On a point of order, Mr. Speaker. I wish to draw your attention and that of the House to a question that has been tabled for written answer today by the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland. I refer to question No. 97, from my hon. Friend the Member for Petersfield (Mr. Mates), who asks the Secretary of State

"whether De Lorean Motor Cars Limited have sought any additional financing following the recent attack on their premises."

The House will recall that in theOfficial Report, in columns 961–2 of 7 August last and again in column 973 of 12 February last, first my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland and then my hon. Friend the Minister of State twice assured the House that that business had exhausted all claims upon the generosity of the British taxpayer. If those assurances to the House are to be regarded as, in the White House phrase, "inoperative", the House is owed at the very least an oral statement, with the opportunity to cross-question.

I beg to ask leave to present a petition which has been signed by 1,500 persons both in my constituency and outside it by those concerned with the preservation of the countryside, the importance of agriculture and the necessity for not providing a new natural boundary for the West Midland conurbation.

The petition sheweth

That the Government has decided that we can no longer maintain our accustomed standards of health, education and other essential social services;

That at the same time the Government appears ready to spend upwards of £20 million more than is necessary on a new two-lane motorway, the M54, instead of dualling the existing A5.

Wherefore your petitioners pray that your honourable House will cause the M54 motorway scheme to be cancelled.

That is indicative of the strong feeling in my constituency.

I am grateful to you, Mr. Speaker, for giving me the opportunity to raise the question of the programme for extracting oil from coal. The programme is one for erecting two pilot plants at Point of Ayr colliery, in my constituency, each processing 25 tonnes of coal a day, one by the method known as the liquid solvent process, which dissolves coal in a liquid solvent at 400 degrees—the solvent being itself a product of the process—and the other by a process that is unique, where the solvent is a gas in a so-called super-critical condition. Once again the gas is itself a product of the process.

The pilot plants will be applying a process that has been developed at the National Coal Board's research establishment at Stoke Orchard. The cost of the programme, which will be about £60 million, will be borne only partly by Her Majesty's Government. The Coal Board will provide some of the funding from its own resources and some money will come from the European Coal and Steel Community. I am convinced that it will be possible to get much more than the £3 million or so that has been promised from the latter source. It is the type of project in which the European Community traditionally takes an active part and provides the very mechanism that we want for getting a larger contribution to our budgetary requirements, and interest is also being shown by BP and perhaps by other oil companies. The Government's contribution is important as much because of the encouragement and reassurance that it will give to the other potential investors as it is in itself.

I raised this matter on 24 November 1980 and I make no apology for raising it again so soon. It is of great importance to my constituency and to the nation's future. It is because the matter is so crucial, and because it is vital that the project should be right from the start, that I felt unable to sign the early-day motion in the names of the right hon. Member for Barnsley (Mr. Mason) and others, which seeks to censure the Government for their so-called vacillation in not pressing ahead with the coal liquefaction project. Of course I am keen to get an early answer, and I agree that the delay is harmful, but I am much more concerned to get the right answer. Delay will be a lot less harmful than a negative decision. I hope, therefore, that my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary of State will not feel that he has to give me a definitive answer today unless he can give me the one for which I am hoping.

The importance of the project to my constituency lies not only in the number of jobs that it will create. More than 300 will be created during the three-year construction phase and 130 during the subsequent three-year operating phase. Unemployment in the Rhyll area is now an appalling 21 per cent. and is still on the way up. Clearly, the need for jobs is desperate. It is every bit as desperate as it is in some regions of the United Kingdom that scream more loudly about their unemployment problems. We have had the largest single closure in Western Europe with the shut down at Shotton, and we have had massive layoffs due to Courtaulds streamlining its operations.

Even more important than the number of jobs that will be created is the fact that during the operating phase there will be the availability of high technology jobs. In the coastal area of North Wales there is a famine of such jobs, which alone can provide a worthwhile goal for the brightest of our school leavers, in the absence of which they tend to drift away from the area, thus perpetuating the vicious circle of a lack of skilled manpower leading to a lack of job opportunities. I see the pilot plants at Point of Ayr providing a focus of revival that will spread throughout North Wales. The 130 jobs will have an impact on the area's level of economic activity that will be out of all proportion to the number employed on the project.

The devotion of my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary of State to the coal industry has won him admiration and respect from both sides of the House and throughout both sides of the industry. I know that he has been fighting a gallant battle for the project; a battle not merely to get it, but to get it right. To some extent he has had to do battle with the Treasury.

It is rather too easy to blame the Treasury for making false economies, for cutting public expenditure in such a way as to increase the need for public expenditure a few years hence, quite apart from the damage done to the industrial strength of the nation and its ability to provide jobs and a decent standard of living as a result of cuts in industrial development. On this issue I find myself very much at one with the recent speeches of my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Hexham (Mr. Rippon) and my right hon. Friend the Member for Taunton (Mr. duCann).

It is all too easy to charge the Treasury with making false economies when it has to make real economies if inflation is to be held and interest rates kept down. As real economies are every bit as unpopular as false ones, those of us who believe in controlling inflation and keeping down interest rates have a duty to give general support to the Treasury in its determination to contain public expenditure. However, having said all that, it would be a profound mistake to withhold Government participation in this project, participation that is essential if it is to attract the other outside financing that it needs, on the ground that the whole thing could be done more cheaply elsewhere. I am sure that it could, but there are other considerations that should weigh equally heavily.

I regret the manner in which the correspondence between the Department of Energy's chief scientist and the chairman of the National Coal Board was communicated to the press. I understand that Ministers feel that that sort of thing makes it much more difficult to have sensible discussions with the NCB that will lead to the best possible outcome. Now that the correspondence is public I cannot but refer to it. I think that the NCB has had the best of this argument.

A good deal turns on the assessment of the date by which the United Kingdom will cease to be self-sufficient in oil from conventional sources. I find it hard to believe that Dr. Challis is right when he puts this as late as after the year 2000. On a number of occasions the Secretary of State has spoken of 1990 as being the date by which our self-sufficiency will begin to wilt. If that is nearer the probability, surely we must take steps now so as not to be at risk of having to buy this technology, or its products, from abroad. If any revival from the world recession is in prospect, and surely it must be, it seems that the Secretary of State's assessment is much closer to reality than that of Dr. Challis.

There has been much discussion in the press of the phrase in Dr. Challis's letter about

"political considerations having played their part in selecting a green field site next to a Welsh colliery."

It is a political consideration that, for a process so vital to Britain's industrial future, and perhaps to its very security, Britain should not be entirely dependent upon buying the technology from abroad, even if it can be bought more cheaply than we can provide it for ourselves. It is a more narrowly based and more accurate political consideration, and one which I suspect Dr. Challis had in mind, to site the project in an area where, over a long period, the work force has shown its steadiness and sense of responsibility. One of the great merits of siting the scheme at Point of Ayr is that it emphasises the importance of the North Wales coalfield, despite the comparatively small numbers employed there. The determination of the miners of North Wales not to allow the Scottish miners to push them into the eager embraces of the South Wales coal miners is part of their sturdy independence of mind and their refusal to participate in sudden ill-advised outbursts of industrial protest.

It would not be much good siting so sensitive and so key a process as this in an area where the workers have the habit of striking first and negotiating afterwards. I hope that the Government will allow themselves to be influenced by political considerations of that sort. After all, that is what Ministers are for. It does not require the skills of elective high office merely to calculate whether it will cost less in pounds and pence to develop our own technology or to buy it from abroad. The trouble is that for decades not nearly enough political consideration has been given to such decisions. Time and again we have pioneered inventions ahead of the whole world, only to let others develop and carry them through to profitable production. Each time we have recoiled before the immediate costs of proceeding from invention to development.

The catalogue is a long and sad one—namely, the Brabazon, Blue Streak, TSR2, Maplin airport, the European Airbus as far as the Government were concerned, for it was only Hawker Siddeley's determination to go it alone that kept Britain in that now immensely successful project, and, above all, the melancholy story of Britain's once unassailable lead in the nuclear generation of electricity.

Time and again we have failed to proceed from research to development or from development to commercial production. The story begins further back still, with the failure to exploit the discovery of penicillin. I am not sure whether the lesson has sunk in even yet. With any new invention or discovery, there are always sound arguments against going on with it, in favour of leaving it to others who have more natural advantages, who can exploit the invention more cheaply and who have more immediate need of it. However, at the end of this road lies the total loss of industrial independence—Britain as a sort of giant labour-only sub contractor. The risk is that Britain will become the land of the hewers of wood and the drawers of water in the twenty-first century.

In the present project the balance of argument is much more strongly in favour of going ahead than it usually is in such cases. The objections raised by Dr. Challis in his closely argued letter are valid, but against that we have the two distinct processes that have been fully tested in laboratory conditions by the National Coal Board at its Stoke Orchard research station. Those processes are for producing oil of a grade suitable to meet the needs of our petrochemical industry as well as the needs of the transport industries, which would allow us to have a source of those supplies ready at about the time when our natural sources are beginning to run out. What is more, those processes produce oil from a raw material that we have in abundance, with 200 years of proven reserves.

The process will be saleable abroad. It offers advantages in many respects over the rival processes, of which there are few, which are being developed in the United States, Germany and South Africa. I stress that, on top of that, it offers continuity of employment to the group of workers who, in the long run, are the group most essential to this country's continued economic survival. Those highly skilled and devoted men are the coal miners.

Set against that is the fact that the process could be carried through more cheaply in, for example, Australia, alongside huge deposits of opencast coal. None the less, the balance must swing heavily in favour of going ahead with the Point of Ayr twin pilot plants, unless the shortest of short-term accountancy principles are to be paramount. That is not to say that Dr. Challis is wrong, but that Ministers must take a wider, longer and deeper view. It is that view which I confidently hope my hon. Friend will now set out.

I welcome the remarks of my hon. Friend the Member for Flint, West (Sir A. Meyer). I am sure that the House is grateful to him for raising this question, which is of keen interest to his constituents, of course, but, as the early-day motion signed by over 100 hon. Members confirms, it is also a matter of great importance to the whole House.

The House will recognise that the matter is important because of the presence on the Opposition Front Bench of the right hon. Member for Leeds, South (Mr. Rees), and the presence of the hon. Member for Rother Valley (Mr. Hardy), who has taken a consistent and diligent interest in the future of the coal industry. I am sorry that the illness of his wife has prevented the attendance of the hon. Member for Midlothian (Mr. Eadie), who has been at the back of this project from its beginning.

I also express my gratitude to my hon. Friend the Member for Flint, West for the appreciation that he has shown of the complexity of the issue and the difficulties for the Government in reaching an early decision. He has pursued the issue with the diligence that I would expect of one who serves so well his constituents and the interests of the country. In replying to my hon. Friend, I propose to cover the various issues drawn to the House's attention and to put the Point of Ayr proposal into the context of work on this exciting technology, which is going on around the world.

The world is using up its oil reserves faster than we are discovering new ones. For every three barrels of oil that we use, we discover only two to replace them. Yet the industrialised world is still heavily dependent on liquid fuels, and, despite our best efforts to reduce that dependence, I think we can all see the long-term need, for example, in transport uses, for liquid fuels. That may be much more difficult to curtail. Hence the enormous interest world-wide in the conversion of coal to liquid fuel.

The main impetus behind the major development programmes on oil from coal in the United States of America, West Germany and Japan is to find ways to reduce dependence upon imported oil. In Germany and Japan, those programmes go beyond the mere development of a technology and into exploring the possibilities of investment in politically stable countries where coal can be produced cheaply. No one would disagree that that is a sensible strategy, but I stress to the House that both West Germany and Japan face a different energy situation from our own. Unlike us, they do not have the breathing space afforded by North Sea oil. They are both totally dependent on imported oil supplies. So their need to develop oil from coal technologies is far more urgent than ours.

The Government believe that it is precisely at times like these, when we have adequate indigenous energy supplies, that we should provide for tomorrow by doing the necessary work to establish prospects for our energy supplies in the future.

The Government have honoured the last Administration's agreement with the National Coal Board to provide support for the design phase of Point of Ayr. Indeed, we have agreed to two modest extensions. The first data from this work became available in mid-1980 and the Department began its evaluation immediately. Hon. Members will know from discussion in the press that the data are complex. The decision is crucial. I can certainly understand the anxiety of hon. Members to see a decision at the earliest possible moment, and I sympathise with their impatience. But this is a matter which could not be rushed. Naturally, I am as sorry as my hon. Friend that those serious matters have been portrayed in some press reports in terms of a dispute between the Government and the board. I was particularly sorry that there had been any allegation of delay on the part of the Government in dealing with this important matter.

Far from vacillating, the Government, on receipt of the pilot plant proposal and cost estimates in April 1980, immediately began detailed technical discussions with the board and BP, which lasted until April of this year. Those discussions led to an agreement to extend the design contract to cover, in particular, a 2,000-hour test with the three-quarter tonne per day LSE plant at Stoke Orchard. This test is to determine the long-term performance of the process in a continuous mode. Together with a critical design review, this is intended to improve the quality of the NCB's technology package. We have thus shown a continuing interest in the board's proposal and have gone beyond the contractual commitments of the previous Government.

I am glad to be able to use this opportunity to announce to the House this morning the conclusion of the Government's very careful study of the proposal to develop coal liquefaction technology at Point of Ayr. But first I think that the House would welcome it if I set out in some detail the economic background to this study and the Government's conclusion.

First, there is the question of United Kingdom self-sufficiency. That point was raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Flint, West. I stress that that self-sufficiency is not in oil itself, but in the premium products of transport fuels—petrol, diesel and aviation fuels—and chemical feedstocks, the raw materials for rubbers, plastics, paints, resins and fibres. Our concentration on the premium uses requires us to make a commitment to oil substitution, leading to a decline of non-premium demand for oil.

As a nation we have already made good progress in those sectors of the economy where there is the greatest potential for oil substitution. In electricity generation, United Kingdom public sector power stations burned only 6·3 million tonnes of oil in 1980—a reduction of nearly 40 per cent. on 1979. In the domestic sector, oil use fell by over 20 per cent. last year to a level of about 2·5 million tonnes. Oil use in industry also fell by over 20 per cent., but consumption here is still running at over 16 million tonnes per year.

There remains, therefore, sizeable potential for further substitution of oil in non-premium industrial uses. The economic pricing of fuels is the primary means of achieving a successful transition out of oil, and is already providing industrialists with a clear incentive to move from oil to coal. However, in order to give industrialists further encouragement to switch, the Government announced recently their decision to make available £50 million, to be committed over the next two years, in the form of capital grants of up to 25 per cent. of the cost of replacing oil-fired boilers by those burning coal. This represents an additional potential coal burn of 2 million tonnes—obviously not immediately, but building up to that level as plant is installed. As I said, the scheme will be administered by the Department of Industry and details will be announced in the very near future.

In addition to the new boiler conversion scheme, the Government have been giving financial support to a number of demonstration projects designed to improve coal combustion techniques. The NCB has, in collaboration with the boiler manufacturers, also achieved considerable progress in this area. The use of coal-oil mixtures, another promising means of promoting substitution, is being actively pursued, notably by BP and Shell. There is then considerable potential for moving the United Kingdom away from the use of oil for bulk heating purposes, and replacing some of it with coal.

However, the speed with which we need to develop alternatives to oil in its transport and chemical uses is uncertain. Experts differ in their views on the question when our oil supplies will no longer be sufficient to meet our needs, although it would seem unjustifiably optimistic to assume that they could do so for more than a few decades.

United Kingdom oil production in 1980 was just over 80 million tonnes, and it is expected to rise to between 90 million and 120 million tonnes in 1984. Thereafter it will peak and then fall away, but the remaining reserves of 2 billion to 4 billion tonnes, including estimates of oil in future discoveries, should enable a contribution to domestic needs to be maintained well into the next century.

The indications are that with a full commitment to energy conservation and oil substitution measures the United Kingdom ought to be able to maintain net self-sufficiency in transport fuels and chemicals feedstocks well into the next century. If oil is to be used increasingly for these premium applications, coal will play an important part in displacing oil from the non-premium markets.

The prospects for the production of oil from coal in the United Kingdom must be examined against this background. The economics of oil from coal depend heavily on the difference between coal and oil prices. It takes about 1½ therms of coal to produce 1 therm of synthetic liquids. The high capital and running costs of the plants have to be recovered from this margin between coal and oil prices. The present gap in the United Kingdom, which is about 7p to 9p a therm, is not enough to cover these costs either with existing technologies or with the more advanced technologies under development.

To estimate when liquefaction will become economic requires a projection of how and when the price gap will widen sufficiently, and I need hardly remind the House of the pitfalls associated with making such projections. Estimates put out by Governments here and elsewhere generally suggest that oil prices will continue to rise in real terms as pressure on supplies of natural crude oil increases, but the price of coal on world markets is also likely to rise in real terms, as one would expect. The rise in the price of oil—the energy source on which industrialised nations most depend—is bound to put pressure on the price of any alternatives to it. Coal producers are bound to respond to increased demand for their product. Indeed, this happened in the past, with each successive oil price rise. Therefore, it is not enough for us to look at the trend in oil price increases in isolation.

For a considerable time, the most economic way of using coal will be to substitute it, where possible, directly for oil. It is likely that coal liquefaction will become the most attractive option only when opportunities for direct substitution have been taken up.

The economics of liquefaction will also depend upon the extent to which world coal supplies can be expanded to meet, first, the demand for substitution and then for liquefaction. That, in turn, will depend on political developments and on the resolution of environmental problems in a number of countries. The indications are that the world's major coal producers—Australia and the United States, for example—will be able to expand production to meet not only their own direct needs but demands for exports and, to some extent, demand from coal conversion industries. In these countries, given successful development of the new technologies, commercial liquefaction could become viable at some time in the 1990s, but that is based on relatively optimistic assumptions.

However, the position in Western Europe is not the same. The economics of liquefaction are more doubtful. Indigenous coal supplies will not be sufficient to meet home demand, and all the expert studies that have been conducted agree that Western Europe is likely to be a major steam coal importer towards the end of the century. The logic of this is that, provided that our costs are lower than the European price, the United Kingdom will find a ready market in Western Europe for any surplus coal that we may produce for conventional steam raising. Liquefaction of coal will be economically more attractive in the countries which are major exporters of coal, while European-produced coal will continue to find its best application in the more traditional uses.

One day, of course, when coal substitution for oil is well advanced, and particularly if nuclear power is by then playing a major role in electricity generation, liquefaction may become economic in the United Kingdom, but this situation is not one that we believe will arise here in the 1990s, as it may do in the United States or Australia. It is unlikely, we think, to arise until well into the next century.

The only oil from coal technology in use on a commercial scale today is in South Africa, where a £3,000 million investment is in progress to provide the country with 50 per cent. self-sufficiency in petrol and diesel. the technology involves gasification and synthesis, as used in Germany during the Second World War, and is expensive and energy-inefficient. If applied in the United Kingdom, this process would yield oil products at a cost of around $60 per barrel, which is far higher than current world oil prices. Even in South Africa, with access to cheap coal, a significant subsidy is required to make liquefaction products competitive with those from natural crude oil.

America, Germany and Japan, direct liquefaction technologies are being developed along lines similar to those of the NCB's Coal Research Establishment. In Texas, the Exxon Corporation already has a 200-tonne per day pilot plant operating smoothly. In Kentucky, a plant of the same size is operating using the H-coal process. In Germany, a 200-tonne per day plant is in the advanced stages of construction. I have visited all three, and, in terms of the size of plant available, the United States and Germany have a lead of several years over the work here in the United Kingdom.

