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

1. Transport Act 1981

2. Employment and Training Act 1981

3. Ullapool Pier Order (Confirmation) Act 1981

4. Great Yarmouth Borough Council Act 1981

I suppose that we should be grateful for the fact that the Secretary of State looked in briefly at the beginning of the debate to check on the speech of the Minister for Social Security. He has not stopped to listen to any of the comments of Opposition Back Benchers. Perhaps the right hon. Gentleman is already off on his holiday. If he has not gone on holiday, perhaps he is lobbying hard to make sure that he is promoted to become Chancellor of the Exchequer, rather than pushed sideways to be the new Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food.

The House is clearly in a mood of anticipation of the holiday. If, by the end of the holiday, the Secretary of State has been promoted to Chancellor, perhaps he will show a little more compassion and concern for the DHSS and his successor than the present Chancellor of the Exchequer has shown.

Considering how little compassion the Secretary of State has shown for his Department while running it, that is a rather optimistic comment.

I hope that if there are some Government changes we shall see much higher priority given to the DHSS and its expenditure needs.

It is ironic that the House is ready to go on its holidays when for many of those affected by these statutory instruments there is either no opportunity to go on holiday or holidays are a mixed blessing. One of my constituents has been out of work for about 18 months. His brother had suggested that as my constituent would not be able to go on holiday this year he would take the family with him to Blackpool, and pay. My constituent was pleased, but he had mixed feelings. He looked forward to going on holiday, but he knew that he would have to work his way through the minefield of Blackpool trying to avoid spending money. He knows that when one is on holiday at almost every turn there are pressures to spend money on oneself or one's children.

I can think of many other constituents who are dreading the summer holidays because their children cost them more when they are on holiday. First, they lose free school meals, which, for many children, are an essential part of a balanced diet. Certainly in Stockport, once the holidays start there is no provision for free school meals. There is thus an extra burden on the family.

In addition, there is the desire to take children out and to give them some sort of holiday. They know that many of their school friends are going on expensive holidays. It is difficult for a one-parent family to find a cheap holiday. It is difficult even to take children out for a day without forking out a lot of money. It is important for the House, when thinking in terms of its holiday, to remember that for many people affected by the orders holidays are something of a nightmare.

I was disappointed that the Minister did not mention the problems caused by the Civil Service dispute. Most of us are concerned that much of the work on the uprating ought to have started already. We have not been told whether it has been delayed by the dispute, whether the Government are in a position to bring the orders into effect in November or whether some of the upratings will be delayed because of the industrial action.

The Minister has to turn his attention also to the attitude that will exist in the benefit offices. I know that in Stockport there is a great deal of bitterness about the dispute and the Government's attitude to it. The benefit officers feel that they have behaved extremely responsibly in trying to shield claimants from the impact of the dispute, but they also feel bitter about the way that the Government have treated them. It is only human nature that some will feel resentment in the next few weeks when carrying out the orders.

I plead with the officers to continue their policy of ensuring that claimants do not suffer and to make sure that if anything goes wrong in the offices no under-payments are made, and that if mistakes occur they should only be over-payments.

It is important that the Department should look at the problems in benefit offices. It is clear that officers are operating under considerable stress. There are many more claimants and some are claiming for the first time. They are upset, nervous and apprehensive and, because of the frustrations they suffer, many hit out at the first person they meet who seems even slightly bureaucratic. There is often short fuse in benefit offices and the staff are put under considerable strain.

Some of the staff are under strain because of their own low pay. Many receive low wages and have to pay out benefits that are considerably more than they earn. That causes much frustration. The low pay in many offices results in many of the counter staff being young. I do not criticise their competence—some are excellent—but a 58-year-old man who has been out of work for 18 months and is moving on to supplementary benefit finds it difficult to explain his situation to a 19-year-old who may look only 16 or 17.

In the same way, a mother who has been deserted by her husband and who is 35 or 40 and has three children finds it difficult to explain to someone who looks as though he has only just left school the difficulties of making ends meet and the problems of budgeting.

It is also difficult for some young benefit officers to imagine that claimants are hard pressed to make ends meet on the benefits that they receive. The officers are probably fairly well off, even on their low wages, because they do not have many commitments. It is a different world to try to live on the same income when one has considerable family commitments.

I hope that the Minister will tell us whether there will be any problem over the upratings and how quickly we can get back to normal business. Everyone has stressed that it is clear that the benefits will not go up by as much as inflation this year. The Minister may claim that it is possible that the Government have got their estimate of inflation right, but no one outside the Treasury believes that. Almost every economic indicator suggests that the rate of inflation will be higher than the Government forecast.

The Government have said that they will make good the shortfall in long-term benefits in November. That is not true. They will never make good the shortfall. They are not saying that in November they will pay, in a lump sum or in some other way, the money for the preceding 12 months that will not be paid out by the orders and regulations before us. The Government say that they will get the long-term rates back to what they should be in relation to the rate of inflation, but they are not making good the shortfall.

I suggest that the Government have a duty to make good the money that will be lost. If the Government overshoot their forecast inflation rate by 1 per cent., we are talking of a benefit shortfall of about £25 in 12 months. If they undershoot by 2 per cent., about £50 will be involved.

It would be difficult and complicated to alter all the order books, but there is a simple way for the Government to make good the shortfall. They can check on 23 November whether they have forecast the inflation rate correctly. A week later they will pay the Christmas bonus to many beneficiaries. They can simply put into the Christmas bonus the shortfall that is then apparent, so that the bonus can be raised from £10 to £35, and when the shortfall is 2 per cent. it can be raised by £50. That would be a simple way of making sure that people do not go short for that 12 months and never catch up on the money that they have lost.

Each year the Christmas bonus is devalued by a little bit more. Having paid lip service so many times to the principle of the Christmas bonus, the Government must decide to put it up from £10 at least back to its real value, not just in the year before the next general election, but now. Most pensioners would be cynical in their attitude to the Government if the bonus were increased just before a general election.

I come now to the long-term unemployed. I welcome to a certain extent the proposal that those between 60 and 65 will be allowed to claim long-term supplementary benefit rates in certain circumstances. However, I have a suspicion that this is a con job to try to bring down unemployment.

I re-emphasise the point that I made in an intervention: how will the Government ensure that all those people who have stopped signing on will actually be able to claim the long-term benefit? I give as an example one of my constituents who feels very bitter. At present he cannot draw supplementary benefit because his wife is earning about £1 a week more than the short-term rate. As I understand it, he will never be allowed to claim the long-term rate, because he will not have been able to draw the short-term rate, yet the long-term rate is considerably more than the amount of money that his wife is earning. This is one of the major pitfalls. When individuals start to inquire about the system, they find that it is harsher than they had expected.

I have already raised with the Under-Secretary the question of the family income supplement regulations. A child of one of my constituents left school on 16 June, but because of the change in the supplementary benefit regulations and the lack of work he cannot draw benefit until 21 September. So, for a three-month period my constituent will have a substantial loss of income. The Under-Secretary of State said in a debate that she thought that the whole idea of family income supplement was that it covered a long period. But a letter to me, sent in her absence, made the point that the whole idea of the FIS was that it was to be a short-term benefit, because it would be ridiculous if a family got on to FIS for another year whenfor nine months they would not require it. The hon. Lady's letter was a total contradiction of the whole principle of the FIS benefit as I understand it.

We are now told that the Government will review supplementary benefit for school leavers. Both the supplementary Benefit for school leavers and the FIS regulations, as they affect school leavers, must be reviewed quickly, so that we can pass regulations in the House before Christmas and thus enable people to know where they stand for next year.

It is clear to me that there is much bitterness, which have an impact on educational standards next year. More and more young people will realise that it is important to leave school at Easter, if possible, rather than stay on for three or four weeks, because by doing so they may deny themselves benefits for the rest of the summer. If that is not put right, it will have a disastrous effect, persuading far too many young people to leave school and not complete their examination courses. I hope that these regulations will be reviewed quickly.

It is odd that in all the upratings with which we are dealing today we are not looking at the capital disregard.. One of the major anomalies that have emerged from the social security review is the decision to have a fixed amount of £2,000 and no tapering effect. The capital amount, involving the surrender of insurance policies and so on, is causing much hardship.

Again, the Government are carrying out a review. One has the feeling that they will carry out a review, and then a review of the review—anything to put off taking action. The simple thing to do would have been at least to include in the order an increase to take account of inflation over the 12 months while they are carrying out their review. What is really needed is a completely different approach. What we want is not the absolute cut-off but a return to a tapering system, even if it may be complicated to administer.

The Minister claimed credit for the Government for what was being done on child benefit. The truth is that support for the family and the child is steadily declining. As I have said in the House many times, there were many negotiations when the Labour Government were in power before the child benefit was launched. There was much pressure. An argument that was always put to us was "We are holding down the price of school meals. You must take it as a package—school meals and the child benefit." The present Government have encouraged local authorities to raise the charges for school meals and not to revise the means test for free school meals, so that while the Government are giving some extra money in child benefit they are taking much of it back in charges for school meals.

We are told that the Government are carrying out a review of the housing benefit and that discussions are going on between the Department of the Environment and the Department of Health and Social Security about a uniform housing allowance. I very much welcome that, but it must be made clear that it cannot be done, as in the last review, at no cost; it must be at some cost. It is anomalous that people must make up their minds whether to draw a rent and rate rebate or to apply for a small amount of supplementary benefit. There is also the question of those who are being taxed and are drawing supplementary benefit. The Government cannot get rid of such anomalies at no cost without causing increased hardship for some groups.

I share the particular concern for the elderly and the concessions for them. I particularly challenge the Government on the death grant. What will they do about it? Is the truth that they want to make what appears to be a generous gesture, saying that it will go up substantially, but, will then claw it back with a means test? That is what most people suspect, and I share the suspicion.

The Government's problem is to decide who will be means-tested. Is the test to be applied to the person who has died or to the next of kin? Most people who have lobbied for an increase in the grant do not want it to be means tested in that way, because a great deal of bitterness would be caused if it were applied in either of those ways. I hope that the Government will not adopt that approach.

It is a sad reflection on the House that few hon. Members are present. Most of them are away on their holidays. We should be concerned about, and doing something to relieve, the lot of a small proportion of people who live in abject poverty.

