, dissatisfied that the correct balance has been found. I can, however, assure my hon. Friend that I will make it my concern to see that VAT procedures interfere with legitimate business practices no more than is consistent with the need to assess and collect the tax in an effective and economical manner. We have promised to assist small businesses and in that context to undertake a thorough review of the enforcement procedures of Customs and Excise and the Inland Revenue.

Regarding the tax threshold, I am deeply aware of the considerations that my hon. Friend has drawn to the attention of the House, and we debated them on the Finance Bill as recently as last year. I am sure that my hon. Friend will understand the conventions and not expect me to anticipate my right hon. and learned Friend's Budget Statement. One person in six on the VAT register is entitled to deregister if so desired. Presumably because of the balance of convenience and advantage, we may infer that they have chosen not to do so.

My hon. Friend has done a service by raising these problems in the context of the case of Mr. Bedward, and to a degree the Double Luck restaurant, so early in this Parliament, and I can assure him that his comments and criticisms will not pass unnoticed or unconsidered.

It is a great honour for me to have been able to address the House, however sparsely attended it may be, twice in one week. I wish to raise the question of private medicine, particularly in relation to the the National Health Service.

It cannot be forgotten that my party won the last general election on a programme, endorsed by the people, of three freedoms—the right of people living in public housing to buy their homes, that those in State education should have a choice, and that those who endured ill health should, if they desired, be able to contribute to, and benefit from, private medicine within the National Health Service.

The programme was laid out clearly and was endorsed by the people in the greatest plurality of the voters that this country has seen in my lifetime. We have now come up against a great principle, namely, whether this House and Parliament shall decide who runs a service or whether those who work for the service decide who runs it.

A rather odious person, who is a carpenter-cum-builder-cum-baker-cum-nothing, has said—I shall not use his exact words—that every rich illegitimate who is in a pay bed from 1 January next will not get the service which this House has laid down over the past 33 years, through periods of Labour and Conservative Governments, is the people's right. It is important for the new Government to make clear where they stand on that issue.

There are certain matters open for negotiation and some problems that are matters of administration, but on the principle of who rules and whether the voice of the people, through Parliament, or the voice of a union and a few petty tyrants, which is often not the voice of its members, is to decide who is allowed what, I hope that the Minister will say loudly and clearly and without equivocation that the House, representing the people, will decide what happens in the lawful running of our country.

On 30 April 1946, Aneurin Bevan, who was not a noted Conservative, and was not even a noted middle-of-the-road Socialist but was one of the full-blooded Socialists who built the Socialist Party that we have today, made clear that although he might not approve of fee-paying patients and although he criticised some of the philosophy behind private medicine, he believed that it was right to keep doctors and specialists within the NHS so that the country could have a good and rounded service.

Less than a month later, Mr. Bevan said that the more time that a specialist spent in hospital, the better it would be for all concerned. He said:

"I would encourage the specialist to have as much consultation in the hospital as possible. I do not want him to go to his surgery; I want him to be there on the spot and to see the people in the hospital. It would be disastrous if, as a consequence of not accepting this principle, there grew up in Great Britain a rash of nursing homes, where the specialist would be intellectually isolating himself".—[Official Report, Standing Committee C, 21 May 1946; c. 1155.]

Not all doctors wish to be in private medicine, but they wish to have the right, the privilege and the freedom to choose. Choice is what all our freedoms are about. Yet that little man Geddes says that the hand of the private patients is throttling the NHS. What utter rubbish it is! About 1 per cent. of the beds in all our hospitals are occupied by private patients, but they are contributing about £40 million towards the NHS.

There are people who purport to speak for egalitarianism and the freedom of the so-called little man. All that they are really doing is speaking up for a principle of envy and malice. They do not really care about the individual that they purport to speak for. All that they wish to make sure of is that everyone has an equality of misery.

The NHS, which most people in their right minds would wish to see strengthened and further advanced, believes that the right to choose is one of the greatest benefits that the House can give people. Private patients are not rich illegitimates, as Mr. Geddes called them. They are people like myself and 2,800,000 others who pay out of income taxed at exorbitant rates in case they fall ill. I pay about £200 a year so that my wife and family, all my loved ones, and I can be treated if we strike times of physical handicap. Does that make one a rich illegitimate? I think not. It makes one prudent. One does this in the same way as one insures one's car through the AA or the RAC. Why not stop that?

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

No. What we pay is a premium to protect ourselves against what may befall us. We insure our houses against being burnt down on the same principle.