These, then, are the many factors that we have had to take into account in arriving at our decision.

There is the question of how long we shall be able to meet our needs for premium liquid fuels and feedstocks from conventional petroleum sources. The indications are that this will be considerably longer than in many other countries.

There is the question of when the margin between coal and oil prices will become enough to cover the capital and fuel charges of an oil from coal conversion process.

There is the fact that other countries are ahead of us in building large-scale pilot plants.

There are questions over whether the potential advantages of the NCB process can be realised, and the technology advanced to successful commercial operation.

We have weighed all these issues very carefully. The Government have decided that, subject to substantial financial participation by private industry, they will back the Point of Ayr proposal. The Government are prepared to make £5 million available from the Department of Energy's research and development budget to aid pilot plant construction and commissioning. As I have said, this is subject to the National Coal Board demonstrating that it has secured the whole of the balance of the funding required to complete these phases of the work. I have told Sir Derek Ezra of this decision and I expect that officials will meet shortly to discuss the details.

I have one question, which I precede by a word of thanks for the informative way in which the announcement has been made and the courteous way in which the Minister has mentioned all those involved. If my hon. Friend the Member for Midlothian (Mr. Eadie), the previous Under-Secretary of State, is not here, it is because I felt that it would be better if he got away earlier at the end of this part of the Session.

My question relates to financing. There will, of course, be other opportunities to debate this. The Minister mentioned the money from the Department of Energy. He also mentioned the NCB and, earlier, the EEC. Clearly, money can be raised from the money market for this project. But why can it be raised in that way for this project when there seem to be problems about money from the money market for other projects that might arise for the NCB?

I know that the right hon. Gentleman would like me to go into the financing of nationalised industries. It has been made clear—I am delighted that he acknowledges this—that the ultimate success of this process must rely on participation by the private commercial as well as the public sector. It is clearly an important positive. I acknowledge that, and I assume that the NCB, being involved in the overall construction and the consortium to fund such a project, will naturally pursue the route that the right hon. Gentleman clearly endorses. I do not think that it would be wise for me to develop the discussion into other areas of nationalised industries' finance at this stage.

I remind the House—this is the point that I have just tried to make—that this technology can be successful only if it is developed commercially, and therefore, as the right hon. Member for Leeds, South mentioned, the early support of private industry is essential. I know that the NCB's technology has already attracted strong interest in the private sector, and I know that the board will show vigour in explaining to private investors the potential advantages of joining the board in this project. As both management and unions made clear at the recent tripartite discussions, the approval of the Government in principle was crucial and can serve as an encouragement to others. Today, as I said, we have done more than give our approval in principle. We have backed that decision with money from my Department's research and development budget.

I think that we all welcome the decision that has been made. I wish simply at this stage to draw the Minister's attention to the fact that the Scottish NCB and the Scottish miners are very anxious that the claims of the Grangemouth area should not be forgotten in any subsequent plans. We have, around what is literally the greatest concentration of petrochemical technology in the United Kingdom, a massive coalfield just waiting for exploitation along the lines of future projects after Point of Ayr.

I am tempted to pursue that point, but we have also present the right hon. Member for Leeds, South and hon. Members from other parts of the great NCB industry. We are here discussing the pilot plant proposals rather than the subsequent developments. Nevertheless, I recognise the nature of the petrochemical complex around the Scottish coalfield and I understand the point that the hon. Gentleman legitimately makes.

I hope that this announcement will help to clear the way for the NCB and prospective co-sponsors to move to the next stage. The Point of Ayr project will, as my hon. Friend pointed out, create employment opportunities in an area where much of traditional industry is in decline. I know, too, that it will be welcomed by the engineering industry in the present recession. I look forward to the successful operation of this plant and hope that the promise shown by the board's technology can be realised to the future economic and industrial benefit of the United Kingdom.

I raise the subject of the complaints procedure in the British Transport Police not lightly but after deep thought. In a sense, I wish that I did not need to raise it. It arises out of a constituency problem which has drawn to my attention the inadequacy of the complaints procedure as operated by the British Transport Police.

At the outset, I must emphasise that in all that I say this morning I feel that the British Transport Police as a civil force does a particulary good job. In raising the subject, I in no way condone trespassing on railway property. It is vital that the message should emanate from the House that it is extremely dangerous for young people to trespass on the railways. In South Tyneside alone, and area to which I shall allude, there have been a number of serious accidents. I therefore plead with parents and young people to keep off railway property because trespassing on it is extremely dangerous.

I have already expressed my admiration for the police service in this country. But my holding of that view depends upon an efficient appeals procedure and an efficient complaints procedure, so that if wrong is done it may be brought into the open and we can all see what the situation is. That underpins my confidence in the civil police. The 1976 Act provides facilities for a complaints procedure. The Act makes provision, which I believe that the Secretary of State has used, to extend the complaints procedure to the British Transport Police. I shall return to that in a moment.

The background to the complaint that I make, or my explanation of the weakness of the present system, can be illustrated by alluding to a constituency problem. On Sunday 15 June last year, three young people aged 14 in my constituency were apprehended trespassing on railway property which, as I have said, is a dangerous playground and a dangerous occupation. They were apprehended by a constable of the British Transport Police and escorted off British Rail land. They accepted that they had been trespassing.

At the beginning of November, a constituent came to see me because he was very upset at what he saw as an inadequacy in the complaints procedure against the British Transport Police. His son—I have permission to mention his name—Trevor Giles, was charged, taken to court and fined. There are no doubts about that. I emphasise that his parents are not complaining about that. But they were surprised to discover that their son was the only one of the three boys, who were all of the same age and apprehended at the same time, to be charged.

I regarded this as a serious instance in which justice did not appear to have been done. I therefore raised the matter with British Rail officials, at Newcastle in the first instance.

I pay a compliment, which I suspect, Mr. Deputy Speaker, you may wish to echo, to the work of British Railways' North-Eastern divisional office and of the people who staff it. We are grateful for that work which is often done with inadequate and out-of-date stock. The old DMUs operate on the Sunderland and South Shields line, and we should very much like them to be replaced by something more modern.

I raised this matter with Mr. Thomson, the divisional manager. He looked into the case. In reply to my letter of 3 November he gave a full and frank reply. He explained that Trevor Giles was charged and that the other two boys were not because British Railways and the British Transport Police like to retain flexibility. I appreciate that. There is no need for a high-handed approach. He explained that one of the boys had not been charged because since the apprehension he had been remanded at Low Newton centre. That is a matter of judgment, and, having discussed it with others, I am not particularly happy about it. Not to charge a youngster with an offence simply because he has committed another crime of a completely different nature is a dubious approach. The logic of that is that if someone commits enough crimes he should be charged with only one.

The other explanation was that the third boy was aged 12. On the face of it I fully accept that as a good reason for not charging him. British Rail had quibbled about the Low Newton case, but I accepted this point. My constituent, however, said that Mr. Thomson was wrong. All of the boys were 14, he said. One of them, he said, had been horn in the same hospital at roughly the same time as his son. They were at school together.

I was by this time becoming most unhappy. I wrote to Sir Peter Parker on 18 November and he acknowledged my letter. I heard nothing for two months. I wrote again on 19 January asking whether I could expect a reply. Nothing came. I wrote again on 16 February to remind Sir Peter. After a number of telephone calls I finally received a reply on 10 March. That reply substantiated the opinion and advice given to me by Mr. Thomson. The letter said:

"In reaching decisions clearly a guiding principle is that justice should be seen to be done."

So BR accepts the point that I am making—that justice should be seen to be done. However, to interpret that inflexibily so that all offenders acting together are treated in the same manner prevents the police from using their discretion in the treatment of juvenile offenders. I do not want to challenge that discretion, but I was worried, because the letter was just a repeat of the one that I had received in November from a different source.

Again I wrote to British Railways and spoke to them on the telephone. Finally, on 29 April I managed to draw from them a letter which admitted that they had made an error. They admitted that, on checking, they discovered that the boy whom they had alleged was 12—and who for that reason had not been charged—was 14. I fully accept that that was a genuine error—my constituent and I do not dispute that—but it raises a number of problems. The fact that it took a Member of Parliament six months and a dozen letters to arrive at the truth perhaps suggests that all is not well with the complaints procedure for the British Transport Police. Neither I nor my constituent was offered an apology or even much more of an explanation in the reply from the British Transport Police.

If we are to keep the flexible approach while showing that justice has been done, surely my constituent has a genuine complaint if, after three youngsters of the same age are arrested at the same time for the same offence, only one is charged. I in no way support the following assertion, but it does not need much to make tongues wag. It does not need much for people to add two and two and make the answer five. That is what often happens in a local community. If that has happened in one case could it not happen in others? Let me take a hypothetical case. Let us assume that a fictitious British Transport policeman apprehends three young people, charges one and lets two go free. Could they be the sons of the police constable's friend? I am not suggesting that that is so in this case, but the Minister will take the point that I am making.

I return to the inadequacy of the complaints procedure for the British Transport Police. There is provision under the Police Act 1976 to extend the complaints procedure to other statutory and police bodies. That matter was considered by the Royal Commission on Criminal Procedure which issued a report, research study No. 10. It was dated August 1980, but it was received in the Library of the House on 17 December. That document states:

"negotiations are in hand to bring the BTP within the jurisdiction of the Police Complaints Board in accordance with the provisions of the Police Act 1976."

The Royal Commission therefore thought last August that that was happening. Only a week before that I had had cause during my parliamentary duties to inquire about another complaint against the police, one that was subsequently not pursued. The Home Office investigating the matter, kindly sent me a booklet called "Police and public", which is basically a citizens' guide on complaints against the police. Its opening remarks are:

"This leaflet explains the procedure for members of the public who consider they have grounds for complaint against the conduct of a member of a police force in England and Wales."

Having studied that booklet carefully, I can find nowhere a reference to the possibility of complaints being made against any actions by the British Transport Police. I suspect, however, that the Minister will tell the House that there is such a complaints procedure. It is strange that the Royal Commission does not refer to it. It dealt, in a document issued at the end of last year but dated August 1980, only with negotiations that were taking place at that time. However, I have a feeling that the necessary steps were taken by the Government to extend the complaints procedure before that date. A leaflet I received only last week from the Home Office explaining citizens' rights gives no indication that the British Transport Police are covered.

One matter causes me even more serious concern. I have been in contact with British Rail on about a dozen occasions by letter. The Minister has copies of the correspondence, including the replies, and will know that what I say is correct. I have also spoken to British Rail on eight or nine occasions by telephone. At no stage did British Rail tell me about the right to use the complaints procedure if my constituent or I had wanted to make a complaint against the British Transport Police. I am not saying that the complaint was justified—that is not the point—but my constituent has the right to make a complaint. If it is not upheld, that is a matter for the complaints procedure.

The only recourse for my constituent was to come to me. After six months, my only recourse is to raise the issue on the Floor of the House, relating it to the responsibilities of the Minister under the Police Act 1976. This is a cumbersome manner in which to try to draw to the attention of the House and the country a weakness in the system. The apparatus, I understand, now exists. The only problem is that no one knows about it. The Home Office has not passed the information to me. I presume that British Rail was not deceiving me which must mean that it did not know.

Similarly, the Royal Commission on Criminal Procedure did not appear to be aware in August that a final decision had been made. I have much admiration for British Rail. I hope that today, within three hours of leaving Kings Cross, I shall be travelling across the River Tyne to Newcastle. I wish that I did not have to raise this problem on the Floor of the House. If, however, a Member of Parliament feels that an injustice has been done or that an injustice appears to have been done, it is his duty to put aside other prejudices and perhaps embarrass his friends—I regard British Rail as my friend—on the Floor of the House in a case such as that which I have described. I am sure that it appears to many people in my constituency that justice has not been seen to be done.

I believe that the British Transport Police should check their prosecuting policies. This is a suitable occasion to try to highlight the rights of people to pursue the correct procedure if they have a justifiable complaint against the British Transport Police. That assumes that the Minister will say that there is a complaints procedure. The hon. and learned Gentleman has indicated that this is the case.

I repeat myself because it is important to get the message home. Railways are dangerous places. Youngsters should not play on railway lines. Nor should adults trespass on them. There has been a tragic accident in South Tyneside within the last couple of weeks. British Rail's philosophy is that it is better to take people to the juvenile court than to the coroner's court. I agree with that philosophy. That approach must, however, be pursued with openness and frankness.

I appeal to parents to make sure that their youngsters do not trespass on British Rail land. Railway lines are dangerous places. They are especially dangerous where unscheduled trains take coal from pits, as in my constituency, to be transported to London. In those areas, the problem is acute.

I hope that I have convinced the House that there is something wrong in the case that I have outlined. I hope that the Minister can give me an assurance that it is an exception. We need better and more open publicity on the matter. I hope that this debate will make more widely known not only the dangers of trespassing on the railway but also the fact that if people have a complaint against the British Transport Police there is an opportunity to raise it without having to resort to such a draconian process as an hon. Member raising it on the Floor of the House.

The hon. Member for South Shields (Dr. Clark) expressed several times his regret about having to raise a complaint of this kind on the Floor of the House. I am also sorry, in many ways, that he felt that it was necessary to do so. I have a genuine regard for the hon. Gentleman's judgment. He is not one of the tiny minority of hon. Members who might raise malicious or ill-founded allegations against the police. His presentation of the case shows that he feels strongly that his constituent, the parent of the boy, has a legitimate grievance about the manner in which the case was handled. I find that view difficult to understand. I have examined the case. I feel that the sense of injustice is wide of the mark. I shall deal with that aspect further in due course.

I can reassure the hon. Gentleman about the complaints procedure. The British Transport Police are subject to exactly the same complaints procedure as the civil police. The hon. Gentleman may be right in saying that this is not widely appreciated. This debate will perhaps serve the purpose of making the facts better known, certainly in South Shields where I am sure it will be reported.

The case arises out of a question of trespassing on railway property. I am glad that the hon. Gentleman agrees that this is quite a serious matter. Obviously, it is not a serious criminal offence. There is no lasting stain on the character of the boy. The offence must be seen in proportion. As a small boy, I was a keen train spotter. I did not always have the consent of the railways when visiting engine sheds. I have probably many years of undetected crime behind me. With hindsight, however, I can see that I would have had no legitimate complaint if I had been prosecuted. More discouragement against going onto railway premises would have been good for me.

Prosecution of children, in particular, for this offence is one of the odd areas of the law where the step is taken for the protection of the child and the public. There would be a public outcry if the British Transport Police ceased to apply fairly rigorously the rules about trespassing on railway property. Children are killed on the railways quite frequently. I understand that in 1980 13 children were killed trespassing on the railway. To trespass is dangerous not only for the trespassers themselves but for railway staff, drivers and even, sometimes, passengers. In 1980, 28,351 cases of trespassing on railway property were reported. There were 6,169 prosecutions of offenders, of whom 2,308 were juveniles.

A considerable burden is placed on the British Transport Police to deal with cases of trespass. They do not see prosecution and routine police work as the primary method of dealing with the problem. They take part in special presentations in schools, in the hope that children will learn the dangers. I agree with the hon. Gentleman—as I am sure will the police—that parents have a responsibility to keep down the level of trespassing on the railway. In some cases the police have to enforce the law. That is inevitably part of their duty.

I join the hon. Gentleman in paying tribute to the work of the British Transport Police. Trespass on the railways is obviously only a small part of their duties. They deal with vandals, hooligans, thieves and thugs of all types. I am sure that the public will agree with both of us that they do an extremely valuable job of protection. We are seeking to step up police activity on British Rail and London Transport, as a result of the unfortunate increase in vandalism and hooliganism on our trains. Last year we made an extra £1 million available, so that the police could set up mobile groups that could move more quickly to deal with vandalism and attacks on staff, which occur both on London Transport and British Rail.

In a way, the debate is topical, because tomorrow the England v. Scotland match will take place in London. Unfortunately, as we all know, that will place great responsibility on the British Transport Police. I am sure that they will protect the public to the best of their ability and with their usual skill and discretion. The hon. Gentleman will agree with what I have said about the police force in general. However, he complained about a prosecution and the way in which his complaint was handled.

The case concerns the exercise of discretion whether to prosecute the three boys involved. My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State and I have no responsibility for the British Transport Police in this area of activity. The investigation of offences relating to British Rail's property is the responsibility of the chief constable and assistant chief constables of the British Transport Police, who are also responsible for deciding, in general, in the light of all the information available, whether to take proceedings. The discretion is theirs. My right hon. Friend has no power to direct which course British Transport Police officers should follow in any particular case. Obviously, I do not wish to comment in detail on the court proceedings. That is the same position as that held by my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary in relation to the ordinary police authorities.

The responsibility is, therefore, that of the chief constable of the British Transport Police, who is the chief of a force that numbers about 2,000 men. He is responsible to a police committee, chaired by a member of the British Railways Board, which includes representatives from the bodies for which the British Transport Police provide police services. Apart from British Rail, that means London Transport and the British Transport Docks Board.

The committee reports to the chairman of the British Railways Board. But, again, his overall supervision of the British Transport Police does not extend to giving him any power to excercise detailed control over such matters as prosecutions. The British Transport Police need to be able to exercise discretion whether to prosecute in particular cases, just as the ordinary police do. I hope that the hon. Gentleman will agree that it would be a great mistake if the police were automatically obliged to take an offender to court in every case. There must be room for caution, and that means that in some cases a difficult judgement will have to be made.

The policy on prosecutions carried out by the British Transport Police is similar to that of other police forces. British Transport Police prosecutions are undertaken by considering particular circumstances of the offence and the facts relating to the individual concerned. Each case is considered on its merits. Children and young persons who commit minor offences are generally cautioned and not prosecuted unless they have committed previous offences and been dealt with for them, or unless there are special circumstances. Even then, prosecutions are undertaken only after consultation with the social services department of the local authority in the case of children and young persons.

I understand that that policy was followed in the case raised by the hon. Gentleman. He has taken the matter up, and I have seen the correspondence with the chairman of the British Railways Board. I shall not deal with the personalities involved, but three 14-year-old boys were caught trespassing on the railway and only one of them was prosecuted. The father of that boy feels indignant and his indignation is shared by the hon. Gentleman.

Is the hon. and learned Gentleman saying that there were consultations with the social services department of South Tyneside council before the decision was taken to prosecute that one boy, or were all three cases discussed with the department before the decision was taken? There is an important difference.

I have outlined the policy, which in the case of children of that age would include consultation with the social services department. I do not know whether the case as a whole was put to the department. The department may have been consulted on the question whether to prosecute the boy who was prosecuted. Off the cuff, I do not know whether it was explained to the social services department that two other boys were involved.

As the hon. Gentleman said, one of the other two boys was already at a remand centre. It was thought pointless to bring him back to be dealt with for what in his case was a minor offence of trespassing on the railway. The other boy was believed to be 12 years old. That is the source of the complaint. Unfortunately, the parent of that, child, deliberately or accidentally, misled the policeman who went to the house. The police were led to believe that the boy was 12 years old. In error, that child was not prosecuted. However, the third boy was prosecuted and was plainly not innocent of the offence. He was fined £10.