I agree with the concluding words of my hon. Friend the Member for Stockport, North (Mr. Bennett). This debate is about the relief of poverty. Today we have heard only one speech from the Conservative Back Benches, but when we are graced with the presence of more Government Back Benchers we often hear speeches suggesting that most of the benefits referred to in the statutory instruments are paid to people who are reasonably well off. That is not so.

We are talking about how our society deals with those who are poor, whether poor because they have retired from work, because they are sick or disabled, because they have the expense of bringing up children who are not working, because they themselves are in work but are badly paid, or—and more particularly under the present Government over recent years—because they are out of work. Those are all sources of impoverishment which reduce the incomes of families and individuals to levels far below those which are tolerable to most people in work. Moreover, virtually none of those benefits results in people out of work being as well off as people in work.

A variety of approaches has been adopted over the centuries to the relief of poverty. All of them have been grossly unsatisfactory—measures whereby those in power and those with wealth have attempted to ameliorate poverty merely to the extent that the poor would not revolt totally against those in charge of the economy. Now, certainly in the inner urban areas, people may well revolt in the old-fashioned way against those who are in charge of society and of the economy, because they see no other way of redressing their grievances.

In theory, despite four Acts of Parliament which have been introduced by the present Government, we are still running a type of sub-Beveridge system. I remind the House that the principle of Beveridge was

"Security against want without a means test".

It did not go on to say "if the country can afford it". It simply said

"Security against want without a means test",

on the assumption that society would gear itself to preventing people from falling into want, whatever the state of the economy.

Only the other day, in a plethora of articles about the Royal wedding, a woman journalist said that she was 18 at the time of the Queen's wedding in 1947. In that year, a year of great difficulty for the British economy, the old-age pension went up from 10 shillings to 24 shillings. Under the Labour Government of the time there was no question of whether the country could afford to raise the old-age pension to a reasonable level. The measure was pushed through, despite all the burdens that it must have put on workers at the time.

Now we have Beveridge in reverse. We have poverty and a means test. Moreover, we have not just one means test but a plethora of means tests, which make it exceedingly difficult to administer our social security and pension system. The administration of that system consumes vast sums and requires vast numbers of people who could be better employed on something else. Above all, it is a complicated means-testing system which deters people who are entitled to benefit from applying for it. As all hon. Members will be aware, when one asks experts on social security matters for explanations about who is entitled to what, where, if and how, they find it difficult to explain. The staff in the social security offices also find it difficult to explain. So the ordinary man and woman in the street, particularly those who most need social security, are at a loss to know whether they are entitled to benefits. In fact, the take-up rate for many of the benefits to which people are entitled is around 70 per cent., and in a few cases above 80 per cent. That means, at best, that one in five of those who are entitled to many of the benefits that we are debating do not apply because they either do not know about them or are deterred by the complexities of the means test system. Moreover, some people still have a sense of humiliation about means testing, and thus do not take up the benefits to which the House decided that they are entitled.

Last year, the Strathclyde regional council organised a campaign—admittedly, it was a fairly crude campaign; it had to be crude, because it was done in a hurry—to publicise benefits. As a result, more than an extra £1 million flowed into the pockets of many people in that area who had always been entitled to the money. If they received £1 million that year, they should have received £1 million in the previous year and in the year before that.

When the campaign was brought to the attention of the House, the response from the right hon. Member for Daventry (Mr. Prentice), formerly the right hon. Member for Newham, North-East, was to denounce the activities of the Strathclyde council in promoting the take—up as being politically motivated. I find it extraordinary that anyone who sits on these Benches and who has been elected to this place should denounce anyone for having political motives. The campaign in Strathclyde was politically motivated in that the people on the council there believe that politics is about the distribution of wealth. They were determined to see that some of the country's wealth was distributed to people living in their region who were entitled to the money, although the Government had not drawn their attention to it.

Following that, though not as a matter of personal pride, I wrote to the Association of Metropolitan Authorities to ask whether its authorities would consider a Strathclyde-type campaign. I received a favourable response. That was not surprising because, being politically motivated and controlled by the Labour Party, the association was likely to be in favour of such a proposal. I also wrote to the Association of County Councils, which replied that it would have no truck with such a campaign. That, too, was not unexpected, because the ACC is politically motivated and is controlled by the Conservative Party. It had no interest, following the line that had been laid down by the right hon. Member for Daventry, in promoting any increase in the take-up of benefits.

Subsequently, the Labour Party established a working party to formulate a leaflet which would be as uncomplicated as possible without misleading people. Those of us who were involved in that project found it a difficult task. The document has been produced and it is being circulated to all Labour-controlled local authorities. I understand that the AMA will promote its use in its areas.

Once that project was completed, the hon. Member for Wallasey (Mrs. Chalker), the Under-Secretary of State, decided that it was a good idea after all, and that campaigns to promote the take-up of benefits were worth while and should be assisted. Apparently, they were no longer politically motivated and to be denounced. As suggested in our document, she undertook that the DHSS and other offices should collaborate as much as possible with any local authorities which were promoting the take-up. We welcome the hon. Lady's conversion.

May I point out, however, that it is not the job of local authorities to promote the take-up of central Government benefits. It is the Government's job. The authorities have been driven to do it only because the Government have failed in their duty to promote the take-up of benefits. It is noteworthy that last year they spent less on the promotion of take-up of benefit than they have spent even on the television campaign to advertise the so-called right to buy council houses. The Government spent about £1 million on that campaign. They spent less than £1 million on promoting the take-up of benefits. That is a shameful record. The Government should get their priorities right. However, as they were elected on the wrong priorities, I suppose that we cannot expect a change of direction.

The main problem for the Government is the massive increase in unemployment. That has absorbed vast sums of money which no doubt the Government had hoped to spend elsewhere. That, I assume, was the hope of those in the Government who believed that their creation of 3 million unemployed was an accident. I cannot imagine what those who deliberately set out to create 3 million unemployed thought would happen about benefits. I suspect that they had hoped to curtail and reduce the benefit even further. It entirely shot through the old rubbish that has been peddled for years by Conservative Members—and occasionally by Labour Members—that the golden reason for not setting unemployment benefit at a reasonable level was that it would take away the incentive to work. It would need an enormous reduction in the level of unemployment benefit to create an incentive that would find jobs for our 3 million unemployed, who grossly exceed the number of vacancies available.

What does the Minister think the impact of the Government's policies, including these statutory instruments, will have on an inhabitant in my central London constituency? Let us take the example of a building worker. Although many houses need to be built, hospitals to be rehabilitated, schools to be improved and even private industrial premises to be renovated, he may be out of work. He will be reliant on unemployment benefit, which has not risen as much as it should have done. He may have children at school. They would be educated in the ILEA schools—at least, I hope so. That authority wished not to increase—as the Government wished—but to reduce the price of school meals from 35p to 25p. It thought that to be a socially useful and responsible action that would help to ameliorate the impact of poverty in London.

The ILEA has been advised by lawyers that if it goes ahead with that perfectly sensible and reasonable proposal the councillors involved will stand a good chance of having to meet the cost of it themselves because of the activities of the district auditor and the lunatic interpretation that the courts put on the law. Therefore, there will be no reduction in the price of school meals.

A child above the normal school leaving age, but continuing in education in an ILEA school, receives a relatively generous grant which helps to provde clothing. There is enormous pressure on the ILEA not to provide that grant, even though it helps to ameliorate poverty It helps those from working-class backgrounds to stay on at school. The Government regard that expenditure as optional. They have reduced almost to nothing the central Government grant to the ILEA. If the child stays at school, if his parents are responsible and prevent him from staying out all night, try to keep him at his work, make him do his homework and take a serious interest in school, and the child gains O-levels, what does he then face? Children seeking places in higher education will not find them as easily as they could in the past because the Government, as part of their general social policies, are reducing the number of university places. Yet the number of children wishing to take those places is increasing.

If a child leaves school and does not go on to higher education, although he may have done everything asked for by his parents and teachers and gained the best qualifications that could be expected, the chances are that he will not find work. In London this year, as has happened in other areas already, there is a 50–50 chance. that he will be out of work.

Under the mean-minded set of scavengers sitting on the Government Front Bench, if a child stays on at school to complete his exams but has not finished them before the end of the term, he will not be entitled to benefit until the end of the summer holiday. That mean-minded approach is bearing down on tens of thousands of working-class children throughout Britain, and especially on those in the inner city areas. The child's family will still be faced with massive increases in prices. It does not matter whether one uses the retail price index, the tax and prices index, or any other index; the fact is that prices are rising.

Rents and rates are being driven up in the London area because of the cuts during the past year of more than £400 million. There is constant pressure to reduce other aspects of social services provided by local authorities or area health authorities that, to some extent, ameliorate the impact of the bad state of the economy on the poor in our inner city.

We are facing pressure to increase charges for old people attending day centres. If the building worker's widowed mother wants to go on holiday, she can, I am glad to say, because that is subsidised in Camden. But pressure will come from the Government and all sorts of nutty ratepayers' associations to reduce such benefits that are being provided at a local level in an effort to ensure, in the words of Beveridge,

"security against want without a means test."

Some of the Labour-controlled local authorities want to ensure that those in their areas are secure against want. They do not want the benefits from central or local Government diminished because of Government policies. We must continue to press ahead with that help.

Does the hon. Gentleman consider the ratepayers' associations in his constituency more nutty than Mr. Ken Livingstone?

I do not regard either as likely to turn their coats, as the hon. Gentleman did.

My hon. Friend the Member for Stockport, North (Mr. Bennett) referred to the difficult conditions and circumstances in which benefit offices' staff try to do their job. Not long after I was elected to the House, I wrote to the Minister to draw her attention to the appalling conditions that prevail for both staff and claimants in the Tavistock Square office of the DHSS. The answer was not that the Department was carrying out a review. It had gone further than that. It had prepared proposals to improve the circumstances in that office so that the staff could do their job properly and the claimants apply for their entitlements in decent circumstances. Unfortunately, those proposals have suffered under the Government's cuts. To the best of my knowledge, they will not be put into effect, despite blandishments from other Members of Parliament whose constituents have to deal with that office.