I hope that the Government will state firmly and clearly that they support the principle that we advanced in the election, that Nye Bevan put forward and that was put forward by a Select Committee, chaired, I believe, by the hon. Member for Wolverhampton, North-East (Mrs. Short). That principle is that there is a balance of advantage in favour of the present arrangements for the provision of some facilities for private patients alongside those for National Health Service patients.

Doctors have their rights. Are we and they to accept Mr. Geddes' principle that he and other NUPE people will decide who can be treated, as happened during those odious goings-on in October and November when they decided who was ill and who could be treated and who could have X-rays? They, the non-medical trade, decided who were sick and who needed help.

I hope that the time has come when the House will make clear to all concerned that it is those who are elected to serve the people in the round, in this Chamber, who will decide who runs what. Then, if people who work for the NHS but think that the NHS works for them do not like what the House decides on behalf of the people, they have the same wonderful freedom as we all have. Mr. Geddes can go back to being the poor baker that I believe he was or to being a carpenter wherever he wishes to be.

Whether the House is controlled by the Labour Party or the Conservative Party is irrelevant. It is elected by the people in their wisdom, or their lack of wisdom, to determine who runs what. I say as a Back-Bench Member, albeit newly elected, that there can be no compromise on who runs the Health Service. The people have decided. The private health service within the National Health Service must be allowed not only to survive but to thrive, because the money would do good for the National Health Service.

The freedom within the private health service will help to keep the doctors and the best of the specialists within this country instead of driving them overseas. But, in the end, the freedom of our people is enshrined here. It is not enshrined within the NUPE conference or in the mouthings of some man who cannot even do properly the job that he was selected and paid to do.

I hope, therefore, that the Minister will make clear that it is not a matter for negotiation but it is a matter of fact that private medicine within the National Health Service will not just survive but will thrive.

rose—

Has the hon. Member the Minister's permission to intervene in the debate?

indicated assent.

I believe that the Minister will allow me a moment to intervene. The hon. Member for Birmingham, Selly Oak (Mr. Beaumont-Dark) is obviously a man of Great tolerance and understanding, but I wish to query one matter with the Minister.

When talking about the whole funding of the National Health Service, will the Minister make clear that many people do not object to private medicine as long as it is economically maintained outside the National Health Service? We on these Benches will not accept that the facilities of the National Health Service should be used by those who have the money to pay for them and to queue-jump over those who are in urgent need of treatment. Will the Minister make clear that it is the Government's intention, whatever their views, to make sure that need is the most important criterion in the National Health Service?

I should like to thank my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Selly Oak (Mr. Beaumont-Dark) for raising an important subject. I am glad that the hon. Member for Crewe (Mrs. Dunwoody) was able to join in for a moment and make her point. I have followed carefully what my hon. Friend the Member for Selly Oak said. It is clear that we have a common objective and a common goal to see that the conflict which grew up between the National Health Service and the private sector, especially in the last few years under the previous Administration, is resolved as soon as possible. This can do no good to either sector.

As the hon. Member for Crewe will know, the Government have strong views that the two sectors working together can be to their mutual advantage and not to their disadvantage. My hon. Friend the Member for Selly Oak will understand that, as a new Minister, I do not entirely agree with every point he made. He said that important and delicate issues were involved and that it was important that there should be consultations. He will understand that I wish to have full discussions with the various people concerned before we dive in with lots of specific proposals which may or may not be satisfactory for those who have to carry them out. I followed carefully what he said. He seems to have some doubts about what we shall do—some lack of confidence in the new Government. Why should he have these doubts? I want to reassure him.

Our commitments and our intentions in this sphere are clear. We intend to restore the vitality of and improve the health care in this country provided by the National Health Service. That is a clear commitment. We intend to do this both in the National Health sector and also in the private sector. It will not be easy, and it will take a little time.

In our manifesto we were quite clear. We said that National Health Service standards were falling. We know this at first hand. We know how desperate the situation is in many parts of the country. My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State and I have made it our job not just to read papers but to visit many parts of the country to see for ourselves the conditions in both the National Health Service and the private sector. We have gone to both because we see the two as collaborators in providing health care. We do not see them as working in separate compartments. Under our Administration, we see them working more closely together.

We also said in our manifesto that too often patient needs did not come first. I am afraid that is so. Far too often under the previous Administration the care of patients did not appear to be the first consideration when decisions were being made. We shall change that, but it will take a little time. Waiting lists, for example, have risen to the most appalling level. They stand at just on 750,000 and might be even higher if the full figures were known. That is a dreadful and deplorable state of affairs. In terms of personal suffering, pain and anxiety, that situation cannot go on. It will be one of our top priorities.