I suggest that the case does not give rise to a deep grievance, because the boy was rightly prosecuted and fined for trespass. The hon. Gentleman is saying only that the two other people were not prosecuted. One of them was not prosecuted because he was in more serious trouble and the other was not prosecuted because, unfortunately, his mother had apparently lied about his true age. That may give rise to a feeling of injustice, but it is not the worst case of injustice that I have heard of.

rose——

I shall give way in a moment. The hon. Gentleman has already strenuously taken up his complaint with British Rail. I am sure that the chairman of British Rail will see what he has said about the length of time that it took to reply to letters. Ministers have many letters to reply to, and I am the last one to be heavily critical of delays in replying. However, it does seem to have taken a long time to reply to those letters. I am sure that the chief constable will consider whether the apology given was adequate.

Nevertheless, eventually the hon. Gentleman received a full reply. As the issue turns on the unfortunate error in the age of the child I should put on record the fact that, as was clearly explained in the board's letter of 29 April, the information that misled everybody originated from the boy's mother. The board's director of public affairs wrote:

"When the police officer went to interview her following the offence, she was ill in bed and had to get up, despite her condition, to answer his questions. The officer took a statement and as the boy did not appear to be older than the twelve years he was said to be, the officer had no reason to suspect the information to be untrue. In the circumstances, he saw no reason to prolong the interview unduly, a decision which I believe was not unreasonable in a matter of this nature as there is always a wish to avoid any accusation of harrassment."

That was the explanation. The boy's mother was ill, and no doubt the policeman was anxious not to bully or pressurise her excessively. She appears to have lied about her son's age. Some time thereafter—it was already far too late to do anything about it—it was discovered that the boy had avoided prosecution. It is an old case, which has now been thoroughly aired. I am sure that the police regret it if there was a mistake. However, the issue does not call into question the way in which this chief constable or the force as a whole exercise discretion over prosecutions.

I take the point that we are using the case as an example. However, the Minister said that when the British Transport Police decided whether to prosecute they held consultations with the social services department. I do not expect the Minister to know the answer, but I wish to ask an important question. If the British Transport Police had gone to the social services department and told it that three boys had been arrested, the department might have known their ages. That might well have been the case. It is possible that the parent did not lie and that the constable made a mistake when he wrote down the individual's date of birth. It is not good enough that British Transport Police should raise with the social services department the one case in respect of which it contemplates bringing charges. It is important that all those involved should be discussed. That might obviate these difficulties. In addition, it would act as another check against human error, which can easily occur if someone slurs a word or has to write down a statement.

I hope that the Minister will take that point and, perhaps, hold informal consultations with the British Transport Police on that point.

I have not made inquiries in depth into the case, because, apart from anything else, much would have emerged about the personal circumstances of the children and their families. The police follow a policy of consulting social service departments, presumably to discover more about the individual circumstances of children and their families. However, the police cannot hand over responsibility for prosecution to social service departments and I do not think that the British Transport Police would accept an inviolable rule to prosecute all three or only one. There are often circumstances justifying the prosecution of only one of a group. Perhaps the error in this case would have been discovered by the social service department. I regret that that did not happen.

The hon. Gentleman raised an important general point when he said that he had had difficulty in discovering details of the complaints procedure. The difficulty may be that the complaints procedure against the police does not extend to discretion whether to prosecute. An impossible situation would be created if people prosecuted for a crime were able to go through the complaints procedure and argue whether they should have been prosecuted or cautioned. Such matters are not normally in the mainstream of complaints, which usually concern allegations of misbehaviour by police officers in the course of their duties.

The usual procedure for making complaints against police officers applies to officers of the British Transport Police. The Police Act 1976, which provided for the setting up of the Police Complaints Board to deal with complaints by members of the public against members of ordinary police forces, also enables the board to make arrangements to deal with complaints against members of other police forces. Such arrangements have been in operation since November 1979, as a result of an agreement between the complaints board and the British Railways Board in respect of the British Transport Police.

If the hon. Member or a member of the public feels that he has a legitimate complaint against an officer of the British Transport Police, it is open to him to write to the chief constable of the force and initiate the complaints procedure, with which hon. Members are more familiar in relation to the ordinary police.

The complaint will be investigated in the ordinary way. If, following the investigation, no disciplinary charge is brought, the papers will automatically be sent to the complaints board, which has the power, if it disagrees with the original decision, to direct that a disciplinary charge must be brought. The complainant is informed of the ultimate outcome.

Leaflets on how to make a complaint about a police officer are available at police stations, including British Transport Police offices, public libraries and citizens' advice bureaux. The Home Office includes the British Transport Police among those to whom it circulates information on the complaints procedure from time to time.

The position in Scotland is different. There is no police complaints board there. Complaints against the police in Scotland are investigated by a chief constable, who, if there is any suggestion of a criminal offence, must refer the matter to the prosecuting authority, the procurator-fiscal, who decides, as an independent investigator, what action to take. The British Transport Police also follow that procedure in Scotland, and I understand that it is generally regarded as satisfactory.

I am told that in 1980 the complaints board dealt with 61 complaints about the British Transport Police. Two resulted in disciplinary charges being brought against individual British Transport police officers, and nine were followed by British Transport Police officers being formally interviewed by a senior officer.

It seems that there is an effective complaints procedure and there is no need for concern that no such procedure exists. I am not aware of any general dissatisfaction with the way in which the British Transport Police operate, given that in 1980 they dealt with nearly 200,000 offences and their activities gave rise to a comparatively tiny number of complaints.

I understand that if my constituent had wanted to make a complaint against the British Transport Police he would have been allowed to go ahead and make it, even though it may have been ruled out of court. My complaint is that there appears to be no information in the leaflet to suggest that the complaints procedure covers the British Transport Police.

I believe that British Rail should have advised me of the procedure. I was not aware of it; nor were many other people. That would have saved a lot of time and I ask the Under-Secretary to draw to the attention of the British Railways Board the fact that in such cases they should inform hon. Members and the public that there is a complaints procedure that can be used against the British Transport Police. I feel aggrieved that in all my correspondence and contacts with British Rail I was never told that my constituent could have tried to make a complaint through the complaints procedure.

I take the hon. Gentleman's point about the leaflet. I shall make sure that his comments are drawn to the attention of my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary and the Home Office, so that when the leaflet is next revised or issued they can consider whether it ought to contain an explicit reference to the British Transport Police.

The complaints procedure that I have described is normally concerned with cases of individual police officers who are said to have misbehaved in the course of investigating a criminal offence. The hon. Gentleman's complaint is against the chief constable, or those directly answerable to him, because of the way in which they exercised their discretion to prosecute. He is really querying a policy adopted within that discretion, though it turns out that the problem arose from an error made during investigation of the children's ages. That is not the sort of complaint that would normally be dealt with by the procedure relating to disciplinary offences.

The hon. Gentleman probably dealt with the matter correctly by direct correspondence with the chief constable, who is responsible in this case. If the policy is to be reconsidered by anybody, it will be considered by the committee that British Rail has set up, and eventual responsibility rests with the chairman of British Rail.

The hon. Gentleman has explored all those avenues and has received his reply. Unfortunately, apart from the hon. Gentleman, no one accepts that the boy's father has cause to be particularly aggrieved. I am sure that everyone regrets that an error was made and that it took so long for the hon. Gentleman to receive answers from every quarter.

On the general point of what happens if an individual member of the public has a complaint about the way in which he is treated by a member of the British Transport Police, I confirm that the ordinary complaints procedure will apply and should be pursued in the ordinary way. The British Transport Police, like other police forces, can point with pride to the fact that although that procedure is used it gives rise to an insignificant number of proven allegations. The British Transport Police do an extremely good job of policing our railway and passenger systems. Present standards of behaviour on the railways are such that the public have had cause to be more grateful to them in recent years than they have been in the past.

I am grateful to have the opportunity to raise the problem of swine vesicular disease, with special reference to a serious outbreak that occurred in my constituency last yeear.

In 1979 there were 43 outbreaks of swine vesicular disease in the United Kingdom. In 1980 there were 60 outbreaks, but there were only seven up to May this year. That demonstrates that there has been a considerable reduction in the number of confirmed cases in recent months.

As the House probably knows, when there is an outbreak of swine vesicular disease a compulsory slaughter policy is carried out by the Ministry. An intensive disinfection programme is carried out on the farm or property concerned, involving the cleaning up of all the buildings, yards, road vehicles, tractors and trailers—in fact, pretty well everything on the property.

In December 1980 Ministry vets from the Northallerton office confirmed an outbreak of swine vesicular disease. Prior to the confirmation an order was placed on the premises, Beck Hill Farm Ltd., preventing the movement of pigs for seven days. During that time blood tests were taken. They proved positive, and the Ministry appointed a valuer. Between 11 and 16 December, 4,776 pigs were slaughtered. The carcases were removed by road vehicles, and compensation of £271,884 was agreed and paid. I regret to say that today, in one of the northern newspapers, it is suggested that there was delay in the payment. I know that that is not correct.

Beck Hill Farm is a substantial, efficiently run pig unit, turning over about 15,000 pigs for slaughter annually. All the pigs are brought in and fattened, and there can be little doubt that the disease was brought on to the farm, possibly on a contaminated lorry or through contaminated food. Just prior to the outbreak there was a confirmed case in South Yorkshire, at Doncaster.

In close proximity to the farm there are other substantial pig enterprises, and those concerned were obviously concerned and worried about the possibility of cross-infection and the chance of substantial losses to those neighbours. Most of the neighbours, unlike Beck Hill Farm, have rearing units. It is well known that if breeding units are lost, the position is very much more serious than where they are lost on a farm on which the animals are merely being fattened. Fortunately, I can report that up till now there has been no further outbreak in the immediate area.

For some years the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food has used Wimpeys as the contractual firm to move in and assist in the cleaning-up process following an outbreak of swine vesicular disease, and that was the pattern of events at Beck Hill Farm. Compensation for the slaughter of the pigs was agreed and paid speedily, as I have already mentioned, but the assessment and payment of compensation for ancillary materials on the farm, such as waste food, potatoes, hay and straw, was considerably delayed.

There had also been a continuing problem over what to do with the slurry on the farm. The Ministry informed me that one of the two lagoons contained 1,400,000 gallons of slurry. Understandably, the neighbours were not enthusiastic about having that slurry put on to the fields adjoining them.

I was asked by the National Farmers Union to raise certain points arising from the case that give justifiable concern to pig producers in the neighbourhood. It appears that there might be a lack of common procedure for the removal of slurry and waste products from a farm once the disease has been confirmed. In view of the disease risk associated with these substances it is essential that priority should be given to their disposal, in order to safeguard not only the farmer in question, but those surrounding him who may have livestock. The Ministry could well look again at the procedures and activities to be undertaken in the event of these problems arising.

There is a feeling that in clearing out and cleansing infected buildings there should be close liaison with and supervision of contracted labour by Ministry veterinary staff, to ensure that matters are dealt with properly and that the risks of subsequent disease spread are kept to a minimum. There is no doubt in my mind that the Ministry's policy of attempting to eradicate the disease by means of slaughter and compensation is having considerable success, and no one would wish to alter that policy.

I wrote to the Minister of Agriculture on 19 March, expressing some of these worries. He replied to me promptly in the first week of April. He pointed out that there was difficulty with the owner in the production of invoices concerning contaminated feeding stuff, and that there were also difficulties in trying to reach a satisfactory conclusion on these values. Therefore, an outsider valuer had to be brought in to assist.

While the negotiations were going on there was a large amount of waste food on premises, which attracted a great many birds. This aroused fears that the birds would transfer the disease to neighbouring farms. When the Ministry veterinary staff were investigating suspected swine vesicular disease on the farm they did not stop milk vans, post vans and other delivery vehicles calling at Beck Hill and then going on to all the neighbouring farms, or warn of the risk involved in allowing that procedure to continue.

At the time of the slaughtering of the 4,700 pigs, 17 carcase loads were taken off the farm and driven to the Midlands. As the drivers of those vehicles were changed regularly, there was not satisfactory supervision on a number of occasions. Lorries left the farm, turned in the wrong direction and then had to turn round in the neighbouring farms, which had large pig units, before going down the road in the right direction. That created a great deal of concern.

At Beck Hill farm there are two large slurry lagoons. Although an attempt was made to remove a considerable amount of the slurry, and also to spray the lagoons to ensure that there was no further risk of cross-infection, the usual practice—which is to remove the slurry by tanker and dispose of it in an approved waste tip—was not undertaken in this instance. I suppose that it can be argued by the Ministry, with some justification, that with such enormous quantities of slurry it would have been almost impossible to cope with in that way. It would be helpful if the Minister would take a general look at the procedure for handling slurry, to ensure that the success nationally of SVD eradication is continued and that what is acceptable in one area is maintained and operated in others. The Ministry has taken from 16 December 1980 to 15 April 1981 to carry out its full cleaning-up operations at Beck Hill Farm.

I wrote to the British Veterinary Association—my hon. Friend the Member for Devon, West (Mr. Mills) was involved in the matter at one of our agricultural committee meetings last week—about the problems that we had encountered in this case. The BVA replied that there were certain procedures that usually took place after an outbreak, and suggested that the period of cleaning up and restocking was about 12 to 16 weeks. That appeared to be the Ministry's general procedure, but, as can be seen from the facts that I have outlined, in this case we were in no way on line for that sort of programme.

In the same week that Beck Hill farm had a confirmed outbreak, there was an outbreak at Stranraer, where about 8,000 pigs had to be slaughtered on Mr. Robinson's property. It is interesting to note that on that occasion cleaning up and disinfecting procedures were carried out by Mr. Robinson's own staff, under the supervision of Ministry of Agriculture veterinary officers. It is also interesting to note that, although the outbreak on Mr. Robinson's farm was only a week before the one in North Yorkshire, he was in a position to start restocking on 15 April this year, and already has over 2,000 pigs back on his property.

I cannot stress too strongly to my hon. Friend how important it is to have the operation carried through speedily, so that restocking can begin. I do not feel that the delays in this case can be justified, although I know that there have been certain other difficulties concerning valuation and matters of that kind. However, I have to point out that, sadly as a result of this delay, at Beck Hill farm a number of staff have had to be made redundant because there is no work for them to carry out. Where a farmer is allowed to do his own clearing up under Ministry supervision, that problem does not appear to arise.

As I said before, at Beck Hill farm the premises were disinfected, as well as all buildings, yards and vehicles. It was then decided by the Ministry to pressure-wash the insulated ceilings of each piggery. A great amount of water pressure was applied in this operation, and, as a consequence the tinfoil insulation on the ceilings was stripped off them. This damaged the ceilings so greatly that now they all need removing, and new material will have to be affixed. The damaged insulation ceilings are now quite worthless in monetary value and also in their vapour barrier, heat and fire-resisting properties.

In addition, in many places the floor tiles have been stripped off by the water pressure. I saw this for myself last Saturday morning. Literally thousands of tiles have been removed. When Wimpeys were cleaning up, the water pressures used by the firm's representatives probably were far greater than necessary. It is extremely difficult to lift tiles off floors and remove ceilings altogether unless far too many pounds of water pressure are used in the cleaning-up process.

The electrical system should have been tested and disconnected, with all the apparatus being protected with polythene and tape, before any washing down took place. Because those procedures were not followed a small electrical fire occurred, and the district veterinary officer stopped the North-Eastern electricity board and a private contractor carrying out tests on the apparatus when it was discovered that it would take seven days, at a cost of £1,400, to renew the installation. The electricity board was then instructed to disconnect the buildings at the mains. This was done in February 1981. It is fortunate that no employee, or anyone else for that matter, was killed by the electrical "shorts". The operation of water on live apparatus must contravene regulations under the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act.

I believe that there should be a set pattern of rules when dealing with a situation of this kind. It is most important that in an outbreak of disease, with all the resulting problems, someone grasps the nettle. It is now four weeks since the disinfection operations were completed, and I was given to understand last Saturday that the answer to the question of who pays for the damage to the electrical wiring, ceilings, floors, the replacement of troughs and many smaller items is not clear in the mind of the owner of the property or in the mind of the National Farmers Union.

One might well ask how a pig producer in Scotland, with about 8,000 pigs on his premises and whose outbreak of SVD is confirmed in the same week, can carry out his own cleaning and disinfection work and be back in business by April 1981. Mr. Atkinson is convinced that he and his staff could have cleaned up his farm in half the time and at about half the cost to the Exchequer incurred by using contracted labour.

We now have the problem of replacing damaged ceilings and floors. A great deal of electrical installation will have to be done. The figure for this work will be about £30,000 or £40,000, which is not an inconsiderable sum. In no way can the liability be placed upon the shoulders of the farmer.

These situations are always difficult. However, with clearer guidelines, faster decision-taking and the minimum amount of delay, both the person involved and neighbouring farmers will benefit. I hope that the Ministry will consider what can be done to improve the overall procedures.

I am grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Richmond, Yorks (Sir. T. Kitson) for allowing me to say a few words in this Adjournment debate.

My hon. Friend raised this problem in one of our agricultural committees, of which I have the privilege to be chairman, and I believe that he was right to do so, just as he is right to bring to the attention of the House and the Minister the problems which he has just described. However, I wish to highlight the growing problem in agriculture of these large units, and not just to discuss the problems arising from outbreaks of swine vesicular disease.

We know that, in the world in which we live we have to have these large units in order to achieve the output and the efficiency that we require. A unit of this kind is a far cry from the old days when a farmer with two or three sows and perhaps a dozen weaners or fatteners had a useful unit, when a farmer kept 10 cows and found them a large number to milk in a day, or perhaps had a small flock of sheep. Today, those numbers have to be compared with thousands of pigs or, for that matter, large dairy units of 200 cows and large flocks of sheep.

These large units present real problems, and we in the South-West of England, let alone farmers in Yorkshire and Scotland, are concerned about the effects of disease on large units. The bigger the herd, flock or pig unit, the greater the danger and, therefore, the greater the care that is needed.

The threat of disease grows. The problem of SVD is not so serious, because the slaughter policy is working and is right. However, we have had problems in the South-West with sheep scab. In fact, we are rather ashamed about what has happened in the South-West. Now, the Minister has rightly taken action to deal with sheep scab, but there is no doubt that large flocks have contributed to its spread. We have also experienced the dangers of contagious abortion and outbreaks of TB and foot-and-mouth, to say nothing of problems in poultry units, all of which, because large units are involved, present real problems. The danger is present all the time. Given these large units, the Ministry has to watch them carefully and the problems to which they give rise. Disease can spread like wildfire and it is important to have up-to-date procedures and regulations to deal with it.

As I have said, I agree wholeheartedly with the slaughter policy in respect of SVD. It is right. It is the cheapest solution in the long run. We have seen such a policy work successfully with the recent outbreak of foot-and-mouth, and I congratulate the Minister and his staff on the speedy way in which they dealt with that appalling danger.

However, I support my hon. Friend the Member for Richmond, Yorks when he suggests that we need firmer guidelines to deal with cleaning up operations after an outbreak of disease, especially of SVD.

In the case to which my hon. Friend referred, it took far too long to get the premises cleaned up and sterilised. I wonder why the work was put out to contract and why the farmer was not allowed to do it himself. In my view, any attempt to do such work privately should be encouraged. The farmer should do it himself, of course, under firm Ministry guidance, because its vets cart guide a farmer firmly, and I believe that that is the right way to proceed.