We are faced with having to support these orders because they are minor improvements in the current rates of benefit. Those rates are inadequate. The way in which we have dealt with those not working and not receiving a good wage has been inadequate for many years. It is becoming more inadequate. Unlike practically any other organisation in Britain that is involved with social security or disbursement of benefits to the poor, the Government appear to have turned their back on the twentieth century and are opting out and refusing to accept what has been accepted since Beveridge—that we should do our level best to protect the worst-off in our society from all the ills that strike them, even ills such as the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Secretary of State for Industry.

The Government are different from any preceding Tory Government this century. Neville Chamberlain damaged his reputation at Munich, but in many ways he sought in his own benighted way to extend the level of health, social security and housing benefits. He did not do it in a way that my predecessors supported at the time. However, he saw the enhancement of such benefits as an extension of the protection given to ordinary people. The Government are unique in the twentieth century in seeking to undermine, cut down, take away, withdraw and diminish the protection for ordinary people.

I intervene in my hon. Friend's speech to draw attention to one of my constituents. There is an ironic twist to the tale. The lady concerned is a genteel person who owns her own bungalow from better days. She is in receipt of a mobility allowance. She is suffering because she has to pay tax on the allowance. It seems that she will have to sell her 27-year old car. She has sold all the items that her mother gave her many years ago. She has had to do so to keep the benefits going. This lady used to vote Conservative. She was one of the greatest charity organisers in the area. She brought hundreds of thousands of pounds into Conservative funds, but she has now decided that she was wrong throughout her earlier life. She is now a friend of Arthur Scargill and she votes for the Labour Party.

I have nothing to add to my hon. Friend's intervention. The story that he has recounted epitomises what has happened in our society in the past two and a half years. There has been a recognition that the Government have ceased to function within the parameters normally accepted in British politics in the twentieth century. We can almost expect the Government to revivify the workhouse as their next step in trying to tread down the poor.

This has been a wide-ranging debate. The House, if I can so describe a small group of tightly knit, politically motivated hon. Members, will be pleased to know that I do not intend to detain it for too long.

I am sorry that my hon. Friend the Member for Barking (Miss Richardson) was not able to participate in the debate. I note that my hon. Friend has left the Chamber. Privy Councillors tend to insist on using their rights, which are well entrenched. I understand that my hon. Friend had to leave for an important engagement. I know that she wanted to make a constituency contribution.

These measures could not have been introduced before the enactment of the Social Security Bill, which received its Second Reading on 23 February. That was the day after the Royal engagement had been announced. I remember saying that the Government should consider declaring an amnesty in their vendetta against those in receipt of social security benefits. Unfortunately, we have come full circle and there has been no easing of the vendetta.

We are talking about £27 billion. That is a significant sum, to say the least. We would not dream of voting against any of the orders because their effect is to increase benefits. However, benefits that fall within the main range of social security provision are being increased by 1p in the pound less than they should be because of last year's so-called over-provision that made the benefits last November too generous.

The loss of 1p in the pound is not significant to Members of Parliament or the members of the Press Gallery who may be recording our proceedings. However, it means the loss of 40p a week for a married couple, which is near enough £30 a year. It amounts to a television licence and it could pay a gas or electricity bill. It has that significance to those in receipt of benefits. It should not be dismissed out of hand. I hope that we shall never again have to cut 1p in the pound from pension and other benefits.

The Minister made an interesting remark when he responded to an intervention from the hon. Member for Isle of Ely (Mr. Freud). He seemed to suggest that if fewer people collected benefits there would be more money for the beneficiaries. I saw the face of the Under-Secretary of State when she heard her hon. Friend's words. The Minister could not see her expression. She seemed aghast at what he had said. I suspect that even those in the Box took the same view. I shall be interested to read the relevant passage in Hansard. If the Minister is still a member of the Government next year, we shall endeavour to discover what he meant by his response to the hon. Member for Isle of Ely when we consider next year's uprating orders.

These measures are accompanied by a report by the Government Actuary, who has taken account of the cost to the national insurance fund of the increases in benefits that will take place in November. The report was prepared in June. The Government Actuary has estimated that for 1981–82 the national insurance fund will be £690 million in deficit.

Last November we received a report from the Government Actuary to accompany the contribution re-rating order. He then estimated a surplus of £39 million for the national insurance fund for 1981–82. The position has changed since last November. There has been a change of about £660 million in only six months. The Actuary states in his report that if there is a change in the number of unemployed and the total becomes 100,000 more or 100,000 fewer, the national insurance fund deficit will be £200 million greater or smaller depending on whether the movement is up or down.

If the Government Actuary's forecast has changed from a surplus of £39 million to a deficit of about £619 million over six or seven months, that amounts to an annualised change of about £1,200 million. Am I right in drawing the conclusion that that implies an underlying change in unemployment of 600,000? Is that a fair assumption? I am not trying to juggle with statistics. I am not seeking to make a cheap point. I genuinely want to know whether that is a correct assumption to be drawn from the seventh and ninth paragraphs of the Actuary's report.

If the Minister cannot make a detailed reply when she replies, I shall be grateful if she would write to me, preferably early in the recess. Her reply would assist me in preparing my speeches during the 11-week recess. My hon. Friend the Member for Stockport, North (Mr. Bennett) referred to the recess as a holiday. Parliamentary recesses are not holidays. As hon. Members are aware, that is not said enough.

Is it not possible that, rather than a wrong or changed estimate for unemployment, the Government are expecting more people to be sick than before? By "sick", I mean sick of the Government.

I raised the matter in the context of the unemployed only because the Government Actuary's report refers specifically to unemployed persons in paragraph 7(i).

Many Opposition Members have pointed out that the Government's forecast for inflation is incorrect. My hon. Friends have read various forecasts published in the press and by many forecasting teams. I understand that there is a list in the Library containing about a dozen forecasts for the last quarter of this year. Apart from the Treasury's forecast, only one forecast agreed with the figure of 10 per cent. However, do not wish to argue about the degree to which the forecast may be incorrect.

If there is a shortfall in November, we shall not discover it until January, in the final retail price index. I accept that the December figure for the retail price index is provisional. Anything between ¾ per cent. and 1 per cent. would represent a significant shortfall. The Government are committed to making such a shortfall good next November. If the Government make an announcement next November or at the time of the Budget about pension increases for November 1982 that represents inflation plus the shortfall, and if the Chancellor of the Exchequer—it is a big "if'—only increases personal income tax allowances in the next Budget in line with inflation, under the indexing provisions attached to my name and that of Mrs. Wise, next November, the single person's pension, without any other income, will be above the personal tax allowance and the tolerance level for the Inland Revenue's collection mechanism.

In other words, the single person's pension would be taxable, in its own right, only for those women aged between 60 and 64. A woman aged over 65 has a higher tax allowance. The Government must be making such decisions because they have announced that they will make good any shortfall next November.

One may argue about the number of benefits to which that promise applies. Following our Committee stage, the Minister provided me with a list. It includes the old-age pension—and that is my basic point. The other day I received an abusive anonymous letter from a widow. The letter was postmarked Wolverhampton and concerned a report of a speech that I had made a couple of weeks ago on the Report stage of the Finance Bill. I devoted 95 per cent. of the speech to the problems of women aged between 60 and 64 and I alluded to the fact that widows were affected in other ways. She said that I should not keep talking about widows because there were single people who looked after their parents, who did not get married, and who had pensions in their own rights. She said that they were affected to the same extent as, or more than, widows. Unfortunately, I am unable to send her a copy of the speech that I made that night, but the fact is that only women will be affected.

If the order is accepted it will trigger off the November pension increase. Those women aged this year between 60 and 64 who receive a graduated pension of 33p per week or more will be subject to a tax liability that ranges from Op to 57p per week. They are in the ludicrous position that it pays them not to collect a small amount of graduated pension. It also pays them to try to defer payment, but that again would lead to problems with the Inland Revenue.

If the Government's pledge, which has been repeated today from the Dispatch Box, is carried out next year and if the Government only index tax allowances in line with inflation, a single person's pension will become taxable in its own right for those women. Indeed, I fail to see how the Government can renege on indexing tax allowances next year. Perhaps everything is part of a Government plan, which was set in motion when the Conservative Party came into power.

On 15 July, during the debate on the Finance Bill it referred to two questions. I refer to Hansard, Vol. 8, c. 1203. One was from the hon. Member for Bedford (Mr. Skeet) and was dated 18 January 1980. The other followed that up and was tabled in January 1981. They showed that the Government had planned from April 1982, within the period of the pension increase, to put on to the national insurance books—basically, retirement pension books—amounts of tax that are collectable, and therefore: deductible directly from the retirement pension.

There may be no problem for the Government if they make the basic State retirement pension taxable in its own right and if they wish to change the system of collecting taxes from pensioners. Do the Government intend to do that? I do not wish to criticise the Minister, but the Under-Secretary of State has been doing the job a little longer. I am sure that the Under-Secretary understands my point. Given the legal requirement to index tax allowances and the pledge given, do the Government intend to make those single pensions taxable from next year in their own right? We do not want any waffle from the Treasury about a small amount of tax being involved. The amount will fall above the assessing tolerance, subject to the amount of shortfall. It is clear that there will probably be a shortfall of between 1 and 2 per cent. That will be enough to do the job.

I hope that the Under-Secretary will not say that she cannot forecast the Chancellor of the Exchequer's Budget. The chances are that it will be the Secretary of State's Budget. He is supposed to be the Treasury's favourite to come out of the woodwork to replace the Chancellor. As a Chancellor in the DHSS he has done a fair job. If the interaction of the tax and social security systems has now got to the raw meat of the basic retirement pension, that can only be regarded as invidious.

As the hon. Member for Kensington (Sir B. Rhys Williams) is aware, it is ludicrous that those who receive supplementary benefit following a means test should, in many cases, pay income tax. If such a position is reached, the system will collapse not perhaps under its own weight but under the legitimate pressure of 9 million pensioners.

We shall not need the remarks of those outside the House who seek to encourage the erosion of parliamentary democracy by frustrating the Government's actions. It is the job of the Opposition to frustrate the Government by the legitimate parliamentary means of voting, debating, delaying and procedure. We shall not need any messages from outside, regardless of where they come from. If the circumstances that I have described come to pass, there will be enormous pressure from pensioners. Only a few pensioners, and only women, will be affected. Nevertheless, other pensioners will regard this issue as the thin end of the wedge. I hope that we shall be given a clear statement that such a position will not come to pass.