In our manifesto we said:

"It it not our intention to reduce spending on the Health Service; indeed, we intend to make better use of what resources are available. So we will simplify and decentralise the service and cut back bureaucracy."

Over and over again during the election, we were told that Conservatives would cut spending on health. That is not true. It is totally false, but it was used in the election to try to discredit us. We wish to raise, not lower, standards in health care. We are pledged to a National Health Service available to everybody who wishes to use it—at the time of need and irrespective of their financial position.

Before making major changes, it seems to us common sense that we should wait for the recommendations of the Royal Commission. We expect the Royal Commission to report very soon. But make no mistake, we are committed to restoring authority and control to the local level to bring it back more closely in touch with the real needs of patients. That is one reason why we are so sympathetic to the retention of small hospitals, wherever this is possible.

However, already we are running into some legal difficulties. We are stopping the appalling lack of decision and the drift which went on under the Labour Government. I am amazed and appalled at the number of decisions coming to me which seem to have drifted on for no clear reason for years. One was brought to me today which was unresolved for four years, yet all the information is there and all it needs is a decision.

So we see the need to restore greater professional freedom so that skills can once again be used without a mass of bureaucracy interfering. We should like to see nurses and other staff much more able to practise their skills in the way they were trained to do.

Is the Minister suggesting that the clinical judgment of doctors was interfered with under the previous Administration? I should have thought that he would have found that extremely unlikely.

No. I am saying that, if one has to work in a stressful and demanding role in life with a welter of committees and directives of various kinds, it cannot be good. It distracts and leads one off into side issues which are not always relevant to the care of patients We shall aim to free the professional groups from that.

We see the private sector and the community playing an important part together in developing ways of improving health care and the National Health Service. We hope that the raising of funds for the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson hospital by an appeal will be only one example of stopping the indecision which has gone on and will enable valuable parts of the NHS to continue to run in a satisfactory way. We hope that will become a model for other joint developments in the NHS.

Charity funding?

Turning again to our manifesto, we said:

"When resources are so tightly stretched it is folly to turn good money away from the NHS and to discourage people from doing more for themselves. We shall therefore allow pay-beds to be provided where there is a demand for them; end Labour's vendetta against the private health sector; and restore tax relief on employer-employee medical insurance schemes."

We shall honour those commitments.

My hon. Friend the Member for Selly Oak will have seen the reference to a Bill in the Gracious Speech. This will be presented as soon as our consultations are completed. Meanwhile, until a new Bill is introduced, we are in an unavoidable legal difficulty under the present Act.

It is important that we should realise that the Health Services Board is required legally to continue its activities. My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State has discussed this matter with its chairman, Lord Wigoder. Only yesterday, he wrote to Lord Wigoder. This is an important letter. Therefore, hon. Members will understand if I read three paragraphs in full. My right hon. Friend wrote:

"I have now laid before Parliament the Board's latest proposals for the revocation of a further 49 section 65 authorisations. The proposals will be published shortly."

He has laid 49 revocation proposals before Parliament.

"We spoke about the possibility of the Health Services Board not making further revocation proposals in anticipation of the Government's commitment to repeal the Board's powers to make such proposals.

I recognise that the Board operates independently of the Secretary of State and has statutory duties which it must fulfil until such time as the Act is repealed. I believe the legislation allows the Board some discretion in the effective timing and extent of the exercise of its powers of proposing revocations and I hope the Board will feel able to take account of the Government's intentions in the interests of avoiding unnecessary difficulty for the NHS."

I hope that the Health Services Board will be able to modify its activities a little in the light of that important letter from the Secretary of State. It would be foolish if we and the Board went ahead with changes which we all knew not to be in the best interests of the service.

I should like to go on a little further. We are discussing an important part of our Health Service. For example, in 1977 2¼ million people—that is, more than 4 per cent. of the population—were covered by private medical insurance of various kinds. Three-quarters of them were members of group schemes. Although I do not have more up-to-date figures than those, we know that the proportion has been increasing steadily recently. At that time, the total subscription income for the major private insurance schemes was £86 million a year. That is a considerable sum. We do not have precise information about the total expenditure on private medical care. However, in 1976 it was thought that this was more than £134 million a year. It seems certain that that figure would be higher today.