From the farmer's point of view, the sooner the cleaning operations are completed, the sooner he is back in business the sooner his neighbours can sleep at nights without the fear of the disease spreading to their farms. to say nothing of the dangers to other farmers further afield.

In supporting my hon. Friend in this matter, I hope that we shall have firmer guidelines on these matters and greater encouragement for the farmer to get on with the job quickly with his own staff. It is to his advantage and everyone's advantage.

I ask the Minister two questions. First, what happened to the pigs that went off in the lorries? Were they burnt, dumped, buried, or—an even more frightening possibility did they find their way on to the market?

I hope that I am not putting the Minister in an embarrassing position, but I must warn him, as I have recently warned the House and the public, that there is a growing number of cowboy operators who will use knackered, condemned meat for sale in shops. It is important that we know exactly what happened to these pigs. Did they find their way into pig hamburgers? I do not know whether there are such things. That is the way in which some of the knackered beef has gone. Did they find their way into dog food? That is another dangerous outlet.

This matter is not to be taken lightly. A growing number of fiddles are taking place. We want to be certain that all animals that are slaughtered because of disease or a slaughter policy are burnt and done away with and do not find their way on to the market in any form.

Secondly, over this whole area, and particularly SVD, what arrangements do we have with the rest of Europe? Is there any harmonisation on these matters? We do not see much harmonisation in Europe and the Community as regards foot and mouth disease and a slaughter policy, and so on. As for SVD, I am wondering whether our Ministry vets are discussing with vets in Europe and the Community a harmonisation procedure on these matters.

Once again, I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Richmond, Yorks, on bringing this matter to the attention of the House. I hope that the Minister, without too much trouble, will be able to answer my questions.

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Richmond, Yorks (Sir T. Kitson) on selecting this subject for an Adjournment debate. I should also like to express my gratitude to my hon. Friend the Member for Devon, West (Mr. Mills) for his more general comments on animal health and large flocks. I shall deal with his very fair point about the size of flocks and herds of pigs and other animals. Disease is a great enemy. Obviously, when one has very much larger units, all the problems of hygiene, disinfection and so on are magnified. It may seem obvious, but it is true, and my hon. Friend was perfectly right to raise the point.

As I understand it, in Europe the responsibility for animal health matters remains within each country. However, I am sure that my hon. Friend's experience will confirm that the veterinary officers of various Governments all over the world enjoy a remarkable degree of mutual co-operation. They talk about these matters continually, not just about swine vesicular disease, but about all aspects of animal disease. Where I have come across any international problem—such as contagious botritis in horses, or a foot and mouth outbreak, with the effect that that has on dairy products—I have found that those concerned operate extremely quickly and extremely well. That does not mean that there is not further progress to be made, but the present position is fairly satisfactory.

Perhaps it would be sensible if I were to explain, briefly, the procedures used in the eradication and elimination of SVD, and the background to the disease. SVD is caused by a virus which produces in pigs clinical symptoms which are indistinguishable from foot and mouth disease. Laboratory tests are necessary to determine which virus is present in suspect pigs. The SVD virus is more persistent and more difficult to kill than the foot and mouth virus. If left to run its course, SVD is likely to produce a loss of condition in pigs, but its main importance lies in its clinical confusion with foot and mouth disease. If it were not tackled by a slaughter policy it would become widespread and would seriously disrupt the movement of pigs to markets and abattoirs, as on each occasion when disease was suspected in pigs a full foot and mouth disease standstill would have to operate while a differential laboratory diagnosis was being made.

Since 1972, when the first outbreak of SVD occurred in Great Britain, about 500 outbreaks have been confirmed. Compensation has cost about £11 million, to which must be added about £4 million on expenditure arising for cleansing, disinfection and other costs. In 1980, 60 outbreaks of the disease were confirmed, with the resulting slaughter of nearly 50,000 pigs at a cost in compensation of about £2·7 million. With a few exceptions, the disease has been confined since January 1976 to the Yorkshire, Lancashire and Humberside areas.

Swill feeding of pigs gives rise to greater risks of swine vesicular disease than other methods, notwithstanding that swill—fed pigs may be moved only direct to slaughterhouses. Control measures operating under the Diseases of Animals (Waste Food) Order 1973 have already been tightened up and arrangements are in hand to improve the controls still further.

Other measures which are being taken with the aim of eradicating SVD include blood sampling at slaughterhouses of swill-fed pigs originating in those areas where we consider that there is the greatest possibility of finding infection. This includes some areas of Yorkshire, although my hon. Friend's constituency is not in one of these areas.

These measures have been shown to be worthwhile by the fact that six of the seven outbreaks this year were found as a result of such sampling. The blood sampling has recently been extended to pigs from the premises of sow feeders and dealers in the whole of Yorkshire and adjacent countries whose premises appear to have been a source of continuing infection. The State veterinary service is also undertaking intensive tracing in those markets which have been associated with the disease.

I hope that this brief summary will have served to indicate to the House the seriousness with which the Government regard SVD. As the past history shows, it is very difficult to eradicate. But the Government are determined to continue to work towards this objective. The results of the monitoring which has been undertaken in the Yorkshire-Lancashire area, where the disease is centred, and the recent diminution in the number of outbreaks, suggest that progress is being made in its containment and that, to use veterinary terminology, we are getting ahead of the disease.

As I have indicated, swill feeding of pigs gives rise to greater risks of SVD than other methods, notwithstanding that such animals may only be sent for slaughter. We have taken steps to tighten up the controls set out in existing legislation and have it in mind to improve the arrangements even further after consultation with the interests concerned.

I know that action taken to control and eradicate notifiable diseases causes great disruption to producers and others. SVD probably is among the worst in this respect because of the persistence of the virus and the need to take the most stringent disinfection measures. It will provide the House with a measure of the precautions which have to be taken when I say that it is usually three months before any restocking can safely take place after an outbreak of the disease.

In trying to eradicate SVD, it is almost inevitable that local problems of the sort described by my hon. Friend will arise. Under our procedures the first objective after destroying infected pigs on a holding is to pay compensation for them on the fifteenth day after confirmation of the outbreak. Fourteen days must elapse to give a farmer time to appeal against the valuation of his pigs. My hon. Friend rightly said that there was no complaint about the payment of compensation, which was dealt with promptly in the case to which he referred.

Subsequently, an assessment is made of the risks arising from feeding stuffs and other materials on the holding. Where those must be destroyed that can usually be undertaken expeditiously, but on occasions differences of view or difficulties about valuation occur. In those circumstances, a certain time can elapse before the problem is solved. While we have tremendous sympathy for any fanner whose animals must be destroyed, in practical terms we have to temper that by safeguarding claims on public expenditure.

My hon. Friend the Member for Devon, West asked what happened to pigs removed from farms after slaughter. They are processed by a safe rendering method. It is approved and supervised by my Department. I am not an authority, but I imagine that it has something to do with the temperature at which the viruses can be destroyed.

What is meant by "rendering"? What is it used for?

I am sorry to tell my hon. Friend that I am not an expert on the disposal of pigs that have been slaughtered after an SVD outbreak. It is important that they are disposed of in a safe manner, that the virus cannot be transmitted and that public funds are protected if there is any value in the residual carcases. I can arrange for my hon. Friend to investigate one of the premises, if he so wishes, next time an outbreak occurs.

I come now to the detailed points raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Richmond, Yorks on behalf of his constituent. I am afraid that it is almost inevitable that damage will occur to property. My hon. Friend mentioned ceilings, tiles and electrical installations. The process of disinfection uses large quantities of water and the pressures must be high if the water is to get into all the crevices, cracks, roofs and fittings. In those circumstances it is normal practice for the Ministry to accept liability for the damage arising and for it to pay the cost of repairs. In Mr Atkinson's case the Ministry's local surveyor has been responsible for determining the matter in the usual way. I understand that a conclusion based upon his report will be reached shortly. The issue has taken longer to resolve than usual for the reasons that I have already described, coupled with a disagreement about slurry removal.

In Mr Atkinson's case there were two lagoons holding 1·4 million gallons each of slurry. There can be good veterinary reasons why even potentially infected slurry is better left where it lies, because the virus will eventually destroy itself. In all these matters there must be an individual judgment. The veterinary officer on the spot is responsible for what takes place. The House will accept that it is a matter of considerable pride that there was no spread of disease from that farm, despite the concern expressed by my hon. Friend.

If a movement order is placed on another case, will my hon. Friend consider the question of vehicles going on to the farm, such as post vans and those delivering food? I think that if there were a foot and mouth outbreak vehicles would not be allowed to do that. That procedure needs consideration.

I understand what my hon. Friend is saying. I was closely acquainted with the last serious outbreak of foot and mouth, which happened near land that I farmed. It is the responsibility of the veterinarian on the spot to decide on the level of precautions to be taken. However, I am sure that in the process of tightening SVD precautions the vets will bear in mind what my hon. Friend has said.

The risk of spreading the virus to neighbouring fauns through contaminated feeding stuffs or undisturbed slurry is considered to be minimal. We must take the professional advice that is available. We believe that the underlying policy and the action taken are uniformly applied. We do everything possible to minimise the risk of further contamination. As both my hon. Friends, with their agricultural experience, will know, whenever such an outbreak occurs there is a natural fear and people seek to pick up the smallest of points if they believe that there is danger to their stocks.

A comparison has been made with the speed of settlement in another outbreak. I hope that my hon. Friend will appreciate that the time taken to settle such detailed and complex issues depends essentially upon local factors. It is not possible to compare the time taken in one case with another. We are dealing with people and with human judgment. Inevitably, there will be differences between one case and another.

I hope that what I have said will have made it clear to the House that the Government will continue to regard swine vesicular disease as serious. We continue to be fully committed to the objective of trying to rid the country of that scourge, notwithstanding the difficulties. We welcome the full support received from the whole of the agricultural industry to that end.

Unemployment now stands at more than 2½ million, and everyone expects the number to continue to rise substantially. The other day the Secretary of State for Employment admitted that the Treasury unemployment forecast was too low. He refused, when questioned in a Select Committee, to give an undertaking that unemployment would not exceed 3 million in this financial year. He said "It is quite possible". It is indeed possible. It would be surprising if it did not reach that figure. Every day 6,000 people are joining the dole queues. More than 150 companies a week are closing. Forty per cent. of the jobless in Britain are aged under 25, and one-fifth under 20. There are 400,000 people who have been out of work for more than 12 months.

By November 1980 output in manufacturing industry was at its lowest level since 1967. Unemployment has spread throughout the country. It has risen in my region in the West Midlands faster than in any other part of Britain, including Northern Ireland. Manufacturing industry has been so hard hit—indeed, devastated—that that is hardly surprising.

I wish to quote some figures for short-time working which were given to me in answer to questions. I asked for a comparison of the figures for May 1979 and the latest available date. In the West Midlands in May 1979 there were 3,604 on short-time working schemes. In February this year there were 127,064. That rise in short-time working happened in one region. In the Black Country, in the West Midlands—my constituency falls within that area—1,846 people were on short-time working in May 1979. The latest available figure is 40,203. In my borough of Walsall, 12 people were on short-time working in May 1979, and in February this year the figure had risen to 9,802.

What about job vacancies in the West Midlands? Again, I shall refer to figures supplied to me by the Minister. In May 1979, when the Labour Government left office, there were 16,069 vacancies. In April this year the number has been reduced to 6,435. So much for the talk occasionally heard about people not wanting to work and that some unemployed may be genuine but others are not.

Where are the job vacancies in the West Midlands, especially for the redundant workers from the engineering and other related industries? How many jobs are now being lost? How many of my constituents, having been forced on to the dole queue, will wait months, perhaps years, before they obtain another job? Some of my constituents in their late fifties may never work again. That is the bleak situation. According to the latest available figures, there are 75,000 people over 45 years of age who are jobless in the West Midlands and 50,000 under 20 years of age. If the Rover plant at Solihull closes, the situation in the West Midlands will worsen.

That is the background against which the people's march for jobs is now taking place. The march has been organised by the North-West, the West Midlands and the South-East regional councils of the TUC. It is a march from Liverpool to London. It set out on its way on 1 May. Last Friday I had the honour of joining the march when it came through Walsall. We marched about six miles from the outskirts of the town to the town centre. The Bishop of Lichfield joined us and we were pleased to see him. My parliamentary colleague, my hon. Friend the Member for Walsall, South (Mr. George), accompanied us.

During the six-mile walk to the centre of the town I believe that there was not one hostile remark made by onlookers. However genuine a march, one would expect some onlookers to jeer a little because of their political views—for example "Why don't you go back to work?". I should have been surprised if there had been many such jeers and hostile remarks. However, I believe that not one hostile remark was made.

Why? I believe that when the public saw the marchers they remembered the devastation that has come to the West Midlands and the Black Country areas in the past 18 to 20 months. They know and understand that the marchers are the conscience of the nation. That is their reaction whatever their political views. The marchers are the nation's conscience in fighting against the return of mass unemployment. That is my explanation of why there was not one jeer and not one hostile remark from any onlooker.

Today the marchers will be in Northampton, and I shall have the pleasure of joining them and speaking at the rally which is to take place. I understand that it has been organised by the Northampton trades council. The final rally will take place in London on 31 May. I am sure that there will be a tremendous turnout and a tremendous amount of sympathy from those in London and from the surrounding areas to greet the marchers and to give them the same warm reception that they have had in the rest of the country. I am sure that London will do its duty on 31 May.

There are 500 long-term marchers. They are the ones who have been marching from 1 May. They will be coming to London at the end of the month. The marchers are a cross-section of trade, industry, age, race and sex. When I was marching last week I was in the second row. Ahead of us was a disabled person—and this year is the International Year of Disabled People. He was being pushed in his wheelchair by one of his colleagues on the march. He reflected those who suffer because of their disabilities, especially at a time of high unemployment. On each day of the march the long-term 500 have been complimented by thousands of supporters in each town along the route.

The Government's economic policies have done much to create the present crisis. There has been a tight squeeze on credit and, reduced demand because of tax increases and spending cuts. The over-valued pound has created many difficulties for those trying to export. We have had record interest rates. We have had a monetarist policy that can be said without exaggeration to have been a nightmare for the British people. When I fought, alas unsuccessfully, in a by-election in the autumn of 1976 for my present constituency, I made the prophecy that if a Thatcher Government came into office there would be 3 million unemployed. Unfortunately, it seems that my prophecy is turning out to be only too true.

The Government have already cut back the employment and training services. They now intend to reduce or abolish the industrial training boards. The cuts in the manpower services programme have meant closures of skillcentres and there will be staff reductions in jobcentres.

The employed have been hit. These are the men and women who are the victims of the Government's monetarist policy. They have been hit because unemployment benefit did not keep pace with inflation. It was allowed to fall behind by 5 per cent. The unemployed have been hit because the earnings-related unemployment supplement is being phased out. It will be abolished next January. The Minister may not appreciate the assistance which those who became unemployed received as a result of the supplement. It did not mean that they had the same income as when they were in employment, but it provided some cushion, some assistance, when they were faced with being on the dole queue. What possible justification could there have been for the Government to abolish the supplement?

If an individual exhausts his unemployment benefit and is unable to get a job within 12 months, he may claim supplementary benefit if he does not possess more than £2,000. If either the claimant or his wife has more than that sum, they will not get a penny. A man who is made redundant after some years in employment may have some savings and may save his redundancy money. A constituent wrote to me who was made redundant in his late fifties. He told me that he and his wife hardly ever went on holiday and had saved for their retirement. They were not to know that the husband would be made redundant in his late fifties. He will not receive a penny in supplementary benefit once his unemployment benefit is exhausted. He will have to spend it all before he receives a penny.

These are measures taken by a Government who only last week, by making changes in capital transfer tax, enabled the very rich to transfer their wealth and assets without any tax provided that the transfers took place within 10 years. I am not waging class war. It is the Government who are doing so. It is those whom I represent, and many like them who are represented by my right hon. and hon. Friends, who have been penalised and discriminated against by a Government who, in my opinion, are as reactionary as the Chamberlain Government of pre-war days.

I asked the Prime Minister whether she would receive the organisers of the march. It is known that the right hon. Lady replied "No". I find it difficult to accept that that reply was drafted by civil servants. It seems so characteristic of the Prime Minister. Why is she so high and mighty that she will not receive the marchers? I know that the Secretary of State for Employment will do so. It is perhaps an indication of the support that the march has received throughout the country that a Cabinet Minister is to receive the organisers. However, I hope that the Prime Minister will do so. It is her policies that are largely responsible for the unemployment from which we are now suffering. She is the first to defend those monetarist policies inside and outside the House. Why does not she defend them to the victims of monetarism? I hope that even at this late stage the Prime Minister will agree to meet the organisers of the march.

In his reply the Under-Secretary of State may wish somewhat to dismiss the march. He may have read about political affiliations. However, the march is not a sinister Left-wing plot. There are many on the march who are not particularly political. I accept that there are some who are. I would hardly wish to deny that. There are some who are not. The onlookers who have given the marchers such a rousing reception, from Liverpool to London, are not political so much as against mass unemployment. The bishops and the clergy have given support. Perhaps some of the clergymen voted for the Government, but that made no difference to the support which they gave to the marchers.

The Minister should not dismiss the marchers lightheartedly. They represent the best in our country, and the protest against unemployment will continue in one form or another until policies are changed or until, finally, at the next election, the Government are driven out of office because of the people's loathing for mass unemployment.

I listened carefully to what the hon. Member for Walsall, North (Mr. Winnick) said. I appreciate that he is concerned about the present high levels of unemployment. I understand that he is most concerned about unemployment in the West Midlands, particularly in his constituency in Walsall.

I hope that when the hon. Gentleman addresses the marchers this afternoon in Northampton he will correct himself in two respects. He talks about the high level of interest rates and the over-valued pound. Thanks entirely to the good housekeeping policy of the Chancellor of the Exchequer and my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister, interest rates in this country are at the lower end of the scale of all Western countries. The hon. Member also talked about the over-valued pound. I hope that he will be aware that the over-valued pound, which has come down substantially, helps to reduce inflation and means that we can buy raw materials from overseas more cheaply. Despite his saying that the pound is over-valued, the fact remains that our balance of payments surplus has been at record levels. That means jobs.

I come from a constituency in the NorthWest—Chester. It is but a stone's throw from Merseyside and Liverpool. I would be unbelievably blind and callous if I did not see the unemployment in the North-West, particularly in Merseyside, and if I did not desperately care about it. I hope that the hon. Gentleman will give me credit for caring about it. I did not go into politics—nor did any of my right hon. and hon. Friends—to see people without jobs. We want to see full employment, as the hon. Member does. To suggest that we do not care about the situation—he did not say so in so many words, but he nearly did—is both untrue and is not borne out by the facts.

The hon. Gentleman said that a large proportion of those without a job were under the age of 20. I accept that. If we did not care, we would not have a youth opportunities programme. That programme has been expanded this year to 450,000 places. The hon. Gentleman also mentioned the long-term unemployed. If we did not care we would not have a community enterprise programme. About 25,000 of the longer-term unemployed will receive temporary support under that programme.

The hon. Gentleman also talked about short-time employment. If we did not care we would not have the temporary short-time working compensation scheme. Nearly 1 million jobs are being supported under that scheme. That is helping employers to avoid redundancies. The hon. Gentleman may not like that, but it shows that the Government and my right hon. and hon. Friends desperately care.