I hesitate to challenge the hon. Gentleman, because he has made himself such an expert in this tangled subject. However, does not he agree that, regardless of party, our priority should be to recognise that the net benefit given to those whom we seek to help is the important element? Whether they are brought into the tax system or are, in some way, exempted from tax is not the point. We have to keep sight of the amount they have to spend at the end of all transactions with which they are concerned.

The hon. Gentleman is both correct and incorrect. I take the view—I do not think that it is disputed on the Labour Benches—that the tax base should be as wide as possible. It has been eroded over the years, and that presents considerable problems for the Treasury in raising revenue. In making it as wide as possible, it is legitimate to claim that all sources of income ought to be taken into the computation of the total income for tax purposes, and then to ensure that the threshold, the tax barrier or the personal allowance is high enough to keep out of the tax net those people whose income is below what might be called the poverty line. That has not been done, simply because of the interaction of the tax and supplementary benefits systems.

That position is indefensible from any part of the House. It will require a massive job to put it right, and the longer we leave it the worse it will get. The hon. Gentleman was right in the point that he made, but I cannot accept his implication that we look at the net figure and forget how it is arrived at. It is because the system is so complicated that many people miss the benefits to which they are legitimately entitled.

It should not be the role of a political party to get the local authorities to issue advice to people who are entitled to benefit. That is an executive function of the Government. It should not be left to the Labour Party to do it. But, following the Government's negative initial reaction to the experiment by the local authority in Strathclyde, we considered whether there was any way in which we could help to make the information available, mainly through Labour-controlled authorities, on the assumption that Conservative-controlled authorities would not wish to be involved in such a campaign. But if any other local authorities wish to become involved the Association of Metropolitan Authorities and the other local authority bodies will have all the necessary information.

Our aim is to ensure that every person, regardless of where he lives and regardless of the political control in his local authority, should get the benefits that this House says he should receive. We are talking here today about benefits affecting millions of people. It is surely the role of hon. Members to ensure that we do everything we can to ensure that those who are entitled to benefits receive them.

My last point concerns the regulations dealing with conditions of entitlement and the announcement about two weeks ago in accordance with which the rules are being changed as affecting men over 60. I say "men" over 60. The press reports and the Minister's statement mentioned "people" over 60 who had been unemployed for more than a year, and who wished to cease being registered as unemployed in order to obtain the long-term rate of supplementary benefit. But we are talking only about men. We are not talking about women, because at 60 the women will in any case be retired. The new rule, therefore, does not apply to women; it applies only to men.

I should like to ask one or two questions concerning the figures. My hon. Friend the Member for Renfrewshire, West (Mr. Buchan) has already asked about the figures and I hope that the Minister will provide an answer. How many people are expected to benefit? The Government's press release of 20 July did not state the number. As background briefing, the figure of 45,000 was given. The Government said that the scheme would cost £21 million, and as the increase in benefit is in general about £9·60 a week it is easy to work out that about 45,000 people will benefit. That is the expected take-up nationally.

I do not know what information the Government have put out through the regional offices of the DHSS, but on 21 July the following statement appeared in the Birmingham Evening Mail:

"A Midland spokesman for the Department of Health and Social Security today said the scheme would apply to about 30,000 people in the region".

I know that that is wrong but I want the Minister to stand up and say that it is wrong. If the Government expect about 45,000 people nationally to benefit, even I have to admit that unemployment in the West Midlands, relative to the rest of the country, has not been bad enough to warrant a figure of 30,000 people in that region alone.

I suspect that the Government want to make the best case they can for the new benefit when they are addressing the people to whom, in effect, they are saying "You have been unemployed for over a year, you are most unlikely ever to get another job, so why not call it a day? We will take you off the unemployment register. You will not have to bother to sign on regularly, and we will pay you another £9·60 a week."

Obviously, the Government want to make the best they can of their scheme, with a reduction in the number of registered unemployed and an increase in public expenditure. That is understandable, but the Government have not spelt out that if a man is not eligible for supplementary benefit he will not get it anyway. If a man's wife has a part-time job, and is earning about £28 or £30 a week, even that can be enough to prevent a man from being able to claim the benefit.

That is the position now for many unemployed men who cannot claim benefit. There are 300,000 registered unemployed who do not get a penny piece from the State, in either unemployment benefit or supplementary benefit. They will not be able to benefit from the new scheme. But, because the Government have not been willing to explain in detail the hurdles that have to be overcome in order to get the benefit, I suspect that the scheme has been misunderstood by the regional office of the DHSS in the West Midlands or by the journalist who wrote the story in the Birmingham Evening Mail.

Will my hon. Friend agree that one of the dangers is that the Government are encouraging people not to sign on as unemployed but are not intending to give those people any benefit? The result will be that the Government will gain the advantage of appearing to have reduced the unemployment figures, and it will cost them. nothing. People will stop signing on, they will go to the DHSS office to try to get their benefit, and only then will they be told that, because of the words in small print, they are not qualified to receive it.

I hope that the Government will ensure that that will rot happen. The Government must have some idea of the number of people involved. They must know the number of registered unemployed over the age of 60 who have been unemployed for over a year. Being registered, they are on the computer of the Manpower Services Commission. I suspect that it is known from the computer that their entitlement to unemployment benefit has been exhausted. It should not be beyond the wit of the Government to marry the two computers and to feed in a new programme. The information is known.

It should not be necessary for people to fall into the trap that my hon. Friend has just mentioned. The Government know these things several months in advance. The Civil Service dispute is over. One assumes that the computers will start buzzing again next week and that we shall get some sense back into the system. Something new will be added to the work load on top of the existing system. We must search for, locate and find those people, so that they do not make the mistake of falling into the trap. I hope that the Government do not go back on their announced scheme, and that there will be a new leaflet at local offices. We need a commitment that the scheme will draw attention to those who can benefit and protect those who may claim erroneously.

The Government claim that the scheme makes people eligible for long-term relief, but they are not giving early retirement. The unemployed, long-term or otherwise, are not getting early retirement. The Government claim that some of the men who have been long-term unemployed can get the long-term rate and that many people have been asking for that for a while. I hope that the Minister will not rely on the report "Social Assistance", published by the Department of Health and Social Security in July 1978 after the review team produced the report at the request of the previous Government.

That report cannot justify the decision. At paragraph 4 on page 52, the report states:

"It will still be necessary to have separate ordinary and long-term adult scale rates. We think: he main desirable change would be to extend the long-term rate to the unemployed on the same basis as other claimaints under pension age. In addition, shortening the qualifying period to one year would be advantageous, but this does not have the same degree of priority."

The Government did that the opposite way round. We welcomed it at that time and it would be churlish to deny that. They shortened the period from two years to one year for all supplementary benefit recipients, other than the long-term unemployed.

However, it was the clear advice to the House that, if the change was made, preference should be given to giving the benefit to all the long-term unemployed under pensionable age—it does not distinguish between men over 60. My estimate on the latest parliamentary questions is that it would cost only ½ per cent. of the social security budget. It would cost £100 million—perhaps £110 million—to give all the long.-term unemployed the long-term rate of supplementary benefit.

Just over £100 million is ½p in the pound cut off all the benefit, where the Government have saved about £230 million. The ½p in the pound is about half that, and that figure would just about solve the problem for the long-term unemployed who are forced to live below the poverty line. It would be ½p in the pound well spent, and we advised Government to do that. It is a tragedy that they have not done so. I hope that the Minister will tell us how the Government will prevent people from falling into the trap. I shall accept a letter if she cannot give answers to all my questions today.

We have had a fairly predictable debate, but, none the less, we have heard interesting analyses by hon. Members, particularly by my hon. Friend the Member for Kensington (Sir B. Rhys Williams). I shall read his speech with great interest. I shall answer what I can at the Dispatch Box and write with other answers. Whichever Government are in office, they face exactly the same problems with uprating orders. Uprating is an incredibly large additional cost to the country.

In 1981–82 the uprating alone will cost £763 million and in a full year it will cost £2,156 million. The hon. Member for Birmingham, Perry Barr (Mr. Rooker) was the first Opposition Member to mention the total cost of uprating. It is not only generosity; it is paying benefits as of right to those who deserve them. But we cannot ignore the source of the money. Paying arty entitlement must depend on the resources available. It is my duty to make that point.

Surely, if the increases are only keeping up with inflation in real terms there is no cost increase. The people contribute towards their own benefits.

The money put into the national insurance fund does not fund the outgoing. What is paid in by contributors today is paid out tomorrow, as it were, to our grandparents. The cost of benefits should be taken from increased production, and the hon. Gentleman knows what the level of production is. In budgeting our economy we must take account of the resources available.

The hon. Member for Perry Barr dealt with the differences in the surplus that the Government estimated last year on the national insurance fund and the estimated deficit of £619 million for 1981–82 contained in the table on page 2 of Cmnd. 8296. At the time of the Social Security (Contributions) Bill in December 1980, the Government Actuary estimated that there would be a small surplus of £39 million as a result of the rates set out in the Bill. He now estimates a deficit of £619 million. That is largely but not entirely due to the fact that the unemployment assumptions that he is using are higher than those used when the rates for 1980–81 were set out in December.

The figures are his assumptions. They are not Government forecasts, but we are bound to take note of the large deficit that the Actuary believes is likely to accrue, and, therefore, to take such as action as may be necessary to ensure that the national insurance fund is brought back into balance.

The hon. Gentleman asked whether it was an exact relationship. I shall write to him as early in August as I can with the details.

It is too early to say how the Budget forecast of 10 per cent. in the RPI this year to November 1981 will turn out. The fall in exchange rates since the early part of the year makes the task more difficult. However, the year-on-year rate has fallen steadily this year, and recent monthly increases in May and June have been small.

We have no reason to believe that the figures given to the Chancellor of the Exchequer are doubtful, as hon. Members on the Opposition Benches suggest. The London Business School predicts 10 per cent. to 11 per cent. by the end of the year, and its forecasts have been over in the past. As the right hon. Member for Norwich, North (Mr. Ennals) knows only too well, we must wait and see.