There are about 30,000 beds in 1,100 private nursing homes and hospitals, of which about 5,000 beds are registered for surgery. The Nuffield Nursing Homes Trust forms one of the largest single groups of private acute hospital beds in the country. It is interesting that whereas in 1970 it had 493 beds, by 1978 it had more than 1,000. I have more detail about these aspects of health care which I can make available to those hon. Members who are interested.

The proposed new private sector acute beds notified to the Health Service Board under the 1976 Act total about 2,000 at the moment. Many of those will not actually see the light of day. However, that gives some idea of the extent of the demand. We are discussing a significant part of the country's services.

I believe strongly that the encouragement of private medicine is in the interests not of a select few people but of every- body, including those who rely—and who will probably always rely—on the National Health Service. We know that we are not discussing buying a car or a pair of shoes, when we may decide whether we shall or shall not buy. We are discussing how sick people get their care, which they must have anyway if they are to be looked after properly. We are clear that every penny spent in the private sector releases a penny in the National Health Service sector, which may then be spent on areas which need it desperately, such as children, the mentally sick and care of the elderly.

The issue of private medicine versus the National Health Service is a sad feature of the past few years. It caused a great deal of unrest. It has done a great deal of harm to the National Health Service. In particular, it damaged relationships between different groups of staff in an area in which good relationships were of the utmost importance. Those who oppose private medicine and believe that it should be driven out from the National Health Service are mistaken. Even more mistaken are those who go further and demand that it should somehow be banned altogether.

Private medicine is not a threat to the existence and quality of the NHS, nor is it contrary to the principles on which the Health Service is based. I believe that a great deal of the recent unrest could have been avoided by the previous Government. Instead of adopting doctrinaire policies and forcing measures through regardless of the consequences to the NHS, thereby denying the service very large sums amounting, at the moment, to between £26 million and £30 million, they should have taken the trouble to look properly at the relationships between private medicine and the National Health Service. Had they done that, they would have found that private medicine can help the NHS. I submit that the previous Government's energies would have been much better spent in understanding and developing this relationship than in driving private medicine from the National Health Service and turning their back on what the private sector had to offer.

How does the Minister reconcile his statement about growing waiting lists and the lengths of time that people have to wait with his suggestion that private pay beds are in no way detrimental to those who use the NHS? Why do people in this country not pay the same insurance for health care as is paid in America if, as the Minister suggests, they are paying an economic rate here?

I think that the hon. Lady has missed the point. She should look at some other countries where there are no major waiting lists. She should consider why, of all countries in Western Europe, we have the longest and most rapidly growing waiting lists.

Ask the consultants.

These are the questions that the hon. Lady should be considering. I suggest that the previous Government's policy had precisely the reverse effect to what they intended. It created a split between the National Health Service and the private sector which has done the NHS great harm. In addition, they achieved what they did not want but which I welcome—the development of the private sector. I do not believe that the conflict was necessary, and I shall do my best to undo all the damage that has been done.

Our aim as a Government will be to improve the nation's health services—that is, the whole health care of the nation. The only way to achieve that when resources are limited is to take advantage of all available resources. By that I mean not only improving the National Health Service but developing collaborative schemes between the private and State sectors.

It will not be easy to repair the damage that has been done over the past few years. Let no one think that I underestimate the difficulty we shall have in persuading some of the Health Service unions that there is a legitimate and advantageous place for the private sector, working alongside, with and in the National Health Service. We should like to secure co-operation from all those concerned. We hope that as a result of the consultations which are now beginning to take place, we shall overcome the prejudices and fears which underlie the sort of provocative remarks to which I think my hon. Friend the Member for Selly Oak was referring and the hostile attitudes that we heard from some quarters earlier this week.

I do not believe that those views are representative of the National Health Service staffs as a whole. I shall do all I can to persuade everyone working in the NHS and in health care generally that private medicine is not a bogy that has to be phased out and got rid of but that, properly handled, it will benefit the health care of us all.

This is the last debate before the recess, and I apologise to my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary of State, whom I welcome to the Front Bench, for delaying his departure. I know that he is far too conscientious to be planning a holiday. However, getting away from this place will help to clear his mind and will allow him to dwell on some of the important issues that face his Department.

What is it like to live on the vast soulless council estates that can be seen on the peripheries of our major towns and cities, and what must we do to make life more bearable for those who occupy them? If my hon. Friend is not to take a holiday, I am sure that he will dwell on that question over the recess.

Rightly, there has been concern about high-rise blocks that lurk in many council estates. They are dreadful buildings and they do dreadful things to people. They isolate and insulate them from one another and do untold damage to generations of young children who are brought up in them.