I accept that certain areas of the country are suffering more than others. The hon. Gentleman will agree, because that is common ground. Merseyside is one of those areas. Certain parts of the West Midlands may be other areas. The Government realise that. I shall tell the hon. Gentleman what the Government are doing for Merseyside. As he knows, the march started from Liverpool. Under the Industry Act Merseyside, as a special development area, is eligible for maximum Government financial assistance. In fact, no area in Great Britain is eligible for more assistance. From May 1979 to March 1981, assistance worth £23·3 million was offered to 105 projects in Merseyside under section 7 of the Industry Act. The estimated employment associated with those projects is over 13,500. In the same period, £125 million was paid out in regional development grants. Under section 8 of the Act, over £1 million has been offered to 94 projects in that area.

The hon. Member will also be aware that in Liverpool we have set up an urban development corporation. It will be based on the Merseyside docks area. It came into being on 25 March this year. An enterprise zone will be established at Speke. I hope that the hon. Gentleman is also aware that Liverpool is an inner city partnership area with a budget this year of £17·6 million.

In terms of special employment measures, people in Merseyside are currently benefiting on the following basis: over 12,000 jobs are being protected under the temporary short-time working compensation scheme; about 1,120 people are benefiting from the job release scheme, and community industry has 638 participants; over 17,000 people in Merseyside entered YOP courses in 1979–80 and 24,700 entered in 1980–81; the provisional allocation for 1981–82 is 33,800.

I hope that the hon. Gentleman accepts that much taxpayers' money—not Government money—is going to an area where there is a big unemployment problem. I accept that it is a big problem. However, the hon. Gentleman may not like the fact—I may be wrong, and I shall be happy to give way if I am—that from the European regional development fund £51·7 million has been put into the Merseyside, Widnes and Skelmersdale special development areas since 1979. The hon. Gentleman may not like that, because he is not an eager supporter of the Common Market. However, the Common Market has substantial advantages because of the funds that are available. I can assure the hon. Gentleman that if we were not a member millions of jobs would go, thanks to the lack of trade that would result from our withdrawal.

The march left Liverpool on 1 May. Therefore, it is now in its twenty-second day. I shall give the hon. Gentleman one or two figures to demonstrate that the Governmemt are doing everything within their power to make sure that unemployment is not as bad as it otherwise might be. In the last 22 days the Government have given the British Steel Corporation £77 million. That has meant the preservation of jobs. Over the year it will be £1·2 billion. In the last 22 days the Government have given to British Leyland £18 million. In the same period they have given British Shipbuilders £15 million and Rolls-Royce £7 million. Other industries have been given money, but those four industries alone receive nearly £2 billion from the taxpayer. In the past 22 days they have received over £100 million. We are also spending nearly £1 billion on special employment measures, and since the march began the amount spent has been over £60 million.

The Government will not throw more pounds at problems, because the country simply cannot afford it. I hope that when the hon. Gentleman speaks to the marchers in Northampton tonight he will put the other side of the balance sheet and explain how Labour will create jobs. If he intends to put more money into the system, where will it come from? Over the past 25 years Governments have spent too much money, which is why we are in our present predicament.

Will the hon. Gentleman deal with the money spent on giving the unemployed a minimum existence, which will increase as unemployment increases? Also is it likely that by the end of the year 3 million people will be unemployed?

I shall deal with those points in due time.

I was explaining that throwing pounds at problems does not necessarily solve them. I hope that the hon. Gentleman will draw attention to the Lambeth authority and the new Greater London Council, both of which may create unemployment by throwing pounds at problems, as the money will have to be raised by substantially increased rates, which will drive industry away. Cheshire, Merseyside, Greater Manchester and Lancashire now have Labour-controlled authorities. The marchers should ensure that they do not spend money that commercial and industrial ratepayers cannot afford. If they do, the industry that we are attracting to those parts will be driven away.

The picture is not half as bleak as the hon. Gentleman and some politically motivated people would have us believe. He did not tell the House that last month 270,000 people found jobs. In the North-West last year 700,000 people left the unemployment register. In the West Midlands, around Coventry and Birmingham, with which the hon. Gentleman is understandably concerned, last year 450,000 people left the unemployment register. In his own area of Walsall the number was 40,000. What is more, nine out of 10 of last year's school leavers have now found jobs. It does not help to stir the pot.

The hon. Gentleman did not compare the march with the Jarrow march in 1936, although it has been so compared. Those who organised the earlier march would not recognise this one. InThe Times of 14 May the Venerable Harvie-Clark stated:

"Sir, Mr. Hughes quotes Ellen Wilkinson on 'What good do such marches do?"'—

Ellen Wilkinson was the Member for Jarrow—

"Perhaps we ought to remember that she wrote:

'The Jarrow march was kept irreproachably "non political" by David Riley whose powerful frame marched at the head of our column…with a certain humour, the march committee had sent ahead as our advance agents the two political agents for the division, Councillor Suddick, the Conservative, and Harry Stoddart, the Labour agent.'

Mr. Len Murray and Mr. Scargill, please note."

As the hon. Gentleman may know, that march was even disowned by the national Labour Party and the TUC. The marchers were protesting simply about what happened to their town, where unemployment was far higher than it is anywhere today. Their protest was led by local representatives. Understandably they attracted much sympathy, not least because they fully co-operated with the authorities along the way, which I believe the current marchers are also doing.

Many who have identified themselves with the aims of the march and spoken in its support have done so from honourable motives. They are concerned about high unemployment. However, as the hon. Gentleman admitted, some of those closely involved with promoting and organising the march have less charitable motives, and many hold opinions on a range of other issues with which I doubt that the hon. Gentleman would wish to be associated. At least, I hope that he would not.

We are entitled to ask whether Opposition Members believe that in a parliamentary democracy such marches are the right way to seek to influence Government policy. We are prepared to listen to anybody who has constructive suggestions to deal with unemployment, but we are under no obligation to encourage those who see unemployment simply as a handy stick with which to beat the Government, or see the march as an opportunity to parade their divergent political philosophies. I do not for one moment believe that doing so would be in the interests of the unemployed.

TheMorning Star reported the hon. Member for Bedwellty (Mr. Kinnock), who speaks for the Opposition from the Front Bench, telling the march:

"'we've got to win' in the struggle for social change and for Socialism."

It appears that the hon. Gentleman was playing at politics with people's lives, which I do not applaud and which I hope the hon. Member for Walsall, North does not applaud.

It would be a betrayal of the real interests of those whom the marchers claim to represent for the Government to give way to demands for a change of course. Such changes were made in the past, and proved wrong. It is easy to protest. The call for change and dramatic action is seductive, especially in hard times, and I can understand why people have joined the march. However, the hon. Gentleman and some of his hon. Friends are misguided if they give false hopes to the unemployed. The efforts of the union representatives who organised the march would be better spent in trying to reach serious agreements with employers to make industry more competitive, which would be to the advantage of every worker in industry. That is a less glamorous, more difficult and demanding approach, but it is far more constructive.

As the hon. Gentleman mentioned, the Prime Minister has said that she sees no purpose in meeting a delegation from the march. She has Secretaries of State in many different areas and it seems to me perfectly appropriate and totally right that my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Employment should meet the marchers. As the hon. Gentleman knows, my right hon. Friend has agreed to do that on his return from America on 1 June.

I can only say to the hon. Gentleman—I hope that he will repeat this at his meeting this evening—that when the delegates from the march meet my right hon. Friend I hope that they will put forward constructive proposals showing how they see jobs—and I mean real jobs—being found and will not be purely negative in their approach.

I am grateful for the chance to raise the subject of safety standards in airliners. Before I turn to the main burden of my speech, perhaps I should declare an interest, to the extent that I am deputy chairman of the all-party air safety group.

This year, as in so many other years, many millions of our fellow countrymen and many Members of the House will fly in airliners on business, on parliamentary work, or perhaps just on holiday, making their way to the resort of their choice. They will board their aircraft and fasten their seat belts, knowing that their duty-free liquor is under their seats—or perhaps, if the steward is not looking, in the locker above their heads—and they will assume that, apart from the very unlikely event of the aircraft being involved in a crash, they will reach their destination safely a few hours later.

It says much for the overall safety of civil aviation today that in most of our minds the thought of a crash will be a very remote possibility. Perhaps, immediately after take-off, when the light comes up to tell us to unfasten our seat belts, we shall relax into our seats without a further thought of what may befall us. Indeed, the figure of three fatalities per 1 million passengers boarded emphasises how safe flying has become.

Yet if flying, by and large, is as safe as I have indicated, and if the accidents that we worry about are those rare tragedies in which the aircraft crashes and there are no survivors, that does not mean there are not a number of accidents of a less dramatic kind in which there are fatalities and serious injuries. In discussing safety standards in airliners it is about those accidents and casualties that I wish to speak.

Frankly, I do not believe that the Civil Aviation Authority, which governs the regulations and safety standards of our airliners, insists upon the highest safety measures that could be achieved. I say that because although, as I have stressed, the number of fatalities is still small, accidents happen and people are injured. As we move towards ever-larger aircraft, such as the 650-seater super—jumbo, an aircraft accident—whether of the total disaster nature or something smaller—is likely to produce a greater number of casualties unless we take safety rather more seriously, in the terms to which I shall refer.

Most of us imagine that the integrity of the aeroplane and the engines are the governing safety factors in an aircraft. In fact, as the Cranfield Institute of Technology pointed out in a study in 1976, although over the past 20 years airliners have become larger and stronger, with more efficient engines using safer aviation fuel, the accident survival rate has not altered even in those crashes in which there could have been a high presumption of survivability.

Between 1969 and 1978 there were 16 survivable crashes, in which 419 people died. But on 19 August 1980, 301 people, including the crew, died as a result of a cabin fire in a Saudi-Arabian Lockheed Tristar at Riyadh airport. That was a survivable accident, but there were no survivors. When the cabin fire was first reported, the aircraft was 50 miles from Riyadh. It was able to return to the airport, make an absolutely safe landing, and taxi to a halt. Yet nobody got out of the aeroplane. Everybody was killed. I shall return to the source of that accident later, but it emphasises as well as I know how the point that I seek to make to my hon. Friend, namely, that what should have been a survivable accident, in which most if not at all of the passengers and crew should have been evacuated safely, ended with everybody being killed.

Apart from fire, there are many kinds of aircraft accident that come into the category of survivability. There is the aborted take-off, the overshoot of the runway, or even the aircraft that suddenly finds itself in turbulent weather conditions. In fact, 75 per cent. of accidents occur within three kilometres of the runway, and 71 per cent. of deaths in air transport accidents are due to fire.

Yet from the moment passengers arrive at airports they are almost encouraged to become involved in measures that may seriously prejudice their chance of survival in an accident. From the baggage check-in, when large items of baggage are often allowed to be taken into the cabin rather than having to go into the hold, to the duty free bottles that are bought and taken on board, the hazards multiply. Yet what we allow at Heathrow or at Gatwick in terms of excess baggage, the Canadian aviation authorities refuse to allow at their airports. At the baggage check-in at Canadian airports, only luggage that will go through a certain size of metal hoop may be taken into the cabin. Otherwise, bulky luggage must go into the hold. As the magazineFlightcommented:

"Carry-on baggage can and does kill both directly by hitting people and indirectly by blocking aisles, obstructing exits and generally adding to confusion in an emergency."

What of all the glass bottles, full of alcohol or scent, that we buy at the duty-free shop before embarkation? I know that the British Airports Authority likes to tell us what a money spinning business the sale of duty-free goods is. Indeed, it goes so far as to claim that it makes £34 million annually out of duty-free sales. Certainly, on the way out to London Airport one sees an enormous poster exhorting us to buy before we fly. I wonder whether we are wise to pay any heed to that poster. As the AA has suggested, duty-free may not be the cut-price bonanza that we all imagine, although admittedly that was in a recent article in its magazineDrive and Trail, relating to ferries. I suggest, however, that the way in which duty-free is currently operated provides an unnecessary hazard to air passengers.

Is it really necessary to cram the floor areas and sometimes the overhead lockers in the cabin with duty-free bottles when the airport into which the same passengers are flying will have the same bottles for sale in its duty—free shops? Some years ago it was estimated that on any one day approximately 20,000 bottles of liquor are in transit between the United States and Europe. It seems incredible that we all feel that we must carry a bottle from point of departure to destination when it would be possible to buy the same bottles on leaving the aircraft.

I have raised this matter before in the House. As a result of publicity given to the question that I asked I received a number of letters from people involved in civil aviation. One airline captain, a member of the British Airline Pilots Association, wrote:

"To be forced to travel in an aircraft surrounded by gallons of flammable liquor packed in very fragile bottles seems a quite unnecessary hazard. Not only do the bottles constitute a fire hazard but they are a deceleration hazard since violent deceleration can result in bottle missiles flying through the cabin. They are a rescue hazard in the event of evacuating passengers and a security risk since a broken bottle can be used as a weapon. Unlike most safety problems, there is in this case a very simple solution. That is to allow passengers to make duty-free purchases on arrival instead of at departure. The same quantity of spirits would be imported without duty being paid so Customs should not object. This sensible system has operated very successfully for many years in Iceland and in Singapore. It has now been adopted in Egypt and Venezuela, shortly to be followed by Australia."

One is inclined to ask why, if those other countries can introduce that system, we cannot. Apart from the obvious increase in safety, the purchase of duty-free goods at the airport of disembarkation could be of considerable benefit to airlines in fuel savings. Clearly, they would not have to carry this large additional weight inside the fuselage. The Australian Minister of Transport stated in a news release that airlines operating into Australia, once they had achieved the proposal to reduce the quantity of duty-free brought into the country, would achieve fuel savings of about £89,000 per annum. That release was issued in 1980, so, presumably, the figure is marginally higher today.

I wish that my only concern about airliner safety related to excess luggage and duty-free drink. Alas, it does not. A member of the air safety group of which I am deputy chairman, Dr. John Horsfall, who has been a research assistant at the department of geophysics at Cambridge, has written a number of articles on the safety of aircraft seats and how their present design

"makes it not surprising that fractures of the femur are a disturbing common injury in accidents where the aircraft has a moderately large component of vertical velocity."

He makes that comment because, as he points out, the seat cushions are supported by strips of rubber webbing which fail under comparatively light-weight loads thrusting the passenger down upon the metal structure. Thus the fractured femur.

Dr. Horsfall argues that aircraft seats ought to be tested dynamically as well as statically, and he cites an aircraft seat maker who tested one of his seats on a car seat test rig. The aircraft seat disintegrated completely. It seems extraordinary that someone as distinguished as Dr. Horsfall can make these comments without the CAA, apparently, wanting to take what I should have thought ought to be immediate action to ensure the introduction of the dynamic testing of seats. Further, I shall not be satisfied if I am told that the CAA does not think that adequate test facilities exist, since I understand that one car seat manufacturer has offered to make its test facilities available.

I am told that the covering of the seats is resistant only to scorches from causes such as cigarette burns, but is not in any sense resistant to a cabin fire. Of course, under the seat cover we find our old and dangerous friend, polyurethane foam to which the House has devoted many hours in trying to persuade furniture manufacturers to find a safer alternative. Everyone knows that the foam is highly inflammable and that it gives off dense smoke and highly toxic fumes, which can kill. Although the Airline Users Council drew attention to its concern about the matter only last year, the material continues to be widely used in airline seats on all British airliners. It is estimated that a major cabin fire in an airliner will kill everyone inside within 60 to 90 seconds, assuming that the people cannot get out.

If polyurethane foam were the only foam available for aircraft seats the airlines could be forgiven for purchasing seats made with it. It is not. New materials are being developed here and in the United States. Polyimide resilient foam, for instance, is fire-resistant up to 800 degrees Fahrenheit, and even then it only chars or decomposes. It produces neither toxic fumes nor smoke. It could extend the time available for passengers to escape from a burning aircraft by two to five minutes. It seems a natural choice for new aircraft seats, particularly as it is 50 per cent. lighter than polyurethane foam. However, I am told that British Airways have not specified it for the seats that they are installing in their new Boeing 757 aircraft. They are content to fit polyurethane foam seats.

I know that some listening to this speech may feel it right to ask, if only three out of every 1 million boarded passengers end up as fatalities: am I not making a great song and dance about safety? Anyway, safety costs money, and do not the airlines have to be money-conscious in the highly competitive world of aviation? I accept that safety costs money. One must ask how much the airlines are justified to spend on safety, and what is the price of human life and injury.

I wonder whether we use the argument about money too much. For instance, for at least 15 years all cars in this country have had to be fitted with burst-proof doors. That does not apply to overhead lockers in airliner cabins or to the doors of the galleys, although both lockers and galleys often contain heavy objects, which in some forms of survivable accident will come spilling out into the aisles, or hit people on the head.

Recently, a British-owned DC10 burst a tyre on takeoff. One might say that it was quite a minor accident. Yet the effect of the accident was to make every overhead locker door spring open and whatever was in the lockers come out. In an accident in Athens in 1979, involving a DC8, much heavy material came out of the lockers because the doors did not remain shut.

It is not my intention to spread fear and alarm about flying and its hazards. I wish to underline the fact that flying is a very safe form of travel, but that does not mean that we should sit on our hands and assure ourselves that nothing more needs to be done. New standards and new regulations are required from the Civil Aviation Authority regarding matters such as seat strengths and upholstery, duty-free shopping, excess luggage, and burst-proof locks on locker doors. The question must also be asked whether there are enough fire extinguishers in the cabin and whether the emergency exit marked inside the cabin is also clearly marked on the outside of the fuselage. When an aircraft that has crashed is sprayed with anti-flame foam, the rescue crew will not know unless the doors are clearly marked, where they should be attempting to cut into the fuselage. Only Austrian Airlines, I believe, goes to any trouble with its colour scheme to ensure that emergency exits are clearly marked on the outside.

I do not mention these safety measures freshly today. They are talked about in the aircraft industry. Unfortunately, they do not seem to have penetrated sufficiently into the Civil Aviation Authority or British Airways for either of those State-owned organisations to feel the immediacy that I feel. If the cabin fire in the Saudi-Arabian Lockheed Tristar, when 301 people died—no doubt as a result of the toxic fumes from the polyurethane foam in the seats—had happened at London Airport, I do not believe that the Minister would have rested until the accident had been investigated and those responsible for safety standards in our airlines had introduced measures to ensure that this sort of survivable accident really was survivable and did not mean a dreadful death for 301 people.

My hon. Friend the Member for Newbury (Mr. McNair-Wilson) has raised a subject of great public importance and interest, and I am grateful to him for doing so. Air safety is a complex business. Safety is indivisible from aircraft matters, as I shall seek to explain. Safety is the end result of a number of factors and disciplines, all of which have to work satisfactorily if an aircraft is to fly safely from A to B and to carry its passengers safely throughout the journey.

Aircraft need to be airworthy and to be flown by trained and competent crews using approved operational procedures in a safe air traffic control environment and properly-equipped and run airports. A weakness in any one discipline, however small, can destroy the total effect. To achieve safety, one has to start with rules. Aviation is international, and international standards and recommended practices for the safe conduct of aviation have been adopted for world-wide use. They are to be found in the annexes to the convention of the International Civil Aviation Organisation, to which signatory States are bound. These standards provide the basis for the formulation of each country's own more detailed aviation regulations. In the United Kingdom they are contained in the Air Navigation Order 1980, the Rules of the Air and Air Traffic Regulations 1981 and the Air Navigation (General) Regulations 1981.