I cannot add to what I said in my letter of 8 April to the hon. Member for Perry Barr about the Prime Minister's pledge on shortfall, when I stated:

"This Government is committed to compensate pensioners fully for price increases over the lifetime of this Parliament. This was the pledge repeated by the Prime Minister on 25 February, Vol. 999, c. 371."

Expanding on a comment that I made to the hon. Member for Perry Barr in the Committee on this year's Bill, I went on to list other long-term beneficiaries in addition to pensioners who would need to benefit by making good the shortfall. I repeat what I said in an earlier intervention. When my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Social Services wrote about making good any shortfall the next time round, he was clearly referring to the following November.

Is the Minister therefore confirming that it is only the long-term benefits for which any shortfall will be made up in the following November and that this does not apply to short-term benefits?

I am confirming that the pledge was that it will definitely be the shortfall on long-term benefits which is made good. As the House will know, I should very much hope that we could do more than that, but that will depend upon the economy. The pledge was that the shortfall on the long-term benefits would be made good, which would clearly be in the following November.

The simple proposition always looming in the background is that by making a 1 per cent. cut this year the Government have, in effect, issued a declaration that no pensioner will ever be better off. The pledge has been made that the shortfall will be made up, but there is nothing in the pledge to say that it will be more than made up. Moreover, on the one occasion when there was an apparent over-provision, the benefit was cut back. There is, therefore, the declaration and the knowledge of what actually happened, all of which points to the message that no pensioner in Britain will ever become better off under a Tory Government. If their benefit goes over the top, it will be cut back.

The hon. Gentleman seeks to confuse the issue a little. I shall go over it once more. The pledge given by my right hon. Friends the Prime Minister and the Secretary of State for Social Services was to make good any shortfall, should it occur, in the following November. The hon. Gentleman is considering that entirely without the other pledge that we would do better by pensioners as soon as the economy allowed, which clearly means to do better than increasing pensions to keep pace with price inflation. That can be decided only when the economy picks up. I am not prepared to commit anyone to put a promise on record which could not be fulfilled by the economy of this country without causing higher inflation rates. The House would do well to remember that those who suffer most from high inflation rates are often the old, whose savings are eroded. Overcoming inflation must therefore be the first priority. We depend upon the production of this country for further increases in the pension ahead of price inflation.

The hon. Member for Perry Barr asked some penetrating questions about the position of women pensioners between the ages of 60 and 65. I am well aware that making good any potential shortfall in November 1982, plus the cost of inflation, even with the so-called Rooker-Wise increases in tax allowances, would bring such a person into taxation and outside the existing tolerance limits set by the Treasury. I have taken careful note of the hon. Gentleman's questions and shall certainly bring them to the attention of my right hon. and hon. Friends. There is no sense in asserting that this will not happen, as nobody here today can be sure one way or the other. However, I say this to the hon. Gentleman. I am as concerned about this as he is. If he can rest on that for the present, we shall have to see what can be done about a situation which I regard as not at all satisfactory.

The hon. Member for Renfrewshire, West (Mr. Buchan) commented, as he does on every available occasion, on the increase this year which is based at 10 per cent. on that which should have been paid had we got the forecast right last November. Nobody is losing as a result of that. In better times, I am sure that no Government, of whatever political colour, would wish to have made such a clawback. It was done for the sake of the long-term future, not just for the beneficiaries so often trumpeted by the Opposition, and particularly for the long-term good of bringing down the overall rate of inflation. The hon. Gentleman should remember that if the Government had intended any repetition of such an action, the provision in the Act would not have been limited to one year only. Perhaps we could let the matter rest there for today, although I accept that the hon. Gentleman will return to it on many future occasions.

The question of the Christmas bonus has been raised. At £10, the bonus is still welcome, however small it may be in relation to the value of the original £10 in 1972. We cannot contemplate raising it to the £30 suggested at this time as this would incur an additional and increasing cost of £200 million. Nobody is more aware than I of how much pensioners appreciate the bonus, but an increase could not be accomplished within the present state of public spending, with the large total of £27,000 million for 1981–82.

I apologise for missing the speech of the hon. Member for South Ayrshire (Mr. Foulkes), who referred to the death grant, but I had to slip out for a short time. The death grant review has been going on for some time. I have made no secret of my own impatience to resolve the matter. We have already announced in answer to a parliamentary question that we shall be making a statement. We had hoped that it would be made this summer, but there are some difficulties and it will now have to be made early in the new Session. I must warn the House, however, that to increase the grant to £180 would cost an additional £100 million approximately for a year. On this matter, therefore, my remarks must be the same as they were on increases in the Christmas bonus.

I take it that that is the cost without any means test. Does the hon. Lady have figures for the cost if there were a means test?

I should like to help the hon. Gentleman, but I cannot, as this depends entirely on the kind of means test—whether it is on the money and effects left by the person who has died, or on the means of the nearest living relative or the person who has decided to take responsibility for the funeral cost, or whatever. I do not have figures to hand. I am sure that the discussions which may follow the decision eventually taken—I cannot tell the hon. Gentleman what it will be, as I do not know—may bring to light some of those figures, but I certainly cannot give them now.

Is the Minister therefore confirming that the problem with the review is the question of how to apply a means test?

No. I am saying that there are many problems with the review. I remember making similar comments to those made by hon. Members today when I was in Opposition. At that time, I had no idea how complicated it was to deal with even a relatively small but none the less important benefit. This matter has proved far more complicated to investigate than I had at first assumed.

I shall now turn to child support. I am certain that the increase in child benefit, which from next November brings child benefit to £5·25 for each child and the one-parent benefit to £3·30 for each one-parent family, is a most important contribution. We can argue about many ways in which it would have been good to spend more money, but when we compare the value of child support in November 1981 with the high peak of April 1979, we shall recognise that those with children have benefited, considerably.

I am aware that making up the child benefit by 50p in November does not restore it to the April 1979 figure, hut it will be higher for families with one child under 11 than in the last 25 years, except April 1979. It will be higher for families with two children than at any time in the last 15 years, except April 1979. It will be higher for families with three or more children under 11 than at any time in the last 10 years, except April 1979, and higher for families with children over 11 than at any time in the last six years, except April 1979.

I ask the House to remember that in April 1979 we were approaching a general election. When the figures for child benefit were fixed by the last Government, they cannot have been unaware of the timetable of the increases in comparison with the timetable of the general election. Therefore, it is not surprising that they sought to make increases at a propitious time—and good luck to them for having improved child support by that amount.

Will we have to wait for a rise in benefits until the next election, when presumably the death grant will be announced and the pensioners' Christmas bonus will be increased? Is the Minister hinting that child benefit will also be increased?

I am not giving the hon. Member for Stockport, North (Mr. Bennett) or anyone else any hints. I am saying that it is notable that there was a high peak in April 1979. It is noticeable that that was during the general election period, which must have affected many people's thinking at that time.

April 1979 was unique in the sense that it was the beginning of the tax year. The Minister knows the reason why the child benefit had to be changed in any event because that was the last of the third part of the phasing out of the child tax allowances. That would have happened anyway. It is disingenuous of the Minister to seek to imply that because there was an election in the offing—the previous Labour Government did not choose the date—we made those increases. She knows that that was the last part of the phasing out of the child tax allowances.

I am aware that it was the last part of the phasing out of the child tax allowances, but the fact remains that the amount by which the child benefit was improved at that stage marks a high peak in the child support figures. That was the point that I was making to the House.

I wish to say a few words in response to my hon. Friend the Member for Kensington, who gave some interesting figures in his contribution. I shall go into more detail after the debate, but he is well aware that one of the reasons why the supplementary benefit rates of child support have increased notably has been the reduction in scale rates from five to three. That has particularly benefited the under-fives who had the 79 per cent. increase between November 1978 and November 1981. It also benefited the 11 to 12-year-olds who had an 81 per cent. increase in child support over that period. It was entirely sensible and logical that the under-fives should have had that additional support when their parents were on supplementary benefit, and also for the 11 to 12-year-olds in our society when there is fast growth among children of that age and when support for them is needed. Therefore, the increase was entirely beneficial. I shall go into some of the other figures raised by my hon. Friend in correspondence following this debate.

I wish to say something further about one-parent benefit, as it is now known, and to get it absolutely clearly on the record. In increasing one-parent benefit, we also want to get a better take-up of one-parent benefit. Many hon. Members will know that at present I am involved in seeking to contact single payees on child benefit books—in other words, where there is only one name on the child benefit book—to make sure that if they are entitled to one-parent benefit they make a claim for it.

I regret that, because of the industrial action over the last few months, the start of that scheme, which should have been about two weeks ago, has had to be delayed. Improvements for one-parent benefit and the other improvements to enhance take-up will be put into operation as soon as possible. I shall return to the other questions about recovery from industrial action later on.

With regard to child dependency additions, the other thing that I wanted to say was that many hon. Members have understood that there have been variations in the additions for the national insurance beneficiaries. I believe that we are going in the right direction to make it a priority to increase child benefit, paid to the parents of children, whether those parents are in or out of work. If that has meant that there has been a wearing down of the differences that used to exist for the long-term future of child support, it is a positive step forward. No one likes to accept any reduction, certainly neither in actual nor in real terms. If we are to make sense of child support over the years ahead, we shall have to take some of those measures. I believe that that is moving in the right direction.

Other hon. Members questioned the basis of the uprating of the different elements in family income supplement. I shall explain how we do that each year. Every year, as the right hon. Member for Norwich, North will know, the Department considers how best to spread the money available for improving family income supplement between the different elements in the scheme. Sometimes the emphasis has been on the prescribed levels, and at other times it has been on steps to be taken in regard to additional children and the maximum amounts payable. A requirement to move all those elements in strict proportion would remove a desirable element of flexibility that any Government would wish to retain. As we have flexibility, it allows scope either for concentrating help on the existing beneficiaries or on extending the numbers eligible for the scheme.

I am pleased to say that the numbers on the scheme who are taking up the benefits are improving. They have improved, largely as a result of the publicity last winter, probably to an average of about 110,000 per annum. Those improvements may go further.