My hon. Friend may spend time reflecting on the damage that State dependency has done to generations compelled to live in public housing. He will conclude that Socialist philosophy that the State knows best has been dramatically disproved by the very existence of high-rise blocks. They have been rejected by those who live in them, who will do anything to get out of them. If living proof is needed of the misery created by Socialism, it is to be found among those who live in the twilight zones of our cities.

What of the vast estates that do not have high-rise blocks? They have a problem that I believe is far worse. These are the estates that have low rise but high density. They have spine blocks or cluster blocks. The last thing that the tenants wish to do is to buy their homes. More and more are talking about blowing up their estates rather than buying their homes.

Phrases such as "high rise" and "inner city" are now well into the urban malaise terminology, yet for all the concern that has been expressed on both sides of the House about our cities' problems, and in spite of the £100 million that has been spent on research since 1968 specifically on tackling urban squalor, there is little evidence of improvements.

The advent of council housing on an enormous scale has brought with it a new type of bureaucracy. Planners, advisers, architects, a plethora of civil servants, maintenance men and inspectors are all employed in the public sector. They have been responsible for the buildings, yet the buildings have become worse and tenants have become more miserable. Regardless of the shape or size, and regardless of whether they are low or high density, the cost yardstick, or Parker Morris standards, have been applied. We now have more dissatisfied people living in units of public housing than any other European country. That is why the Conservatives made council housing a central issue in the election campaign and why we shall sell as many houses as we can to sitting tenants in the hope that that will start to create change.

I shall refer to the estates on the edges of many of our towns and cities, but especially to those in the North-West and in Liverpool which were built on the former green field sites, when the inner city slums were demolished. The most recent of those built in the past decade are in areas known as Belle Vale and Netherley. The former is in my constituency and the latter is in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, Garston (Mr. Thornton).

Belle Vale has what have become and what are known as odious spine blocks, while Netherley has cluster blocks. The Belle Vale estate was designed by an experienced firm of architects in about 1970. It has won design award after design award since then. What were the architects after? The quality of the fabric that they used was up to standard. However, they did not appear to be planning homes for people to live in. They cannot claim that what they produced possibly makes up a good community or creates a caring neighbourhood. Was their brief to build transit camps or shelters, for that is what they have created? Many of the tenants feel ashamed to name their estate as the place in which they live.

What is it that makes the estates so dreadful? It is not so much the shadow of the spine blocks that looms over the whole of the estate, nor the density of the housing, but the total absence of space for children to play, the absence of trees, grass, shrubs or plants, the absence of playgrounds, play space, shops, community centres and youth clubs. There is not even a hall in which people may meet. Approximately 3,000 adults live in Belle Vale estate and about 5,000 young children. Some say that it has the highest child population on any estate in Europe. The majority of those children are under the age of 18.

The families living on that estate feel that they have been sentenced by the housing department to a spell in the spine blocks as a kind of punishment. The planners also made sure that, once they got families into these spine blocks, they would have difficulty getting out. They were built six storeys high, with narrow flights of stairs which make it virtually impossible for a young mother, with her shopping, pushchair and children, to get up and down to and from her flat. For that reason young children are kept indoors.

Not surprisingly, when the children get outside they feel pent up and angry. The young vandals at Belle Vale are those who are rebelling against the inhuman conditions in which they are forced to live. They are showing the public housing authority, in their own way, how much they loathe and detest the circumstances in which they are compelled to survive.

The level of vandalism, the House will not be surprised to hear, is enormous. The estate looks as though it has suffered from successive bomb blasts at every corner. There is a thin film of glass covering every street and roadway from the shattered glass caused by vandalism of the windows in the homes on the estate. When I was last on the estate, a few weeks ago, I think that approximately one in three of the flats had broken windows or was completely boarded up—and this estate is but seven or eight years old.

If this is not a place for the young, neither is it a place for the old. The planners were concerned to make sure that life would be miserable for the old as well as the young, so that they could spend the remaining days of their lives suffering from incessant noise caused by young families overhead. That is why the old people's homes were placed under the spine blocks, so that they could get the full brunt of badly insulated floors.

The noise is deafening when one is on the ground floor in these specially built old people's flats underneath the spine blocks. That is not all that they have to suffer. They especially suffer from the insults and abuse hurled at them by gangs of young thugs. They are subjected to every known vulgarity and humiliation by groups which congregate around their flats and jeer and taunt them. If the old people venture outside, they must be careful not to be struck by the never-ending rubbish thrown from windows high up in the spine blocks. Shoes, tables and television sets have all found their way into the small compounds at the bottom of the spine blocks where the elderly live.