Aviation is the most tightly regulated of all forms of public transport. Detailed and comprehensive regulations have little meaning if they are not complied with. The task in this country falls to the Civil Aviation Authority, which is statutorily responsible for aircraft safety in the United Kingdom and is staffed and organised accordingly.

The fitness of aircraft to fly is the concern of the airworthiness division. Responsibility for monitoring the safety of airline operations rests with the operations division of the authority. I believe that it will be helpful if I specify more particularly the duties of those divisions, which make such an important contribution to the total concept of safety, and which relate to many of the points raised by my hon. Friend.

Before an aircraft on the British register can fly it must have a certificate of airworthiness granted by the airworthiness division of the Civil Aviation Authority, which issues the certificate only when it is satisfied that the aircraft complies with the British Civil airworthiness requirements—or in these days the joint airworthiness requirements, which is a unified code developed for use in Europe. Certificates are renewed at intervals. The airworthiness division also ensures that a aircraft are properly maintained in service by approving the maintenance organisations and the responsible licensed engineers, and the maintenance schedules to be followed. The division employs highly qualified and experienced experts, both in headquarters and as surveyors in the field. They work in close collaboration with the aircraft manufacturers, airlines and maintenance organisations. British airworthiness standards enjoy a high reputation at home and abroad.

Ensuring the safe operation of transport aircraft is the responsibility of the operations division of the CAA. It carries out the testing, licensing and medical examination of aircrew. Its flight operations inspectorate has particular responsibility for granting air operators' certificates, without which airlines cannot operate, and for checking that each airline is a fit and proper organisation to secure the safety of its operations.

To that end, its flight inspectors—who are themselves licensed and experienced airline pilots—work closely with the airlines for the purpose of monitoring their operations manuals, training schedules, flying records and flight time limitations. In addition, the inspectors fly with their crews. The high standard of operational safety achieved by British airlines overall is a tribute to the airlines and their crews, and to the work of the flight operations inspectorate.

Air safety is not easily achieved overnight, but is painstakingly built up over the years. It requires constant vigilance to maintain the high standards required. Accidents occur when there is a failure in any one of the disciplines, whether through human error, or through the failure of equipment or systems. If we measure safety by the accident record, it is shown that there has been a steady improvement over the years.

One year's statistics can mislead, but averages taken over a period of years can tell a story. In the past 20 years the number of accidents has halved. If we take the number of passengers killed for every 1 million carried on British airlines over a 10-year period, the figure for 1970 to 1979 is 1·76. The figures for the moving 10-year average for the years 1974 through to 1978 are as follows: 4·94, 4·53, 3·39, 2·05 and 1·75. Those figures show a trend towards improvement and underline the figure that my hon. Friend gave. The statistics of fatal accidents per 100,000 stage flights tell a similar story of improvement, but I agreed with the tenor of my hon. Friend's speech when he implied that we should not be complacent about any of the aspects

My hon. Friend referred to particular aspects and to certain incidents. Fire has always been a serious hazard in aircraft accidents. All possible measures are taken to minimise that risk, and much research effort is directed to that end. The most promising avenue of investigation is the possible use of anti-misting additive to fuel, developed by ICI, to curtail the outbreak and spread of fires caused by spilt fuel.

My hon. Friend referred to the accident involving the Saudi Arabian Tristar at Riyadh, in which all the passengers and crew died. That was a dreadful tragedy, but the report is not yet available and it is therefore difficult to comment. It appears that most of the victims died of asphyxiation. The accident investigation was carried out by United States officials and was reported. Our airworthiness division is in close contact with the Federal Aviation Authority, which participated in the investigation. I assure my hon. Friend that the implications of that accident will be considered carefully by representatives of all airlines, including our own.

I emphasise the international aspects of air safety, because each State is responsible, in its own sovereign right, for its own aviation affairs. In securing the safe operation of their public transport aircraft, States are expected to conform to the ICAO standards, and if there were any specific complaint of shortcomings in that respect it would be possible to make appropriate representations on an international basis.

My hon. Friend referred to aircraft furnishing materials. All fabrics and cabin furnishings used in aircraft have to satisfy the flammability specifications of British civil airworthiness requirements, which require that materials have to be self-extinguishing. Nevertheless, all organic materials will burn if temperatures are high enough.

Considerable effort and money have been spent on research to develop furnishing materials that will meet more stringent requirements, not only in respect of flammability, but for smoke emission and toxicity. I appreciate the importance of the factors that my hon. Friend underlined. Progress is being made in finding better materials to satisfy those more stringent requirements. A promising material named polyimide has been developed by International Harvesters, but I understand that it is difficult to manufacture in quantity, and that may account for the supply problem to which my hon. Friend referred. I also appreciate the importance of my hon. Friend's general reference to fire hazards connected with seating materials.

I emphasise that the duties of the CAA and how they are discharged are subject to review by the Air Registration Board, an independent body comprising representatives of the aviation industry, including manufacturers, airline pilots, insurers and representatives of the CAA, who advise and are consulted by the board on matters connected with airworthiness standards. It can be seen that the CAA is not a law unto itself. The board reviews its activities in accordance with the best advice that it is possible to receive.

I shall draw the attention of the CAA to the points raised by my hon. Friend. I appreciate that he dealt with a number of matters, including overhead lockers, luggage, and the various arrangements made at airports to serve passengers. They will all be given careful consideration by the CAA.

I assure my hon. Friend that there is no sense of complacency on the part of my noble Friend the Under-Secretary of State for Trade, who has ministerial responsibility for aviation matters. There is an awareness in my Department of the need for constant vigilance and of the need to search for higher standards to ensure a higher degree of safety and convenience wherever possible. I am very grateful to my hon. Friend for raising these important matters.

In seeking to draw the attention of the House—but more particularly that of the Home Office—to the conduct of the Metropolitan Police in the case of Mr. Geoffrey Mariner, I am motivated more by frustration and sorrow than by anger. Nevertheless, I am very angry at the way in which the law appears to have operated in the case of my constituent.

I accept at once that the Home Office is not directly involved in the matters that I am raising and that there are procedures that the Minister and the Secretary of State have to follow, but this is the only way in which I can seek to draw the matter directly to the Secretary of State's attention and have a personal exchange on it.

Although I shall be critical of the manner in which the police appear to have behaved, I hasten to add that I hold the Metropolitan Police in very high regard. In particular, the forces of Y Division, operating in Enfield, now under Chief Superintendent Goodson, and at Edmonton, now under Chief Superintendent Markham, have proved over the years to be first-class protectors of the peace and to have served my constituents well.

Mr. Geoffrey Mariner and his brother Philip had lived at 72 Park Avenue, Bush Hill Park, Enfield, for many years. They were industrious and hard working. Even when they were into their late sixties—as they were in 1979—they still went to work.

On Sunday 24 June 1979 the brothers were having a late tea when they heard a noise at their door. Geoffrey reached it in time to see a hand withdrawing through a broken glass door. On opening the door, at first no one could be seen, but then he saw a person crouching by the bay window. In the ensuing struggle the intruder lashed out and stabbed at Mr. Mariner with a large pair of scissors. Mr. Mariner was cut on his arm and then stabbed above his eye. Mercifully, his eye escaped damage, but it was a very close thing.

Subsequently, a man was captured and charged. Mr. Mariner and his brother were interviewed, and they then received a witness order ordering them to attend and give evidence at the trial. A part of that notice—with which the Minister will be familiar—read:

"You should enquire of the police officer in charge of the case when you will be required to attend the court of trial".

Mr. Mariner went to Enfield police station immediately and spoke to the officer in charge of the case. He was assured that he would be given ample warning, and he was told to go away. All this took place in June and July 1979. No other approach was made to Mr. Mariner.

I now move on to January 1980. An issue of the local newspaper, theEnfield Gazette & Observer, dated 24 January, carried the headline

"Burglar gaoled for two years."

The report stated:

"A man who stabbed an elderly resident in the face when disturbed in a burglary was gaoled for a total of two years at the Old Bailey on Wednesday".

The Wednesday refers to 16 January.

It was two further paragraphs in that account that caused great shock and dismay to Mr. Mariner. They said that the burglar

"pleaded not guilty to further charges of committing burglary while armed with an offensive weapon and not guilty to malicious wounding."

I hope that the Minister will take careful note of the following paragraph:

"The prosecution told Judge Lewisohn that the pleas of not guilty were accepted by the Crown because the victim had since moved house and could not be traced and so would not be giving evidence."

Mr. Mariner, who had this newspaper account drawn to his attention on 26 January, was justifiably thunderstruck. He had lived continuously at No. 72 Park Avenue, and his home had at all times been in occupation. He went immediately, on Saturday 26 January, to Enfield police station and asked to see the officer concerned. He knew his name and, of course, I know it, as does the Minister, and I shall not repeat it in the House. He was not available, but Mr. Mariner spoke to the desk officer and told him of his agitation. He was asked to return on Monday 28 January to see the officer, which he did.

The officer told him that in the late afternoon on Wednesday 15 January he has received a call to say that the case would be dealt with at the Old Bailey the next day, 16 January. The officer was about to go off duty, but he left instructions about informing Mr. Mariner. Attempts were made that night to inform Mr. Mariner, but no response was obtained to repeated heavy knocks on the door. A further attempt was made in the early morning of 16 January. The officer said that inquiries showed that the house appeared to be empty and not occupied.

I entered the picture when Mr. Mariner came to see me on 15 February. I was appalled by what I learnt. As the Minister will know from his files, I wrote to the Home Secretary on 18 February setting out this astounding series of events and asking him to investigate the matter fully. His files will show that it was five weeks later—24 March—before the hon. and learned Gentleman's noble Friend Lord Belstead replied, after a reminder from me advising him that the matter was one for the Commissioner of Police.

I wrote immediately on 26 March to the Commissioner. It was not until 3 October, more than six months later, that I received a reply from Sir George Ogden, deputy chairman of the Police Complaints Board. That letter and subsequent correspondence that I have had with him and with the noble Lord have caused my constituent and myself great unease and have prompted me to raise questions to which I hope the Minister will get answers that we have failed to get.

The first area of unease relates to the manner in which witnesses such as Mr. Mariner are kept informed about a matter which in Mr. Mariner's case could have cost him his life. I find it deplorable that this matter should have been disposed of without Mr. Mariner hearing anything about it. May we be told how this happened.

I am informed that the officer in charge of the case received his orders as he was going off duty. He made arrangements about informing his witnesses, including Mr. Mariner. I accept without qualification that those endeavours were set in train. But, in the event, they failed.

I am told that after attempts to contact Mr. Mariner that night, a further attempt was made the following morning. It is this aspect of the matter that causes Mr. Mariner and me most disquiet. Let me quote again from Sir George Ogden's letter:

"The officer whose duty it was to assign someone to go to Mr. Mariner's house in the morning states that he did so and that the officer reported being unable to gain a response."

We should take careful note of this:

"It has not been possible to identify and interview that officer as the relevant records have been destroyed."

Let me spell out the nature of my unease. Mr. Mariner was in his home that night, and never left his home until 9.30 the next morning. His neighbours, whom I have seen, confirm that. No one can be found who spoke to any police officer that night or that morning, yet the court was told by the prosecution that Mr. Mariner had since moved house and could not be traced. We are then told that the officers who passed this information on to the prosecution cannot be traced as the records have been destroyed.

Why and how were they destroyed? Again, Sir George Ogden writes:

"In January 1980 Enfield police station was taking part in a pilot scheme preparatory to the adoption throughout the Metropolitan Police District of a computerised system of recording messages, allocating them to officers to deal with, and noting the outcome. Records of these messages and the associated action were kept for 31 days then destroyed. It was therefore simply a result of the practice then current that the January records had been destroyed when you wrote on 26th March. This will be no comfort to Mr. Mariner, but you may like to know that, as a result of his complaint, the period of retention has since been extended."

I want the Minister to take careful note of those dates. A record was made on the morning of 16 January that an officer had been deputed to warn Mr. Mariner. We are told that that record was destroyed after 31 days—16 February. Sir George says that the officer insists that someone was allocated to attend, but he cannot remember who. When Mr. Mariner called at Enfield police station and expressed his intense distress and anger to the officer in charge—I have his name—those records, I am told, were still in Enfield police station. How was it possible for those records to be destroyed after that officer was fully alerted to the distress of my constituent? Will the Minister attempt to give an answer about that problem?

At no stage had there been any attempt to contact Mr. Mariner after the trial, no moves to confirm the hurried assumption that he was no longer living at 72 Park Avenue. I am mindful that Enfield police station is as busy a station as one will find, and I am aware that this matter may not figure high in the order of priorities of a busy station with hard-pressed officers, but I suggest that, far too often, police officers are less then sensitive to the fact that what to the police is just one incident in a busy day is for members of the public a worrying, frightening personal burden. This is an illustration of less than adequate thought being given to a victim of violence.

Sir George Ogden told me that the charges were originally listed for hearing on 6 September 1979, but

"It was thought"—

I repeat "It was thought"—

"at that stage that there would be guilty pleas to all charges, and, as Mr. Mariner was not required to attend, the officer in the case did not wish to trouble him unduly."

How about letting Mr. Mariner decide for himself whether he wanted to attend? How about telling him, after 6 September, what was intended? To treat in such a cavalier manner a man whose life has been in grave danger is very shabby treatment indeed.

We now come to the trial. I am told that it was with little more than 12 hours' notice, overnight, that Enfield police were told that the case would be heard at the Central Criminal Court. I am further told that that is not unusual, due to pressure on the courts and the late opportunity to hear a case due to a late withdrawal. Surely our system of justice cannot be allowed to rest on such capricious whims of fortune. In this instance it led to the most unfortunate string of events. Will the Minister comment on that aspect of the matter?

The final aspect of this unhappy matter is the manner in which victims such as Mr. Mariner reach the end of their traumatic experience with the feeling that they are treated in a very offhand way by the police and the system.

Mr. Mariner sustained dreadful injuries. He was not advised of the court hearing. He was not advised of the second court hearing. He failed to obtain satisfactory answers to the extraordinary series of errors that led to the court being told that he had left his home. As a result, his attacker escaped two serious charges. He waited almost nine months, only to be told that no officer involved would face disciplinary charges.

I shall look directly at the Minister as I say my next few words. Mr. Mariner is not a vindictive man. He has not sought compensation. All that he wanted was a satisfactory explanation. His reply from the complaints board was:

"The Board agree with the Deputy Commissioner"

—namely, that no disciplinary action can be taken,—

"while sharing in his regret that circumstances should have conspired to produce a situation in which Mr. Mariner was bound to feel that he was treated with less than adequate understanding and consideration."

Why not state that Mr. Mariner was treated with less than adequate understanding and consideration? Why not express regret that he had been treated in that way? Why not use the word "sorry" and apologise? Sir Robert Mark had something to say about that aspect of the complaints procedures.

I acknowledge that the board was in some difficulty, largely because of the curious circumstances arising from the destruction of the vital record, but I consider that relations between public and police would be much improved if police procedures allowed more sympathetic letters to be sent to complainants I am not in any way asking for admissions of either guilt or error that have not been borne out by an investigation. Sympathy for Mr. Mariner from the Minister would do much to restore his faith in our system of redressing grievances.

I am grateful to the hon. Member for Edmonton (Mr. Graham) for having raised and explained so thoroughly an issue that he properly brought to the House on behalf of his constituent, Mr. Mariner. To express sympathy for Mr. Mariner, as he asked, is much the easiest part of my task today, and one which I fulfil readily.

Mr. Mariner may feel that he has been treated in a manner that falls far short of satisfactory. I hope that it is some mollification to him to know that he still lives in a country where such a matter can be brought to the Parliament of the land and be answered by a Minister of the Crown. I readily acknowledge that it is my responsibility to do that.

I fully appreciate the hon. Gentleman's concern about the handling of his constituent's case. I can well understand Mr. Mariner's feelings on discovering that the court had disposed of the assault part of the case against his assailant without conviction and, therefore, without imposing a penalty because Mr. Mariner—through no fault of his own—had not been in court to give evidence. Although it will be of little comfort to Mr. Mariner, I think that the police are also less than satisfied with the outcome.

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for what he said about the Metropolitan Police force in general, and about the officers of Y division who serve his constituency. Those observations will be noted and received with gratitude. I am sure that they are well deserved.

The hon. Gentleman put the case clearly, and I think that it will assist the House if I explain the background. A number of factors combined to produce an unfortunate result. There is a large backlog of cases awaiting trial in the Crown courts. That in itself is a product of the increasing number of crimes committed, especially in the Metropolis and in the South-East. The courts are under pressure.

Secondly, the case in which Mr. Mariner was involved could not be finally set down by the court authorities for trial for some considerable time. In the event, the police were given less than 24 hours in which to warn the witnesses to attend court. I understand from the Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis that their efforts to notify Mr. Mariner were not successful. In the absence of Mr. Mariner's evidence, the accused person's plea of not guilty to the assault side of the case was accepted.

I understand also from the Commissioner that the prosecution's request for an adjournment for the case to be tried was refused by the judge, but that before disposing of the case the judge commented that if a conviction had been secured the sentence that he might have thought appropriate for that offence would have made little difference to the total penalty imposed in respect of the other offences to which the accused had already pleaded guilty, in respect of which he was sentenced to a total of two years' imprisonment. From this I deduce that a concurrent sentence would probably have been imposed so that the man would have served no more, or little more, than two years in all.

The judge also refused an application by counsel for the prosecution for compensation to be granted to Mr. Mariner in respect of the attempted burglary and the injury that he sustained. In doing so, however, he made no criticism of the police for the failure to bring Mr. Mariner to court. These matters of judicial discretion are entirely for the court to consider and decide. It would not be appropriate for me to make any comment on them.

As hon. Members are aware, my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary has no power to investigate complaints against the police. However, Parliament has provided for an independent system of investigation of complaints made against the police as a safeguard against the Executive leaning, for example, upon a proper investigation of matters that might prove to be embarrassing. I am certain that that is a right and proper piece of legislation for Parliament to have passed.

Under the Police Act 1964 and the Police Act 1976 responsibility rests with the chief officer of police concerned, the Director of Public Prosecutions where the complaint might involve a possible criminal offence, and the Police Complaints Board. Accordingly, as the hon. Gentleman has said, when he wrote to the Home Secretary complaining on Mr. Mariner's behalf about the Metropolitan Police, he was correctly advised by my noble Friend the Under-Secretary of State of the relevant statutory procedures and advised that he should forward the complaints to the Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis. In other words, he was told that the Home Secretary, to whom the hon. Gentleman had naturally written, had no jurisdiction to investigate the matter.

I understand from the Commissioner that the subsequent investigation established that steps had been taken to warn Mr. Mariner to attend court once the date of the trial was made known to the officer in the case, late the previous day. Two officers made three calls at his house during the evening but were unable to obtain a reply. They gained the impression that the house was empty. I have noted what the hon. Gentleman said about none of the neighbours recalling any conversation with a police officer at that time. However, one way or another the officers gained the impression that the house was empty.

On the third visit, it was thought too late to disturb the neighbours with inquiries. The officer considered that to dispose of the matter merely by leaving a note would not have been satisfactory. She decided to call again later but then herself became involved in an arrest and was unable to return. However, she said that she made arrangements for someone to come the following morning. The officer whose duty it was to assign someone to attend Mr. Mariner's house in the morning said that he did so and that the officer concerned reported being unable to gain a response.