I have been asked in many debates, although I do not think that the question was posed today, how many lone parent beneficiaries who are working on shorter hours entitlement level—that is, 24 hours or more a week—are benefiting from family income supplement. I ask right hon. and hon. Members to accept that this is only an estimate. I reckon that now about 18,000 lone parent beneficiaries are receiving the benefit of working for 24 hours rather than having to do the extra six hours and become entitled to the amounts that two-parent families receive for 30 hours per week.

The improvements in family income supplement have been notable. I repeat to the House that the one-child family with earnings of £60 this year and £66 next year will receive a 14 per cent. increase in family income supplement. The two-child family on the same earnings will also receive a 14 per cent. increase. We hope that more people will take up FIS. I shall return to the subject of take-up in a moment.

A number of hon. Members have mentioned housing benefit, which used to be known as unified housing benefit. My Department, together with the Department of the Environment, has done an enormous amount of work in seeking a feasible scheme for the implementation of a housing benefit which would eliminate from the system the lottery, as it has sometimes been called, of whether someone claims supplementary benefit or goes to his local authority for a rent or rate rebate. The discussions between the local authority associations and the Department of the Environment are proceeding well. I cannot say what the eventual outcome of those discussions will be, but I am glad that we have made as much progress as has been made. I regard it as a most important improvement to the system overall.

I shall try to answer all the questions that have been put to me about the take-up of supplementary benefit. One hon. Gentleman said that there were many unclaimed benefits. I have said many times that many of the unclaimed benefits are probably for a small amount. The intimation is that that should be so, but we are taking steps to assist take-up, especially with the rewrite of the supplementary benefit handbook, the notices of assessment that go to claimants and the improved and clearer leaflets.

I remind the House that all retirement pensioners and widows are invited to claim. Unemployment claimants are also issued with a leaflet which draws their attention to supplementary benefit.

The hon. Member for South Ayrshire mentioned his wish that there should be a comprehensive fuel allowance. He also mentioned, with some affection, the long-departed electricity discount scheme that gave benefit only to those with electric heating. I do not think that it will be a surprise to him that a comprehensive fuel allowance cannot be introduced at present because of the large expenditure involved. However, we are planning to spend more than £250 million a year from November on fuel assistance. That is the most generous package of fuel aid ever. It concentrates help on the poorest households—those on supplementary benefit and FIS.

I accept that there is a problem, as there is with every means-tested benefit, for those whose entitlement is just missed because of other income or various other circumstances. For those who are most hard-pressed we are doing as well as we can. The hon. Gentleman knows that the electricity discount scheme was discontinued because it was so unsatisfactory. It came under enormous criticism. The average help given under that scheme was about £7·50 a year, which does not compare very favourably with the £72·80 in a full year in increased amounts that will be given from next November to supplementary benefit claimants who receive the basic rate heating addition. The discount scheme was not only limited to one fuel but it was given to a few people who did not need it.

The hon. Gentleman also asked about my meeting last week with the chairman of the South of Scotland Electricity Board. We had previously spoken in the House about the £150 limit on debt before that board would accept supplementary benefit people on to fuel direct. I had an interesting and helpful meeting with the chairman and some of his advisers last week. The meeting was constructive and I am hopeful that we can make a real improvement in conditions soon. I hope that the hon. Member will not press me further now, because some delicate negotiations are continuing. It was a most helpful meeting.

I shall not press the Minister further on that because I am glad to hear her comments. However, surely she is aware that many people were grateful for the electricity discount scheme, even though it was a rough and ready scheme. I am sorry that it has been abandoned and as a result some people are less well off. Surely, the pressure is on to introduce a comprehensive fuel discount scheme to cover the other fuels that are now shooting up in cost. The hon. Lady has stated her wish that she would like such a scheme to be introduced. She has given us the cost and explained why such a scheme cannot be introduced, and that is the theme that has characterised all her comments. How long can she and her colleagues continue as Ministers if everything they want to do is being frustrated by the Treasury Ministers?

The hon. Gentleman knows that I shall go on battling as long as I have breath in my body to do so, whether I be at this Dispatch Box or anywhere else, even outside the House. That is beside the point, however. The new scheme will be better, although admittedly going to a smaller number than those who received the £7·50 a year from the electricity discount scheme. He knows that those who are affected are those on rent and rate rebates. I said in answer to the hon. Member for Stockport, North that in working towards a resolution of the housing problem—which will bring the whole of the system into better order—that may be a better and more feasible time for considering other means of helping those in most difficulty.

I am conscious of the length of time that I am taking. I return to the new order which brings the long-term rate to men who are over 60, unemployed and in receipt of supplementary benefit for more than a year. The hon. Member for Perry Barr asked some detailed questions about that. The official in the Midlands who told the Birmingham Evening Mail that there could be 30,000 beneficiaries in the Midlands area was wrong. I do not know where that figure crept in from but I confirm that the figure is estimated to be about 45,000. First, I should explain that the figure does not include those who will qualify because they can count periods out of benefit for up to 13 weeks towards the 12-month qualifying period. Secondly—this explains the difference between the 26,000 at December 1980 and the 45,000 estimated now—unemployment has risen since December 1980 and, therefore, there will be more people to benefit.

Thirdly, the figure of 45,000 is an estimate of those who will benefit up to March 1983. That clears up the questions being asked about the difference between the figures of those who might have been in that group at December 1980 and the figures announced in a number of news broadcasts, even if not: in the press release received by hon. Members.

Will the Minister clarify that she is saying that the difference between the 26,000 at December 1980 and the 45,000 estimated arises because the Department is assuming that the figures will rise from 26,000 in December 1980 to 45,000 in March 1982? Have I misunderstood her?

I shall go over my figures again. The 26,000 figure did not include those who will qualify because they can count periods out of benefit for up to 13 weeks towards the total 12-month qualifying period. That is an awkward part of the regulations but it is fact. There is that further group on top of the 26,000. There are also those who have been out of work, signing on and in receipt of supplementary benefit for more than one year, and that figure will increase. It is a figure for the future, not a figure of entitlement as from November. The additional rate of benefit is the long-term rate and will start from November, when all the upratings take effect.

Concerning these men over the age of 60, I was asked whether I thought that this provision was discriminatory. When we already have an earlier retirement age for women, it is beneficial that at least those men over the age of 60 who are out of work arid have very little chance of resuming work should be given this choice and opportunity.

The hon. Member for Renfrewshire, West cannot have it both ways in saying that it is discriminatory to do it for men, which gives them the choice, when women at the age of 60 can retire—although some of them choose to continue working and so enhance their pensions. The only point I make to the hon. Gentleman is that I believe that this is beneficial. I believe that it is right for that group of people who do not have any prospect of working again over the age of 60. The hon. Gentleman cannot expect to make a message out of that point.

The way to avoid any discrimination is to extend the long-term supplementary benefit to all long-term unemployed.

I am well aware that the hon. Member and many other hon. Members would like to do that. I do not believe that the hon. Gentleman was a member of the previous Government's Front Bench. They also found that, for reasons of cost, they could not do this. I hope that the hon. Gentleman will not be churlish and not welcome this provision for those for whom it is important. We cannot do more at present, but this is a positive and helpful step forward.

I was asked a further question about people who become eligible for the long-term rate under the regulation and inviting them to claim. Men who would not be eligible for the long-term rate would not be invited to cease registering, so there can be no question of people ceasing to register and finding themselves without benefit.

The hon. Member for Perry Barr asked about the mechanics. The mechanics and a clear explanation of all the steps need further work by myself and my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary of State for Employment. However, I assure the hon. Member that the month of August will be put to good use. I hope that all right hon. and hon. Members will draw attention to the fact that there is now a choice for men over 60 who are long-term unemployed and who have been receiving supplementary benefit for more than one year no longer to register to receive the higher rate of unemployment benefit.

I was asked about credits to national insurance benefits and how these might be affected by the change. It is not our intention that this change should have any effect on a person's entitlement to any national insurance benefit, including retirement pension. For the most part, the benefit is retirement pension and credits will continue to be available for this purpose. It may require an amendment to the regulations to ensure that the receipt of supplementary benefit at the long-term rate in these circumstances is counted for credits.

I apologise to the House for the fact that this matter could not be brought forward today. That was simply because I have not had time to go into it. However, it will be brought forward at an appropriate time should it be needed.

Other questions have been raised. I shall seek to answer them in correspondence to ensure that there is no doubt about what is going on.

Recovery from industrial action has been mentioned several times in the House. I am very pleased that the industrial action in the Civil Service is being ended and that those who have been on strike will be returning to work. For the DHSS, this means that we can make a start on the backlog of work caused by the stoppage of the computer which maintains the record of national insurance contributions and the computers which pay child benefit and unemployment benefit.

However, it will be many months before recovery is completed in all areas. We shall give priority to recovery in areas affecting the payment of benefits. The special arrangements for paying benefits which were introduced during the industrial action will continue until normal arrangements are operating. I hope that hon. Members will seek to make that well known to those affected.

I was asked about the completion of the uprating in local offices. We are making every effort to ensure that the uprating is completed on time. I cannot guarantee—just as no Minister before me or, I think, in future, could guarantee—that there will not be a little delay in a few areas, as there has been in the past, for a variety of other reasons. But, if delays occur, no one will lose. We shall backdate the increases to the date of uprating in any delayed cases. I hope that that reassures hon. Members.

I come now to the matter of publicity and take-up. This is very important. It has been raised in conjunction with these orders and regulations. One hon. Member made some assertions about FIS which I think were not right, although I did not take the figures down in time. I shall look at the record and refer back to him if the figures are wrong. The eventual report on the close period of scrutiny during the previous Labour Government showed only a 50 per cent. take-up of FIS. Any Minister would be thoroughly concerned about that. We are taking every measure that we can to improve it.

I should like to tell the House what will happen this year. A £475,000 press and television advertising campaign will take place. That is £135,000 more than the figure last year. Last year's campaign improved take-up, as we well know. Fifty-five per cent. of that £475,000 will go on a national television advertising campaign, which is one of the most effective ways of getting people to claim FIS, and 45 per cent. will go on a national press advertising campaign.

I ask all hon. Members to make sure that they draw FIS to the attention of any self-employed people with whom they may come into contact. As my hon. Friend the Member for Tiverton (Mr. Maxwell-Hyslop) requested, it will be on the leaflets, but I think that there is sometimes a bigger job to do than simply putting it into leaflets, into national publicity and even on television. Word of mouth is often one of the most valuable means of extending the take-up of a benefit.