There is now litter which is knee deep in places. The rubbish containers, some four or five feet high at the end of the spine block chutes down which people living in the spine block flats send their rubbish, are usually smouldering because children have set light to them. The smell of charred paper and burning rubbish pervades the whole estate when the wind blows in a particular direction.

The underground car parks under the spine blocks were skilfully designed with massive iron bars and gates to protect them from the people living there. Even these are now empty. The reason is clear. Those who left their cars there have learned what happens to them. Like vultures, the gangs descend, take the cars to bits and within a few days only the sh of the cars are left. They are to en there today.

There is also a problem of damp on the estate. It is not damp from outside but damp from inside, which cannot get out. I have heard that conditions are so bad that some families are starting to mushroom-farm on their walls. Some of the rooms are so badly affected that they cannot be used at all.

This is an estate which won architectural awards only a few years ago. This is public housing which the State has paid to have built. The people living there are those who have been placed there by the public authority and who have nowhere else to live. They are people often at the end of their tether, who were placed there because they could find no other accommodation.

It is for this reason that I believe that the Minister faces a special responsibility. No matter whether it was a Labour or a Conservative Administration who built these spine blocks all over the country—no matter which party is responsible—I now fear that he has a special responsibility to deal with them, because there are special problems which cannot be coped with by the local councils.

Residents on the Belle Vale estate have done their best to mitigate and alleviate the situation. There is an active residents' association, which has fought for improvements year after year and has done a splendid job. There is a remarkable vicar, the Rev. Neil Coslett of St. Mark's church, who has campaigned year after year to get improvements for the people living there. But quite clearly the problems which the residents and the three Conservative councillors in the area have faced have been too daunting for anyone to tackle at a local level.

Some say that estates such as Belle Vale are not homes fit for heroes but that at least they are better than slums which lack basic amenities and which were formerly placed in the inner city areas. However, I am convinced that this is not so. The new slums are more sinister, for although they provide shelter they can never provide a community or neighbourhood. They offer a psychological oppression aimed at breaking down the spirits of the people living there rather than giving them new hope of a home and a family. That is a new dimension in these estates.

As a result of this oppression in the area, it is not surprising that there is a widespread use of drugs. The use of tranquillisers, particularly among young mothers who find the stress and strain of living there too great, has become commonplace. The social services are inundated with families that cannot cope.

Not surprisingly, the estate provides a fertile ground for rearing adults who are less able, more unhappy, more unbalanced, who in turn form less stable relationships as adults and who produce disturbed and unfulfilled children of their own. This is the cycle of deprivation to which my right hon. Friend the Member for Leeds, North-East (Sir K. Joseph), when Secretary of State for Social Services, referred and in which he invested nearly £500,000 of taxpayers' money on research. I am waiting, as I am sure is the House, for the results of that research. I fear that all these problems are still going on, yet we have not yet heard what that research says.

The social cost to society of this estate and others like it, let alone the financial cost of building and servicing, is quite astronomical. No one willingly stays on Belle Vale. More and more flats remain empty for longer periods, because no one wants to move into them. Once the flats are empty, they get boarded up. But the vandals still break in. It is not just the young who are ripping out the plumbing, tearing out the light fittings and removing the doors. But, as a result of that action, pensioners wake up in the morning to find water pouring through their ceilings as the water leaks from the plumbing which has been torn out on the top floor of the spine block. The old people at the bottom of the spine blocks merely wait day by day for the next catastrophe.

As the estate gets worse and the housing deteriorates, only the hardest pressed will accept living there. This increasingly means that those with a criminal element congregate there. Attempts by the city council to put young families alongside have been as disastrous as its policy towards forcing a mix through neighbourhood comprehensive schooling. It is a new kind of peacetime concentration camp, from which everyone dreams of escaping but which few do. It is no exaggeration to say that it is the sort of misery which illustrates the squalor of life. For many decent young couples and older people, life there is a continual nightmare. That is why I ask my hon. Friend today to do something about it. He needs powers, first of all, to ban the building of any such vast estate ever again. It should be something of the past. Belle Vale should be the last housing disaster area ever built. But that is not quite enough. I believe that the Minister must do something about the estates that are there and not just prevent local authorities building anything like them.

The past five years have seen the city council concerned about Belle Vale and many similar estates. It has had meeting after meeting. It has tried to deal with the tenants' complaints. It has tried to halt the mass exodus. It has tried to stop the decline and depression of the area. But it has failed to do so.