I understand that it has not been possible to identify and interview that officer, who was the last officer in the chain, as the assigning officer cannot remember who it was and as the relevant records have been destroyed. There is nothing sinister in that destruction. During the period in question the police station concerned was taking part in a pilot scheme in preparation for the adoption throughout the Metropolitan Police district of a computerised system of recording messages, allocating them to officers to deal with and noting the outcome. Records of those messages and the associated action were kept for 31 days and then destroyed. Their destruction was a design feature of the pilot scheme, but I understand that, as a result of the difficulty experienced in this case, the period of retention has been extended.

I noted the point raised by the hon. Member, that when Mr. Mariner made his first complaint at Enfield police station, that was well within the period of 31 days, during which time, under the operation of the system, those records were retained. Therefore, it must follow, as the hon. Gentleman said, that any record taken by the computer would have been available at that time, had it been consulted. That must follow if the system had operated and if the request had been recorded. I make no bones about that. Therefore, I believe that either it was on the record but was not consulted or it was not on the record. That represents the alternatives which are available. When the matter assumed a more serious aspect for those in authority, once the matter had been taken up by the hon. Gentleman, unfortunately by that time the system had ensured that the records were destroyed. I cannot take the matter further. The hon. Gentleman has made a sound point.

Consequently, in the absence of records, it was only by interviewing all the officers on duty at the police station on the evening in question that the two who visited Mr. Mariner's address were identified. Similarly, the officers who had been on duty the following morning were also interviewed, but it was not possible to establish who, if anyone, had been asked to call on Mr. Mariner. In the circumstances, without evidence it was not possible to prove a disciplinary offence against any individual officer. I understand that.

Consequently, the deputy commissioner considered, as I believe the facts obliged him to do, that no individual officer could be identified as guilty of neglect or other conduct which could be made the subject of disciplinary charges. He so informed the Police Complaints Board in submitting to it the report of the investigation and the supporting papers in the case.

I emphasise that the Police Complaints Board is wholly independent of the Metropolitan Police or of any police body. Its purpose is to provide an independent review of the decision of a chief officer of police as to whether disciplinary action should be taken against any police officers. That is worth emphasising in relation to the concluding remarks of the hon. Gentleman, when he said that he felt that the Police Complaints Board could have said that it was sorry. In the correspondence cited by the hon. Gentleman, Sir George Ogden made it clear on behalf of the complaints board that he understood and sympathised with the feelings of Mr. Mariner. However, it was not for the Police Complaints Board to say that it was sorry because it is merely an investigating body and totally independent of the police. I hope that that clears up that aspect.

The Police Complaints Board agreed with the deputy commissioner's view, and the deputy chairman subsequently wrote fully to the hon. Gentleman. Both the deputy commissioner and the board very much regretted that circumstances should have combined to produce a situation in which Mr. Mariner was bound to feel that he was treated with less than adequate understanding and consideration and, moreover, that justice had not fully been done. From what I have said I hope that it is plain that I share their regrets. I regret that a combination of circumstances, the precise nature of which will now never be identified, resulted in Mr. Mariner having a perfectly proper sense of grievance and that the case of alleged assault went, so to speak, by default.

But, however regrettable that may be, there is no way now to reopen the matter. Nor, I am afraid, is there anything more that I can say about the outcome of the investigation into Mr. Mariner's complaints against the police. By reason of the independent statutory complaints procedure, the Home Secretary has no power to intervene in decisions reached by the chief officer, the Police Complaints Board or the Director of Public Prosecutions as the result of investigation of a complaint; nor would it be right for my right hon. Friend to comment on a decision taken by the Police Complaints Board in relation to an individual complaint.

I turn now to the other main aspect of the matters raised by the hon. Gentleman—the question of securing some improvement in the arrangements for listing cases in the criminal courts, bearing in mind the need to warn witnesses. As the hon. Gentleman fairly acknowledged, listing is within the responsibilities of the Department of the Lord Chancellor and not the Home Office. I understand that in the Central Criminal Court—the Old Bailey, the court concerned in Mr. Mariner's case—the date of hearing of a heavy case is usually fixed in advance and all involved are notified. That cannot, however, be done in all cases without considerable loss of court time, and, of course, the more court time that is lost the more time is taken for individual cases to reach their hearing date.

Most cases, therefore, appear in a warned list a certain time before the hearing, and those involved are thus put on notice that the hearing is imminent and that they may be called to attend court at any time in the period of warning. Here I should say that I understand that the police concerned in Mr. Mariner's case undertood at the time of such notice that there were to be pleas of guilty to all the charges, so they took no steps further to warn Mr. Mariner for his future attendance at court.

Is the hon. and learned Gentleman referring to the September or the January episode? From correspondence, it appears that Mr. Mariner was not called in September because the police understood that there was to be a plea of guilty. We are concerned with the warning and the action of the police in the period prior to the 16 January appearance at the Old Bailey.

At this juncture I am referring to the September period, when the matter first came up. Where it is understood that an accused person is to plead guilty, witnesses are not warned to attend, because oral evidence on the facts of the case is not necessary and is seldom taken. That course is normally followed to save witnesses the worry, inconvenience and expense of attending court.

I fully understand that witnesses may not be required by the police in such circumstances, but if I had been involved in such a traumatic matter, even though the police had told me that my presence was not required, I should like to know when the man who had harmed me was to be in the dock, so that I could be in court to watch the proceedings. Material witnesses should be told when the case is being heard, and that they may attend if they wish.

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman. It plainly is possible. I have no doubt that what he has said will be noted by the Commissioner of Police and also elsewhere. I do not think that I can say more than that.

I understand also that the listing arrangements at the Central Criminal Court have recently been reviewed. A warned list is now issued a fortnight in advance, showing all cases expected to be listed for hearing in the ensuing four weeks. Witnesses in those cases are told that they may be called upon at any time in the four-week period to attend court on one day's notice. Great efforts are being made by the judges and staff of the court to reduce its backlog of cases awaiting trial. To maintain the necessary pace of business, it is necessary to fix the date of trial only a short time in advance, but the system of warned lists and the consideration that the court staff give to personal difficulties are intended to reduce inconvenience to members of the public as far as possible.

Efforts are also made, as far as possible, to avoid listing cases for hearing when there is little possibility of their being reached that day—with the result that those concerned, including witnesses, attend court unnecessarily—while striving to provide sufficient work to ensure that courts do not stand idle at a time when strenuous efforts are being made to reduce the backlog of cases awaiting trial. To achieve these aims, it is impossible to settle court lists earlier than one day in advance. This in turn means that it is not possible to give the parties, their legal representatives and their witnesses more than one day's notice of the date of hearing.

Nevertheless, I fully recognise that the position is far from ideal. It is a consequence of the pressure of business in the higher courts, which is particularly acute in the South-Eastern circuit. This is a problem of which all those involved in the criminal justice system are very conscious, not least my right hon. and noble Friend the Lord Chancellor. It has been the subject of discussions involving the judiciary, the police and the legal profession, among others. The Lord Chancellor's Department, in consultation with the Home Office, is continually looking —with some recent success—for ways of improving the speed and efficiency with which criminal cases are processed while protecting the proper interests of both the defence and the prosecution.

I realise that this will make no difference to Mr. Mariner's position, but I hope that it shows that we are not complacent about the problems that arise from the present excessive pressures on the courts, and that we take seriously the question of securing improvements designed, among other things to overcome the kind of difficulties that occurred in the case involving the hon. Member's constituent, Mr. Mariner.

I hope that, having heard the way in which the matter has been opened up and dealt with, the hon. Gentlemen will now feel that at least the matter has been fully investigated and explained. It was regrettable, and I trust that such a thing will not happen again.

I am very grateful for this opportunity to raise the subject of heavy lorries in London in this Adjournment debate. The matter is of great importance to all who live and work in our capital city.

I was disappointed that the Armitage report on heavy lorries made no specific recommendations on lorries in inner cities, and in London in particular.

The environmental impact of juggernauts on our capital is evident to anyone who lives in London. First, there are the fumes. Lorries belch out clouds of black fumes. These are tiny particles of unburnt diesel. Pedestrians have to hold their breath as a lorry goes by in order to avoid a lungful of diesel particles. Then there is the appalling noise caused by heavy lorries. On some roads the peak lorry traffic is at 5 o'clock in the morning, so alarm clocks are redundant for anyone whose bedroom faces on to the road.

Enormous lorries also infringe on other traffic using the roads. Larger lorries are slower than smaller ones, and harder to overtake. When heavy lorries crash or spill their loads—and anyone who listens to traffic bulletins on the radio will know that this happens quite often—the road is often totally blocked.

The Armitage report recommended a number of ways by which lorries could be made less of an environmental menace. For example, the Government should press for an EEC directive on maximum noise levels for new lorries.

These recommendations are to be welcomed. However, I do not think that they will get to the root of London's lorry problem. Quite apart from anything else, the police do not have sufficient resources to enforce the new legislation. Nor will the problem of lorries in London be solved by building more roads. Building more bypasses would have little effect, because only 5 per cent. of all lorries over 16 tons gross weight that enter London have no deliveries or collections to make, but pass straight through.

Building roads actually inside London is not very practical. It requires large-scale demolition and environmental intrusion. The example of the Westway, where the elevated motorway passes as little as 15 metres away from bedroom windows, is completely unacceptable environmentally.

One option that the Government should be considering is a total ban on heavy lorries in London. GLC planning officials have estimated that the cost of such a ban on lorries over 16 tonnes would be £150 million a year. I suspect that a detailed cost-benefit analysis of all the factors involved would reveal a much smaller figure.

Heavy lorries have to be paid for in numerous ways. For example, extra road repairs can be directly attributed to juggernauts; local councils lose rates revenue through properties along juggernaut routes having lower rateable values. Lorries also damage buildings through vibration. A recent Czechoslovakian study showed that houses along juggernaut routes can lose up to half their lives. Finally, lorries cause considerable damage to sewers and water and gas mains. The King report on gas explosions found that heavy lorries were a significant factor in causing the explosions.

There are lessons to be learnt from the way in which other countries have kept the lorry menace out of their capital cities. In Tokyo and Paris lorries over 7½ tonnes and 3½ tonnes respectively are banned even for access. Paris uses the break-bulk or transhipment system, whereby deliveries are taken by juggernaut to an edge-of-town depot. There, all items going to any given destination are consolidated on to a smaller, single, tightly packed lorry.

Garoner is one of the companies operating this system. It has a 178-acre site on the northern outskirts of Paris, with 3 million sq ft of depot space. This totally private sector venture opened in 1967 and had enormous commercial success even before the total ban on heavy lorries in Paris came into being in 1977.

The commercial attraction of the break-bulk system is twofold. First, unloading times and the number of deliveries required for a single destination are both cut drastically. Secondly, over the last 10 years, as lorries have become increasingly larger their average loads have dropped from about 65 per cent. to 50 per cent. Marks and Spencer have used the break-bulk system to great advantage.

London has a far greater need for transhipment centres on its outskirts than has Paris. It has a much larger urban sprawl, with a more difficult road system. Of course, the critics of this proposal will ask where the sites for such operations would be found. I suggest that an enterprising company such as Garoner might begin to search for suitable sites by inspecting the land registers now being set up by the Department of the Environment, which are open for public inspection. The registers contain the first lists of land owned by local authorities, nationalised industries and other public bodies that is either vacant or insufficiently used. My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for the Environment has powers to direct that land is disposed of as appropriate.

Of course, there is a need for road improvement in London—the capital's roads are among the worst in Europe—but that should not be done at the expense of the residents and the environment of the people who live and work in London. Transhipment centres seem to be part of the solution. I look forward to hearing my hon. and learned Friend's view and whether the Government are to do anything about what seems to me an excellent idea.

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Paddington (Mr. Wheeler) on raising such a topical subject. I know that his concern about the effects of the heavy lorry on London will be shared by most of the residents of his constituency and most of those who, like myself, visit or work in the city. The feeling is not confined to London. There is strong reaction to the effects on the day-to-day quality of life that can be caused by the large number of heavy lorries that inevitably use our roads to serve our industry.

I should like to begin with a broad statement of principle on behalf of the Government. I assure my hon. Friend that the Government are determined to ensure that the damaging effects of lorries on the qualities of our lives are reduced. In all our policies we must be careful not to impair the efficiency of our road freight transport in a manner that will lead to damaging effects for industry and increased costs for consumers. Our main aim, however, is to reduce the damage at present caused by heavy lorries. All policies in the Department of Transport—road building, the regulation of lorries and the attempts to help traffic divert from road to rail where environmental gains can be produced—are aimed at reducing the impact on day-to-day life.

I should make it clear that the Government are not responsible for traffic regulations and road building in London, except on a few trunk roads within the GLC boundary a few radial trunk roads that finish at the old LCC boundary, and the North Circular Road. Responsibility for other roads throughout London rests with the GLC and the London borough councils. The Government have an overall responsibility at national level for regulating lorries and lorry traffic.

It was because of widespread concern that my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State decided that a wide-ranging, independent inquiry was necessary, to which lorry operators, national and local organisations and, most important, members of the public could put their complaints, comments and suggestions. My right hon. Friend appointed Sir Arthur Armitage who conducted the inquiry with assessors and heard from over 1,800 individuals and organisations. Many were particularly concerned about conditions in our capital city.

Sir Arthur was concerned mainly with measures that could be applied nationally. He decided that in the time available he was unable to go into detail about specific problems in particular places. However, he visited one or two places in London to see their problems for himself. Some of his recommendations, for instance that on lorry action areas, were made with such areas in mind. There are references in the report—for example, the Archway Road—where conditions are spectacularly bad in London.

Many of Sir Arthur's recommendations relate to possible changes in the construction and use regulations of lorries. They indicate ways in which the Government might be able to help and deal with some of the general points with which my hon. Friend began his speech. My hon. Friend mentioned noise. This is an important source of nuisance from lorries. The Government accept that there is scope for some improvement, and new noise limits have been agreed for new vehicles that will come into use from March 1983. We can also take considerable pride in the fact that a great deal of work has been done in this country to develop a prototype quiet heavy vehicle. This is being examined and is, indeed, in operation at the Transport and Road Research Laboratory. My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State hopes to make a statement soon on the reduction of noise levels at which the Government think the United Kingdom and other EEC member States should aim over the next 10 years or so.

Another problem is vibration. There is some conflict of evidence, however, about the precise extent to which vibration damages buildings.

My hon. Friend also mentioned the important matter of exhaust emissions. The regulations that exist controlling exhaust emissions are probably fairly satisfactory if they can be enforced. A considerable enforcement effort goes into them. My hon. Friend referred to the problem of black particles of carbon in lorry exhausts. This arises if vehicle engines are not properly maintained. I accept, however, that it is a real problem and that there are too many such vehicles about. We hope to strengthen present regulations. We are already considering how to introduce a new objective measurement of vehicle smoke from engines in use.

The Armitage report has attracted a great deal of public attention because of its recommendations on the difficult matter of lorry weights. Sir Arthur Armitage's recommendations as a whole, including those on noise, dimensions and exhaust emissions, as well as those on weights, are designed not only to give economic benefits to industry, but to produce environmental benefits. Some of the initial reaction to the report—including reaction from those with vested commercial interests against the road haulage industry—is understandable. However, I suspect that Sir Arthur and his assessors have been somewhat surprised at the strength of feeling of environmental groups. They would regard themselves as having been on the environmentalists' side. Although we have to decide whether they were correct, the authors of the report believed that their proposals would reduce the impact of lorries on the roads.

It is the report's thesis that an increase in lorry weights, within existing limits and dimensions—contrary to popular belief Sir Arthur made no recommendation that the dimensions should be increased—would allow vehicle operators to be more efficient, but would also lead to a reduction in lorry numbers. Therefore, the Armitage report does not contain a proposition that we should have even bigger lorries on our roads. Indeed, Sir Arthur recommends that there should be strict legal limits on the size of lorries. We are considering whether heavier lorries would reduce the number of lorries, and thereby their effects on traffic and on the environment.

If deliveries and movements within London were carried out by smaller vehicles, one would have to realise that slightly more lorries would be moving around the roads to make essential deliveries to the many factories within the GLC area. It is not for me, or for the Government, to propose how London should solve its lorry problems. That is primarily the responsibility of the GLC and the boroughs. A combination of factors could contribute towards a solution. Road building should help. Within the GLC area there is some trunk road building but London's record of road building in recent years has been poor. The lack of sensible links in some part of the city seems to me, as a provincial visitor, to be only too clear. In such a city traffic restrictions and improvements in lorries must be considered.

Other major cities in the developed world have used a combination of all those methods, namely, road building, traffic regulation and control of the type of lorry moving around in the city, to deal with the problem. My hon. Friend referred to Paris as a good example. In many ways, I agree that Paris is less afflicted by the lorry than is London. Unlike London, Paris has invested in a major motorway ring road, the Boulevard Peripherique, which is just outside the historic city. It has allowed Paris to keep all through traffic out of the inner city.

Contrary to the reports that heavy lorries up to 38 tonnes are banned in Paris, they are allowed access, even within the peripherique motorway, and are not, in general, restricted in the rest of the city. The benefits of the road system have probably kept the numbers down. The only lorries that bother to go into the centre of Paris have an essential purpose. I followed up the reports, which I think my hon. Friend will have seen. In Tokyo, lorries over 7–5 tonnes are prohibited from certain areas at certain times of the day, but they are allowed access at other times.

It is an inescapable fact that there will be a certain amount of essential industrial traffic in a major city. That traffic will have to go in and out of the city to maintain the commercial and economic health of the area and to keep up the level of employment. There are few cities whose economies could survive with a total ban on lorries of the type that is sometimes advocated.

My hon. Friend was attracted by the interesting suggestion that transhipment should be used when dealing with traffic that has to go into the centre of London. We are building the M25 to take the through traffic. My hon. Friend was interested also in the possibility of a break-bulk system—once through traffic has been taken away from London—whereby lorries could unload at transhipment depots on the outskirts. It might be best if they were to do so at locations on or near the M25 orbital route that is under construction. Having broken down the loads, goods could be delivered in smaller vehicles.

My hon. Friend mentioned Garoner. The Government take a general view of the matter rather than the view of one commercial interest, but I have met those concerned with the Garoner project and seen presentations of the arrangements in France. I was impressed, and I could see considerable advantages in the widespread introduction of such arrangements in this country.

There could be commercial advantages for some operators, because such a system could help to reduce vehicle numbers, unloading time and stockholding. Marks and Spencer and other retailers have already adopted a system of consolidation of loads, and various companies are attempting to introduce more general depots, building on the precedent of Garoner in Paris.

Consolidation appears mainly to benefit the retail trade. For example, supermarket chains have depots in London and other major cities to which wholesalers deliver and from which lorry loads of goods are sent to individual stores.

However, consolidation depots do not always lead to environmental improvement. The difficulty lies in finding an acceptable site for such depots. They can lead to a considerable increase in industrial traffic over a wide surrounding area. My hon. Friend the Member for Faversham (Mr. Moate) is aware of that difficulty, because such a problem has arisen in his constituency.

The choice of sites is particularly difficult. I was interested in my hon. Friend's suggestion that those searching for sites, whether they be commercial operators or local authorities considering the possibility of subsequent lorry bans, should use the Department of the Environment's land register. The registers have been set up under the Local Government, Planning and Land Act 1980 and give details of under-used publicly owned land.