For FIS there will also be a permanent display of posters in post offices and citizens advice bureaux—in other words, not one which is confined just to the change in rate period. There will, further, be a new and improved leaflet and claim form, because I believe that the claim form must be improved. In addition, we shall be placing special inserts in child benefit order books, because it may be that mothers will see the need for the claim whereas fathers may not have noted it in the first place.

In total, that campaign will cover about 92 per cent. of low income families with school age children. I hope that every hon. Member will help in that, as in the campaign for the take-up of other benefits.

As the House knows, we produce a very wide range of leaflets on social security benefits. We are making efforts to improve the quality of leaflets. We want to make them easier to understand so that they will be as informative as possible. Starting at the end of this year, we shall be producing a new range of general purpose leaflets for particular groups, such as lone parents and low-paid workers. We have already published the general purpose leaflet for the disabled, "Help for Handicapped People", from the beginning of this year. We shall ensure in every feasible way the take-up of benefit.

Finally, before I commend the orders to the House, I want to say one thing. I saw the press release on Wednesday of this week quoting the hon. Member for Renfrewshire, West talking about campaigns by local authorities to improve take-up. It is obviously up to individual local authorities to decide their priorities for expenditure. I have never been against closely-targeted campaigns, but I am against campaigns that are wasteful of staff time in my Department and campaigns that unfairly raise the expectations of people who have no opportunity to benefit.

However, in certain towns in the North there has already been good co-operation between local authorities wishing to implement some form of take-up and our DHSS offices. My one criticism of the press release issued by the hon. Member for Renfrewshire, West is that it does not encourage consultation between local authorities and local offices of the DHSS. That view is based on a quick glance at the document. I hope that the hon. Gentleman, if he wishes to encourage the campaign, will support such consultation. It is only by working together that the best results can be obtained from the campaign.

The matter to which the hon. Lady refers did not appear in the handout. However, the circular that we issued states that local organisations should consult the DHSS. There is a change of climate, for which I thank the hon. Lady. It is our hope that we can work on this matter together.

I thank the hon. Gentleman. I have not seen all the details of the documents issued by his party but I have seen a fair part of them.

These measures are beneficial. They help a wide number of people. They increase public expenditure, but it is an increase that is incurred willingly. The increase of £2,156 million in a full year that results from the orders and regulations brings social security spending to £27,000 million. However much we want to do, we have to live within the realms of reality. Because the orders ensure that we do that, I commend them to the House.

We now move to the ten Adjournment debates listed on the Order Paper. These are half-hour debates and will continue for five hours. As debate on the six social security orders and regulations has concluded earlier than the allotted time, I shall ensure that a. list of the timings of the Adjournment debates is posted in the "No" Division Lobby and at the end of the Chamber.

The grievance that I want to raise is that council tenants, certainly in my constituency, more generally in London, and I believe throughout the country, have to pay much more for communal central heating and hot water than other people not housed in council accommodation. I feel this grievance particularly because the majority of my constituents live in public accommodation of one kind or another. There are three local authorities providing accommodation within my constituency—the borough of Islington, the Greater London Council and the Corporation of the City of London, to say nothing of many housing associations in the area.

The heating charges levied by all three public authorities are high compared to the charges that one would have to pay in private accommodation for the same service. I stress that I am talking of communal heating systems and not of those heating systems, even in council accommodation, where the tenant has complete control with a separate boiler provided for each dwelling.

In comparing the costs levied by local authorities with what is normal and understandable, one has recourse to a useful series of booklets that I hope will continue to be produced by the Department of Energy. These booklets, called "Compare your home heating costs", contain different figures for different parts of the country to take account, among other things, of differences of temperature. I shall be referring to the South of England edition.

The latest booklet, dated January 1979, is based on figures relating to November 1978. In making use of the figures, one has therefore to make some rough and ready uprating to take account of the rise in fuel costs since that time. While acknowledging that the booklets are not the responsibility of the Minister who will reply, I hope that the hon. Gentleman will pass to the Department of Energy my hope that no decision has been taken to terminate publication of the booklets, which have been useful not only for the purposes of this type of debate but also to many people throughout the country in determining the charge that they might have to face for the provision of space heating and hot water. I hope that the Department of Energy will proceed belatedly with the production of an up-to-date version of the booklets

I take as my first example tenants of a one-bedroom flat—a two-room flat with other facilities—in the borough of Islington. A tenant enjoying full central heating and hot water will pay anything between £6·60 and £8·90 a week for the service. Tenants enjoying partial space heating and hot water will pay anything between £5·85 and £6·90 a week. Tenants with full space heating and no hot water will pay just under £6. Those with partial space heating and no hot water will pay between £3·69 and £6·08. The variations depend on the age of the accommodation and on whether the heating is provided by gas or oil and similar variations. I have based my figures on a selection of those levied in different blocks.

The figures are a disgrace. Anyone who pays for heating in his own home—perhaps a detached house—knows that he can get far more space heating and hot water than these people remotely get for not much more cost. A study needs to be made to discover why people are having to pay what I claim amounts on average to double the sum for the same amount of space heating and hot water compared with the rest of the population.

I should like to compare some figures with those given in the Department of Energy booklet. I take a two-bedroom terraced house with full space heating and hot water. According to the Department of Energy booklet, the average payment might be about £2·50 a week for an oil-based system. I wish to make a comparison not with a terraced house but with a flat which normally has party walls either all the way round it or nearly all the way round it. I wish to give figures for Islington borough council property. A gas-fired system in pre-1953 accommodation costs £10·28. For oil-fired 1953 to 1969 accommodation, the cost is £8·90—and that is for a one-bedroom flat, the only figure available. In gas-fired post-1970 accommodation the cost is £10·51 a week. In gas-fired post 1980 accommodation it is £8·45 or £9·43 a week.

The figures amount on average to £9 a week, or £470 a year, compared to a figure in the 1979 Department of Energy booklet of £129 a year. Even doubling that figure to take account of inflation, which would be excessive, the sum amounts to about £260. The booklet shows that, even including the cost of equipment and the cost of paying interest and amortising the capital over seven years, the running costs and the equipment costs in this type of accommodation might come to about £373 a year, or £7 a week.

Islington borough council tenants in the same size accommodation seem to be paying half as much again as they ought to need to pay even if they were amortising the equipment which is in use—and, of course, they are paying for the amortisation of the equipment as part of their rent, quite apart from the heating charges which they are paying.

Secondly, I ask the House to compare Islington borough council three-bedroom flats with the three-bedroom semi-detached house given in the example in the booklet. The booklet says that the latter, on an oil-fired basis, would cost about £4 a week, or £220 a year. To be on the safe side, let us double it to take inflation into account. We come to a figure of £440 a year, or £8 a week. The equivalent Islington borough council flat charges are, for oil-fired 1953–69 accommodation, £8·90 for just one bedroom. For a gas-fired system post-1970, it is £12·37 a week. For a gas-fired system post-1980, it is £10·91 a week. That is an average of, say, £11 a week, or £580 a year, compared with a booklet figure, doubled, of £440 a year.

Rather unusually, I have in my constituency a great deal of City corporation accommodation. Half of all the City's extra-territorial accommodation is in my constituency. There are three estates. In two-bedroom flats on those estates, which do not all have full space heating, the charges are £9·50 a week, £7·55 a week and £9·75 a week on the three separate estates—an average of about £500 a year. That compares with a figure in the booklet of £2·50 a week for this size of accommodation, and that is £130 a year which, if we double it, comes to £260. So we have £500 for the City corporation tenant and the doubled booklet figure of £260 a year.

It is that kind of comparison which justifies me in saying that the council tenant is paying about double what a person outside council accommodation would normally pay.

If we take a comparison on three-bedroom accommodation, the booklet figure is £220, doubled to £440, and the City corporation charges in my constituency work out at about £10·70 a week, £8·45 a week and about £10·50 a week—once again, an average of about £520 for the council tenant, compared with no more than a doubled indicated level of between £400 and £440 for other people.

Council tenants in many parts of the country—certainly in my constituency—are paying far more for heating and hot water than other people are paying for precisely the same amount of heating and hot water.

Are they getting better service? No one will imagine that they are. Often the systems in council accommodation work badly. They fail and are not repaired quickly. Tenants often have difficulty in getting refunds for periods when their systems are not working. I have many tenants at the moment awaiting refunds from the GLC for weeks when heating was not working at all or are working badly. When faults occur, tenants have to use temporary means of heating, often extremely expensive electric fires. If they are tempted to use mobile Calor gas fires, they find that they have a large capital outlay for an appliance which should never be needed and which will be needed only some of the time. They will also find that the use of such fires is often prohibited on safety grounds.

Why, then, do council tenants have to pay so much compared with other people? First, there is simple inefficiency. The same administrative inefficiency which characterises other aspects of council housing departments also characterises this aspect. Repairs are done badly and have to be redone. The cost of however many jobs it takes to carry out a repair has all to be put on to the heating account. It is not just the cost of the job which needed to be done; it is the cost of the messing up of the job and of putting right the messing up of the job for which the tenant has to pay.

Secondly, many places suffer from bad design. It is a tragedy of our age that architects, instead of allowing their diseased imaginations to work on the houses in which they themselves live have allowed those diseased imaginations only to work on the blocks which they have built for other people—our constituents—to live in. These places are often absurdly badly designed. Double glazing, so common on the Continent and increasingly common in owner-occupied accommodation here, is hardly ever seen even today in council estates. The cost of putting in double glazing when it was not put in in the first place is very high compared with the cost of initial installation.

Thirdly, there is extremely bad insulation of most hot water tanks. The ready-insulated tank which is produced by the manufacturer with an inch or one and a half inches of insulation bonded on to the copper tank is still not commonly used by councils. There are still many councils which never dream of putting in double immersion heaters, if immersion heaters are in use. By a double immersion heater, I mean one which has a long element and a short one so that, if the householder wants only a little hot water, he does not have to heat the whole tank. This is an easy enough device to purchase, but far too few public authorities take the trouble to purchase that as against the slightly cheaper single element heater.