At this stage, I must give credit to the hon. Member for Liverpool, Edge Hill (Mr. Alton)—whom I cannot see in his place—who is now chairman of the Liverpool housing committee. He set up a working party to consider the problems of spine blocks and cluster blocks and the cost of selective demolition. I say that I am sorry that he is not in the Chamber, because the Minister may remember that just before the general election the hon. Member was deploring in the national newspapers the absence of hon. Members from the Chamber on Fridays. He has obviously caught this disease, along with most other hon. Members. I am sorry that he has not found time to come here today. However, he has contributed to this important field and it is significant that his working party is looking at the selective demolition of council housing of the kind that I have described at Belle Vale.

I know the arguments against pulling down this disastrous housing. In the Belle Vale case, the argument is that there is a 50-year loan charge still to pay, and Belle Vale, as I have said, is only nine years old. It is said that it is just not possible to pull down the estate when there is so much money still to be paid off. However, perhaps the Minister could ask the Government actuaries to do some arithmetic over the recess as to what is the likely cost to society, what are the effects on families who are currently living in Belle Vale, and how much money will be spent, for example, on special schooling for children there, special health care and unemployment benefits. As the Minister knows, it costs nearly £5,000 a year to keep one young person in a community home and an equal sum to keep a child in a children's home. There are tranquillisers, bad health from the damp, and all the repairs that will need to be done.

I am quite convinced that in sheer cash terms it would be a much greater cost to keep that estate up for another 30, 40 or 50 years than to pull down the most oppressive spine blocks in which no one wants to live. This is not just a cash equation. It is also a social equation. The Government have a social responsibility, and not just a financial one, if they want to prevent a violent and dissatisfied younger generation from being brought up on this estate.

I have spoken with some feeling about the horrors of this particular aspect. I have been concerned about the conditions ever since it was built. I have seen it deteriorate. I have seen the people on it deteriorate and become more unhappy. This is one estate of many all over the country which has these spine blocks or cluster blocks. It is a new phenomenon. We have been through the high rise era. We are now moving into the spine block and cluster block era.

I hope that the Minister will today tell the House that he will not offer platitudes. I am not blaming him for this estate. I am just telling him about it. I hope that he will give real hope to those who live there, many of whom have given up in despair of anything ever being done. Only the most extreme action will result in an improvement, and unless the Minister has the worst parts of this estate pulled down there will not be an improvement at all because there will not be the space and the opportunities to put right what successive Governments and councils have allowed to continue unchanged.

I am grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, Wavertree (Mr. Steen) for welcoming me to this Dispatch Box. I shall do my best to justify his kind remarks. I have listened with close and sympathetic attention to the plight of the tenants about whom he spoke and the horrifying conditions under which they live. He has drawn on a great deal of local knowledge and proposed some trenchant remedies to the problems in Liverpool. That city is lucky to have such a dedicated champion.

It will be a major challenge for housing managers and local housing committees over the next 10 or 20 years to work out the best use for some of the architectural, shall I call them, creations of the last decade. Too often the deck access schemes, high rise towers, spine blocks and cluster blocks referred to by my hon. Friend were put up without any effort to consult the housing officers who have to maintain them or, perhaps more important, the tenants who have to occupy them. That is why we find so many council estates where the environment is inadequate and maintenance has fallen far behind. The approach would have been totally different if these estates had been built for the open market. A private developer would have been much more alert to what the customer wanted, whereas local authorities seem all too often to overlook the desires of their tenants.

I shall not comment in detail on the Belle Vale situation. If the local authority is proposing measures requiring decisions by my Department, I must be cautious in what I say today. Any approach by the local authority will be dealt with quickly, sympathetically and carefully.

My hon. Friend's remarks also concerned general housing management. We cannot expect tenants to be ready to share the responsibility for improving conditions unless we recognise that they have a point of view about what should be done. That applies not just to Belle Vale but to many other council estates that I can think of. Where the tenants have no voice in decisions about their estates, they will understandably regard the housing department as remote and impersonal. In that climate vandalism and crime are bound to flourish.

Will my hon. Friend invite the Liverpool city council housing department to submit evidence to him on the merits of selected demolition of parts of Belle Vale and possibly ask for his help?

If the Liverpool authority is able to elect a chairman for the appropriate commitee, I shall be delighted to see any submissions, but it must first put its own house in order and consider Belle Vale and other estates for which it is responsible.