My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for the Environment has powers under the Act to order disposal if, for some curious reason, a public sector body is holding on to unused and derelict land. Unfortunately far too much derelict land in inner city areas has turned out to be owned by a nationalised industry or another public body.

Nationally, 33 areas have been selected for registers, and 21 have been published. The London boroughs of Ealing, Southwark, Newham, Tower Hamlets and Wandsworth are to have registers, and those for Ealing and Wandsworth have already been published. They will be a valuable record of the location of suitable industrial land.

The Armitage committee considered consolidation and transhipment of loads and concluded that the arguments for transhipment depots were not so convincing that they had universal application. The committee pointed out that many goods require specialist storing and handling and would not be suitable for transhipment. Petrol is a good example of that, and is also a good example of the benefits of moving to heavier vehicles. There tend to be fixed flows of petrol from point to point and the more that a petrol tanker is allowed to carry, the less frequent will be the deliveries.

We are still considering the Armitage committee's advice that, as a general rule, compulsory transhipment would be expensive and would make the distribution process less efficient. As long as one is selective and realises that there are only parts of the market to which the system could apply, we are interested in what is proposed and we hope that local authorities will take a constructive interest.

All those matters, particularly the building of roads, such as the M25, which we hope will take much heavy traffic out of the London suburbs, and the development of new ideas such as transhipment depots, lead on to the question whether that would enable us to ban lorries from unsuitable roads. That is the particular concern of my hon. Friend, who has in his constituency many such unsuitable roads, suffering from lorry traffic.

Local authorities have some powers and the Government believe that they should be used wherever practicable. That usually means using them wherever there are adequate routes that can serve vital industrial traffic, because that opens the way to a ban being imposed on heavier vehicles using residential roads.

London is already making some progress, and I am glad to say that in March of this year the GLC announced a lorry ban over 50 square miles of North London, which was the first such ban to be made possible by the construction of the M25. It was announced by Mr. Alan Greengross, then the leader of the GLC's planning and communications committee, that this was an experiment. But he said that he was looking forward to a time, by the mid-1980s, when the M25 would form a 120-mile ring round London, giving the opportunity to protect the capital from the impact of many thousands of heavy lorries which otherwise thunder through its streets. He said that the GLC was able to choose—as a result of the progress so far made with construction—areas within the Barnet and Enfield borough council in which to bring in a widespread ban. It was hoped that the scheme would provide better conditions in shopping centres such as Enfield, Barnet, Southgate and similar residential areas.

It is also our hope that as the M25 continues to make progress the opportunity will be presented to local authorities to impose suitable bans in other parts of London.

The new GLC has made rather vague statements about lorry bans. The Labour manifesto talked about banning all lorries if weights were raised. That was a rather ill-thought-out and ill-considered policy—as was a good deal of the rest of the material in the manifesto. However, the Labour Party was successful, and no doubt the new GLC will be facing the practical problems involved. I hope that it will look at the experience and practice of its predecessor. Used carefully and selectively, bans can be introduced, but it is necessary to be careful and selective in order not to cause unnecessary costs for industry. Such costs would be passed on to the consumer.

I agree with my hon. Friend that it is a very serious problem. The debate that has followed the publication of the Armitage report has shown that there is widespread public concern about the problem, and the Government have to accept that we are expected to make some movement on the whole question of reducing the impact of lorries on our day-to-day lives.

We are still carefully considering all 58 of the Armitage recommendations, and have not yet taken a decision on the report. I am glad that my hon. Friend has drawn attention to so many of the positive—and in many cases noncontroversial—recommendations of the report, at which the Government are looking sympathetically. We have to put some of the other more difficult ones in context, because we are all striving to improve the environment without damaging our industry and the interest of the consumer.

The Government will continue to seek the best ways of dealing with the problems caused by lorries, in particular, and we shall come to decisions on the Armitage report as soon as possible. We hope that the local authorities in London, as elsewhere, will continue to look at measures that they can sensibly take in road building and traffic management. The 50 square mile ban introduced recently shows that quite important steps will be practicable in the not-too-distant future. The efforts of Garoner and other commercial companies show that there is no lack of good new ideas within the road haulage industry.

I hope, therefore, that in the not-too-distant future we shall see a good deal of progress in creating conditions in London which will be less unpleasant, less dangerous and less disruptive of people's ordinary lives.

I beg to ask leave to withdraw the motion.

Torture was virtually eliminated from European States at the end of the nineteenth century. Nowadays, however, it cannot be regarded simply as a remnant of a barbaric age. For the past 20 years the incidence of torture in many forms has been spreading over the world in a terrifying way.

Modern techniques are used effectively to increase the pain of torture and the success of those inflicting it. There is especially a misuse of medicine and science to achieve results, and pain can be intensified by those means without actually killing the victims. The torturer is the reverse of the good doctor. He creates and intensifies pain instead of reducing it, and the Nazi experience shows that apparently ordinary people can be turned into brutal sadists.

The International Committee of the Red Cross has described torture as a cancer attacking the very foundations of our civilisation. Democrats fight for the dignity of man. Torture transforms man into a decrepit, spiritless husk without any dignity. Yet torture is commonplace in many parts of the world—for example, in Central and South America but in other parts as well.

We need to use every possible means to fight such a spreading evil, and there are organisations which have been formed to fight it. For example, there is Amnesty International, which deals with 2,000 cases a year and whose members, to their great credit, take the trouble to send scores of thousands of letters to the Governments of countries where persons are incarcerated or tortured. There are committees such as the all-party Parliamentary Committee for Human Rights and the Campaign Against Psychiatric Abuse in the Soviet Union. At an international level, Europe has a Court of Human Rights, and hon. Members often do what they can in company with other Members of Parliament. In the past two or three weeks, I have visited the Romanian embassy on behalf of a Catholic priest and on behalf of miners in Romania, and the Soviet embassy with members of all parties on behalf of the imprisoned Mr. Shcharansky.

Anything which deters even one nation from succumbing to the vile practice of torture has to be supported. Any measure which reduces the scale and intensity of torture anywhere is to be encouraged. The struggle against the use of torture is a fundamental priority in the general struggle for universal human dignity.

But the efforts of individuals and individual organisations are not enough and have not been seen to be enough to reverse the huge growth in the use of torture, so we have to find an international system of implementation capable of doing so.

There have been important international declarations and conventions on human rights in the past, especially since the end of the Second World War. But, sadly, although they have been worth while in setting a general standard, they have been rather toothless in preventing torture. There is the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, which has some value, but since it came into existence the incidence of torture has continued to increase. It has to be said that electric shock torture, which was not practised much before the Second World War, is now common in a number of countries.

What is required is some effective monitoring mechanism to prevent torture practices from continuing or at least to reduce their incidence.

That brings me effectively to the subject matter of this debate and to the basic aspect of it to which I wish to direct attention.

On 19 December 1979 the United Nations General Assembly adopted, in effect, another declaration. It was described as

"a Declaration on the Protection of all Persons from being subjected to Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment."

On the same day, the General Assembly requested the United Nations Commission on Human Rights to study the question of torture and any necessary steps for ensuring the effective observance of that declaration. In 1977, the General Assembly asked the Human Rights Commission to propose a draft convention based on its 1975 declaration.

In 1978, to help with the objective, the Swedish Government, to their credit, unveiled a draft convention at the Human Rights Commission meeting in that year. That draft convention of the Swedish Government, together with another draft prepared by the International Association of Penal Law, was considered by a working group of the Human Rights Commission of the United Nations at its meetings between 1978 and 1980. The matter will be considered again at the thirty-eighth session of the Human Rights Commission in 1982. If accepted there, the convention will be recommended to the General Assembly of the United Nations for consideration, as I understand it, in 1983.

For a convention against torture to be worth while, the key proposals must relate to effective means of implementing the purpose of the convention; otherwise it becomes a matter of mere words. The Swedish Government have made proposals for implementation, but I do not propose to deal with those today because I believe that the International Commission of Jurists has produced a fairly effective method of enforcing the convention.

The International Commission of Jurists is a non-governmental organisation with headquarters at Geneva and is devoted to promoting throughout the world the understanding and observance of the rule of law and the legal protection of human rights. It has consultative status with the United Nations, and its general secretary is Niall MacDermot, QC, a former Member of this House and a former Minister of the Labour Administration in the 1960s.

I have had the privilege of undertaking human rights missions to South Africa and Namibia in years gone by for this remarkable world watchdog organisation in the field of human rights.

The International Commission of Jurists has proposed a draft optional protocol to the United Nations' draft convention already produced by the Swedish Government, and that protocol is based on the ideas of a Swiss lawyer called Gautier and on the experience of the International Committee of the Red Cross in visiting persons detained in prisons throughout the world.

The crunch proposal of the International Commission of Jurists is that an international committee of experts, elected by the States which sign the protocol, should have the power to send its delegates, on a regular basis or as required, to visit places of detention of any kind in territory under the control of the signatory States. The committee would report its findings and recommendations in confidence to the Government concerned. Only in the event of an unresolved disagreement between the particular Government and the international committee would the committee have a discretion to publish its findings in whole or in part.

The beauty of this proposal is that, given the committee's power to visit all places of detention, including interrogation centres and police stations, and, one hopes, psychiatric hospitals—the International Committee of the Red Cross being able to visit none of those—without notice and regularly, the visits would serve to deter torture practices on a casual basis practiced in those places and, where they existed as systematic practices of torture, there would be likely to be a discovery of that systematic torture as a result of those visits.

The beauty, again, of the proposal is that it is a system of prevention as well as a system of investigation. The system initially involves no public attack or accusation against a member State. The Government in question are informed privately of the findings and recommendations of the visiting committee. Therefore, there is less incentive for a Government to refuse to sign the protocol or to delay visits by the committee. Each Government would have an incentive to co-operate in a confidential procedure to remedy abuse so as to prevent later unflattering publication. In other words, if the Government in question against whom a complaint is found to be proved are willing to remedy that abuse and to carry out the recommendations of the committee, no one will hear about those findings. But if they do not, the committee has the discretion to publicise its findings and its unfullfilled recommendations.

The proposals are an extension of the experiences and practices of the International Committee of the Red Cross. As I have said, the differences between visits made by the committee and those made by the Red Cross are that there would be no obligation to give notice of visits in advance, there would be visits to institutions not only at agreed times, but at any time, and visits would have a wider scope and cover not only prisons but all other places of detention. The committee would have the additional power to make its findings public where its recommendation was not accepted. The location of interrogation centres where torture takes place is often kept secret. However, experience shows that the existence and location of such centres becomes known. The committee can demand to visit such an interrogation centre.

The good faith of the Governments in question is crucial. No system of implementation can be fully effective if a Government are determined to render it ineffective. If a Government deliberately delay entry of the committee at their frontiers until torture equipment has been moved, or seek in other ways to delay the visit of the committee to an institution, the inference will be obvious. The committee could expose that obstruction and the inference of torture existing at that institution would be obvious to all.

It is said that few countries will ratify such a convention or protocol. However, the very fact that such an objection is made shows that it is thought that the monitoring procedure will be effective. If it were thought that all countries would sign without any problem, the implication would be that all those Governments had reached the conclusion that it was just another declaration which meant nothing. The extent to which some Governments will object to signing such a protocol shows that they fear that the proposed system of monitoring may have some effect.

If 80 countries have accepted the Red Cross visiting procedure in prisons, as is the case, why should not a substantial number of countries accept an extension of that practice in a new convention? Even if few countries accepted the convention initially, others might do so at a later date. That has been the experience of other conventions. There are already signs that many countries in the Third world are willing to ratify. If a country does ratify, it will prove useful if, at some time in future, a repressive regime succeeds the current regime. That repressive regime might be ashamed to remain part of the convention and protocol signed by its predecessor.

The British Government know all about the negotiations taking place in the committees of the United Nations. I am well aware that the convention and the protocol cannot be signed or enforced tomorrow. A timetable has been set out and it would be churlish of me to accuse the British Government of not having signed the convention, which is still in draft form, or not having signed the protocol, which again is still in draft form. However, I ask the Government to indicate their general policy towards the draft convention and draft protocol submitted by the International Commission of Jurists, and to assure the House that Britain will take the lead—as a place where general human rights have a good record internally—in pushing internationally for the implementation of an effective convention. The precise wording of the convention and the protocol has still to be decided. As I have said, both remain in draft form.

There will be countries seeking to weaken the provisions and there will be other countries seeking to strengthen and extend them beyond mere torture into other areas. I hope that the British Government will be seen not to drag their footsteps. The signing of the Helsinki agreement by some countries, possibly in the hope that that would be the last that they would hear of it, has rebounded on them. Although they do not observe the human rights provisions of the Helsinki agreement, they are never allowed to forget it.

That is an encouragement to those in other countries who are suffering indignity, torture and oppression. That is important to courageous people in different parts of the world who are suffering under various regimes, some military, some Communist, some capitalist and some ostensibly democratic. It is an encouragement to individuals who are fighting lone battles in those countries to know that the issue is being raised internationally.

The United Kingdom has a long parliamentary tradition. It has a tradition of tolerance in areas such as free speech and worship. I should like to see the United Kingdom Government at the forefront of efforts in this area. I read that the Swedish Government prepared the draft convention and that the Costa Rican government submitted the protocol to the convention that was prepared by the International Commission of Jurists. I wanted to see where Britain's name appeared. I wanted to know what Britain was doing. I would be interested to read of any drafts that Britain was preparing. It is my wish to see Britain in the lead.

I ask the Government to outline British proposals to ensure that these worthwhile efforts will come to fruition as early as possible and that Britain will encourage other nations to sign the convention and protocol and use its diplomatic activity to that end. That is the purpose of the debate.

The hon. and learned Member for Bradford, West (Mr. Lyons) has raised an important subject and I am glad that he has done so. I listened carefully to the eloquent and accurate way in which he condemned the use of torture and to the careful way in which he developed his detailed argument. We are all far too familiar with examples and allegations of torture across the world. It must be right that countries and Governments should get together with the support of their publics opinion to try to diminish this evil.

The hon. and learned Gentleman gave an outline of the history of this effort and I shall try to fill in the picture. It was seven years ago in 1974 when the General Assembly asked the Fifth United Nations Congress on the prevention of crime and treatment of offenders to produce rules for the protection of people from torture.

The congress produced a draft declaration which the General Assembly adopted by consensus in 1975. The General Assembly then asked the United Nations Commission on Human Rights to consider ways in which the declaration might be made effective. The commission made a slow start, but at its session in 1978, following a further resolution of the General Assembly, Sweden circulated a draft convention as a basis for the commission's task. Negotiations have been conducted since then on the basis of that Swedish draft, which has been revised from time to time in the light of discussions.

The Commission on Human Rights set up a working group to consider the draft convention. We are represented in that working group. It meets from time to time and so far it has been able to agree ad referendum to Governments on over half of the substantive articles of the convention. We have played an active part in that drafting work in the working group. It is disappointing that more progress has not been made at the most recent session. We are keen to see the convention brought to a conclusion and the completion of a draft so that it can be considered by Governmnents and brought into force at an early date.

I pay tribute to the initiative of the Swedish Government in producing the draft. Valuable contributions have been made by others, for example by the International Associaion of Penal Law and other organisations to which the hon. and learned Member referred.

What are the problems? Why is the work slow? What is our view about those problems? One problem, which was touched on by the hon. and learned Gentleman, is the question of definition. It is important that torture should be clearly and unambiguously defined because if there are inexact definitions in the convention, it is unlikely to be effective when it is carried out and tested from time to time in the courts, or translated into legislation in certain countries. Therefore, it is necessary to distinguish clearly between torture and lesser forms of ill-treatment because the nature of the penalty would differ in the two cases. The experts continue to study that problem of definition.

There is another problem, to which the hon. and learned Gentleman did not refer, but which is worth mentioning as he asked for a full statement of the Government's position. We do not have many opportunities to make such statements. This is the problem of extra-territorial jurisdiction—the extent to which a Government should seek or take jurisdiction over events outside its territory, either committed by its nationals or against its nationals. That is a difficult area. In the light of experience, we are reluctant to extend the scope of our extra-territorial jurisdiction. That may seem tempting at first sight, but there are practical difficulties in obtaining evidence and carrying through jurisdiction over events in other countries in our courts. Those difficulties are great and, therefore, we are not inclined to go down that path more than to a limited extent.

Extradition—seeking to bring back within our jurisdiction people who may have committed offences here—is a better course but again there are difficulties about an automatic obligation to extradite. We have treaties with a number of States, but we feel that we must remain free to judge whether someone who is alleged by another country to be a torturer must be sent back to the country where the offence is alleged to have been committed. One can imagine cases where one harsh regime is succeeded by another and in which we would be reluctant to send back someone accused of torture for the first regime, perhaps to be tortured by the second. It is necessary to examine the practical effects of some of the proposals carefully and to be a little reluctant about some. Those are two areas in which work is still needed.

In the second part of his speech the hon. and learned Gentleman concentrated on the third main problem that remains, which is the crucial question of supervision of implementation. In general, we favour making use of the Human Rights Committee for the supervision. So many bodies are working in the field that sometimes one gets a bit mixed up between them, so it is worth making it clear that the Human Rights Committee, which we believe should be the body to supervise the working of the convention on torture, is distinct from the Human Rights Commission, which is a subsidiary body of ECOSOC and thus of the General Assembly. The committee was set up under the terms of the international covenant on civil and political rights and it already has the duty of considering reports on measures adopted and progress made in achieving the observance of the rights enshrined in it. The committee has 18 members, and the covenant provides that they should be:

"persons of high moral character and recognised competence in the field of human rights, consideration being given to the usefulness of the participation of some persons having legal experience".

The members serve in a personal capacity, so they are not representatives of Governments. The British member is Sir Vincent Evans, who, the hon. and learned Gentleman and many others will know, is a distinguished former legal adviser to the Foreign Office. We understand that the view that the committee is the body that should be given the task of supervising the implementation of the convention when it comes into being is fairly widely accepted.

We now come to the difficulty, which the hon. and learned Gentleman put fairly. We want to do our best to make sure that a convention has an influence on what happens in the outside world, but it also has to be accepted. There is no question of imposing it by a majority vote of the General Assembly. It will stand or fall by the willingness of national Governments to sign and ratify it. There is widespread opposition—perhaps more than the hon. and learned Gentleman said—to any form of supervision. The opposition is strongest in the Third world. There would be disadvantages in trying for a convention with strong supervision provisions and an optional protocol clearly attached to it if only a handful of States agreed to accept it and put it into effect. There is a strong case for reaching an agreement on the convention soon, in the expectation that we can do so in a way that will ensure that large numbers of member States accept it, and then, later, considering the question of the optional protocol, including the scheme that the hon. and learned Gentleman spelt out in some detail from the International Commission of Jurists, which would be the kernel of the optional protocol.

There is a balance of judgment here, but since the going has been slow, and since we want to bring a convention into force on the widest possible basis of acceptance, it is probably sensible to press ahead with that and then to consider the question of an optional protocol for later negotiation. There are, therefore, these practical problems which must be considered further in the light of the real effect of the different proposals when the convention actually begins to bite on the practices of individual countries.

I agree with the hon. and learned Gentleman that no British Government should drag their feet on this. We shall certainly continue to work hard in the working group, and after that in the other bodies which will then have to consider the draft convention, for a practicable and effective convention that will have the result of diminishing the evil to which the hon. and learned Gentleman rightly drew our attention.