Our commitment to introducing a tenants' charter is intended to alleviate some of the problems, but it will not bring an immediate solution to the problems of Belle Vale. In the first instance, that is for the authorities in Liverpool to grapple with. I repeat, however, that I shall look at whatever those authorities may send me.

The introduction of a tenants' charter will provide a new framework. Council tenants will have a clear and comprehensive set of rights and can express their personalities and share in the responsibility for their future. That is in stark contrast to the way that most Socialist councils treat their tenants, as mere voting serfs. Those days should be long over, and we will try to put an end to that.

There is no future in pouring in resources to improve or maintain estates if the tenants do not take an interest and contribute practical, voluntary support. My hon. Friend said that there was some degree of involvement, but the position is so disheartening that it is not the sort that we would like to see.

It must be obvious to tenants that play areas and community centres, for example, are the top priority. If the authority is spending its resources on something less important, they are bound to feel aggrieved It may not be a matter of resources. If there are disproportionate numbers of children or young thugs causing annoyance on estates, the housing allocation policy may need reviewing. My Department has provided factual guidance on allocation policies through the housing services advisory group. I hope that our tenants' charter will be used in a flexible and constructive spirit in bringing about an improvement for all who wish to remain as council tenants.

I said earlier that the immediate problems are for Liverpool itself. Where there is a question of demolition, that must be for the local authority to decide. However, an estate such as Belle Vale must represent a substantial capital investment which has only just begun to be paid off, and if my Department were asked to consider whether housing subsidy should continue to be paid after demolition I am certain that we would want to know that the possible alternatives had been fully explored. I shall ask my Department and the Government actuaries, or whoever is responsible, to take on board my hon. Friend's idea of a more positive cost benefit analysis which is not related just to the cost of bricks and mortar.

The problem is that not just my hon. Friend's Department is involved. The Department of Health and Social Security and the Home Office pay the bills for various items involved in the situation at Belle Vale. It is not just one purse but three or four or more, and that is why I ask my hon. Friend to involve other Departments in the exercise.

My hon. Friend makes long speeches and I have heard him make superb long speeches in Committee. I am trying not to give him platitudes and I have one or two ideas to put forward. It may be that the clock will beat me, but I will try to give him details of one or two of the ideas that we are considering.

We are doing a lot of work on social problems. We have had detailed case studies carried out on a number of problem estates, including one at Netherley. They have just been completed and they bring out clearly the importance of involving and consulting tenants at all stages. We have organised regional seminars to convey these findings to housing managers and local councillors.

My hon. Friend may feel, as I do, that action is more urgent than research findings, however practically oriented. I have explained, however, that in relation to Belle Vale he has to look to the authority. My Department is always prepared to help in working out the best combinations of practical measures to improve rundown estates. It is also prepared to offer advice based on the experience of housing authorities which have successfully reversed the environmental and social decline on their estates. We are now taking that a stage further. My Department is considering starting up in collaboration with local authorities three experimental projects in housing estate management.

We are going to look for the most effective ways of managing estates, with an eye to the human and social problems mentioned by my hon. Friend, and I expect allocation policies, better maintenance and community facilities to play an important part. The balance between these and other items in the projects will no doubt depend on the local situation, including tenants' own views on priorities. The projects will act as pilot demonstrations of the policies that I have outlined. At that stage, we would try to involve any other Departments that appeared to have a direct interest.

Some authorities have begun to try out new approaches to their least-attractive estates. The Conservative-controlled Greater London Council, for example, has reduced the density of lettings, provided accommodation for youth leaders, and strengthened the liaison with tenants' associations. It has also introduced measures to give tenants a sense of control over the common parts in flats, as well as over their own dwelling. This sense of personal involvement in the property is crucial if we are to achieve better standards of upkeep and reduce vandalism. That is precisely the sort of measure that we shall be exploring and monitoring through the projects I referred to.

We shall also want to look carefully at the scope for sales, even in so-called difficult estates to let. It is encouraging how attached people often are to their homes, however depressing the surroundings. It is even more surprising how the efforts of people who have bought their homes can help to raise the expectations of many others who, for one reason or another, do not think that they want to buy.

The problems of rundown estates, such as those mentioned by my hon. Friend in his fascinating speech, will be very much in our minds when we draw up our firm proposals for a tenants' charter. We will do our best within the limits of statutes to meet the points that my hon. Friend has put so clearly, concisely and fairly.

The problems of rundown estates are not confined to Liverpool. They are symptoms of the disease that has been overcoming our inner cities in recent years. As long as I have responsibility in the Department, I shall do my best to try to arrest the decline and begin to roll it back.