Those are only some of the reasons, along with simple inefficiency, why the charges are so much greater. But it still leaves a total question mark in my mind. I do not understand how the charges can be as high as they are, even given all these disadvantages.

I should like to see the Department of the Environment, in its local authority surveillance capacity, asking a selection of local authorities—not all of them—in different places to supply it with the figures for the charges which they levy for space heating and hot water heating.

I should also like to see the Department of the Environment using those figures, consulting the Department of Energy about them and, by sending out its regional representatives, trying to find out what it is which makes the charges for local authority tenants so much greater than any commonsense assessment of the objective facts would suggest is right.

That is the specific request which I make to the Minister. The present situation is taking council tenants for a ride. It is making them pay roughly twice as much as they should be paying. Although I can see that the Department of the Environment can say that this is entirely a matter between local authorities and their tenants, the grievance is so widespread and severe and the situation is so common to all local authorities that it makes sense for the Department of the Environment to devote a little time and effort to seeing whether it can do anything about it, above all in an age when we are all obsessed with the necessity to conserve energy.

I ask the Minister, therefore, to endeavour to collect those figures, to consult the Department of Energy about them, to bully the Department of Energy into producing an up-to-date version of its booklet and to carry on producing those booklets, and to give my constituents a ray of hope that they might in the future need to pay no more than other people in the country for the quantity of heating and hot water which they get.

I shall draw the attention of my colleagues in the Department of Energy to the comments of the hon. Member for Islington, South and Finsbury (Mr. Cunningham) about the publication to which he referred.

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for raising the question of heating charges in local authority properties. It is a matter of great concern to tenants, not merely in his constituency but in other parts of the country. The statutory responsibility for the management, regulation and control of council housing rests with the local authorities concerned. It is for each local authority to decide whether to install central heating in its dwellings and, if so, what form that heating should take—for example, the type of system and the type of fuel to use.

When authorities decide to install in individual dwellings solid fuel or gas-fuelled central heating or electric heating, the tenant is responsible for paying, for example, the gas or electricity board for the fuel that he uses, in the same way as is any other consumer. However, that is not the basic point that the hon. Gentleman is making. He is saying something different, and I shall come on to that and be as helpful as I can.

The hon. Gentleman and I know that it is not uncommon for local authority dwellings to be served by some form of collectively provided, landlord-controlled heating. Communal central heating is frequently found in blocks of flats where there is one heat source per block.

With communal heating, the main determinants of the cost to the tenant would be the reasonableness of the price that the local authority pays the suppliers of the fuel, how it apportions charges among tenants and the efficiency of the system. I shall leave aside what the hon. Gentleman said about architects, but he will recall various remarks that I have made about architects and planners in a different context.

The price of the fuel depends on general pricing policies and the terms of the particular contract which the local authority is able to negotiate with the fuel boards, oil companies or local suppliers. When faced with the fuel originally chosen for a particular system appearing to escalate in cost out of line with others that are available, it is up to the local authorities to decide whether to change the fuel or to take other steps to make the system more economic. It is difficult for them to reach a realistic decision in the light of constantly changing comparisons between fuels, and a decision to change fuels is normally the most expensive option for an authority. It would normally be wise for a local authority to consider introducing more reliable metering and to seek to improve the efficiency of the heating system before considering changing the fuel.

With communal heating, the total fuel costs must be apportioned between, and charged to, those tenants for whom heating is provided. That can be done in one of two ways. The authority can either impose a notional, flat rate, average charge for heating or employ some form of heat metering system which will relate the heating charge to the actual amount of heat used. The choice is entirely a matter for the authority concerned.

Ideally, apportionment of the charges should be on the basis of payment for fuel used and should provide an incentive to save fuel. The evaporation heat meters generally used have, however, long been suspected to be inaccurate. The Building Research Establishment has been examining that important problem and it is hoped to publish a report towards the end of the year.

If the system is inefficient, the options would include insulation, introduction of controls, and possibly a change in the system of heating to, say, individual heating. For example, electric heating has often been installed in the past because of the comparatively low capital cost, which has, however, been more than offset by steep rises in running costs.

My Department chaired the joint working party on heating and energy conservation in public sector housing which in 1978–79 issued domestic energy notes 1 and 3 on electric heating, which emphasised the importance of high standards of insulation and other measures to reduce heat loss.

The note gave advice on efficient operation and on improved controls as ways of achieving acceptable comfort at reasonable cost and covered the overhaul, repair or extension of the heating system, stressing that replacement should be the last resort.

I stress that I do not intend to be provocative, but the hon. Gentleman made the important point that heating jobs are often repaired, re-repaired and repaired yet again. Frequently, such work is done by directly employed labour and in those cases there is no redress. If the job is done by an outside contractor and the specification is properly drawn up, it ought to be possible for the local authority to make certain that the work is put right at no cost to the council.

I assure the hon. Gentleman that in my area most of such work has been done by private contractors and the number of mess-ups has been considerable. The employment of private contractors is no solution to the problem. I should much rather have work done by a direct labour department than by most of the private contractors with which I have had to deal.

We must agree to differ on that matter, but if a contract is properly drawn up it ought to be possible to get the work put right at no cost. Perhaps contracts have not been as watertight as they should be. However, although I can be provocative on occasions, I was not intending to be so today.

The priority that authorities give to central heating work is a matter for them. The note stressed that whatever decison the local authority makes should ensure that tenants are consulted at all stages and that their views are taken fully into account. In particular, adequate information should be given to tenants in non-technical terms about the operation of the system.

Responsibility for maintaining central heating installations rests with local authorities, but the cost is met by tenants, as the hon. Gentleman graphically illustrated, either directly through heating charges or indirectly through council rates.

The Government would not expect local authorities to levy charges for heating that would result in a surplus, but we consider that they should aim to cover the full operating costs of a heating scheme.

The hon. Gentleman said that comparisons between updated figures from the Department of Energy and the charges in two local authorities show that something is out of balance. Again, I am trying to be purely factual, but the hon. Gentleman knows that if a local authority tenant exercises his right to buy his flat he will have the same right as the owners of flats in private blocks to challenge the local authority's estimate of service charges. It is worth thinking about that issue.

Why should a person not have that right as a council tenant?

We considered that point and produced a tenants' charter. I referred earlier to the consultation that needs to take place if a local authority is to make major changes.

The hon. Gentleman argued that in the public sector tenants are limited in what they can do to help themselves and, although we have taken steps to allow local authorities greater freedom in allocating their resources, we recognise that the Government have their part to play, in particular in aiding householders to improve the insulation of their homes.

The hon. Gentleman quoted from the Department of Energy booklet on home heating costs. It contains excellent and impartial advice, which is still relevant, on the practical benefits of better insulation, draughtproofing and the lagging of hot water tanks.

We must all try to reduce the amount of energy that we use—by careful husbandry, by reducing the heat loss in our homes by insulation and draughtproofing and, when the opportunity arises, by choosing efficient heating appliances which are suited to our needs. The Department of Energy booklet from which the hon. Gentleman quoted did not have up-to-date heating costs, but it still illustrates well the difference that insulation, for example, can make to the annual fuel bill.

Through the homes insulation scheme we have made available grants to local authority tenants, as well as to those in the private sector. Every tenant who lives in a house with an uninsulated loft can apply to the authority for a grant of 66 per cent. of the cost, up to a maximum of £65, and all elderly tenants on limited means can apply for a 90 per cent. grant, up to a maximum of £85. I am very much concerned to see the grant reach those most in need.

The hon. Gentleman asked that we should look at a position that he finds unsatisfactory. I have carefully noted his suggestion that there should be a study of the issue, which, if it went ahead, would have to run across the Departments of Energy and the Environment and the local authorities. I shall give his idea the serious consideration that it deserves.

I hope that the hon. Gentleman will agree that it has been very useful to air the issue. I am grateful to him for giving the House the opportunity to discuss it. I am also grateful for his suggestion, which I promise to examine personally.

I am grateful for this opportunity to raise the subject of the future of the special constabulary. It seems a timely moment to do so. This autumn marks the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the Special Constables Act 1831, which established the voluntary element in Britain's police service in the form that we know today. There will be various parades and ceremonies to mark the anniversary, culminating in a service at Westminster Abbey to be attended by my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary.

I hope that all the celebrations of the special constabulary's past will be accompanied by some thoughtful planning for its future. After all, 1981 has proved to be a year in which events have caused almost everyone to think hard about various aspects of police policy. Future policing methods, future police recruitment and future machinery for independent investigation and supervision of complaints about the police are all under scruntiny and review as never before. It is my hope that this debate will encourage the Government similarly to review the future of the special constabulary.

For several years, under successive Governments, the special constabulary seems to have been suffering from benign neglect. During the past decade the strength of the specials has more than halved, from 32,000 officers in 1970 to 15,000 today. Even since the present Government came to office, the number of specials has fallen by over 10 per cent.

The time has come to take a Government initiative to halt this decline, particularly in these critical days, when some of our regular police forces are severely overstretched and are making only a token contribution towards community policing, to which specials, by their very nature as genuine residents in their local community, can contribute so much. My purpose in initiating the debate is therefore to call on the Government to expand, strengthen and revitalise the specials, so that they can be built up into an effective and well-trained police reserve with roots in their local communities.

How can all that be achieved? The priorities for the specials are more training and more recruitment. Neither priority should be all that difficult to achieve, provided the political will exists, because there are such solid foundations to build on within the existing structure of the special constabulary.

One of the paradoxes of the specials at present is that, although their overall numbers are declining, individual enthusiasm for voluntary police service seems to be riding high. I should like to give one or two examples. On Merseyside recently the 350 specials have made an invaluable contribution during the civil disturbances. They have been turning out for duty virtually every evening to make up the patrols on the beat and to man police stations, not in the riot zones but in outside divisions, where the regular police strength has been depleted by the calls of Toxteth and other stricken areas.

In Brixton and in Southall, during the recent disturbances the specials acted as guides and pathfinders to police officers drafted in from other parts of the Metropolitan Police area, thus emphasising that the local community knowledge of the specials can be invaluable in a tense situation.

While I am on the subject of the Metropolitan Police special constabulary, I think that mention should be made this week of the fact that no fewer than 900 specials were on duty at the Royal wedding, doing a long day's voluntary service, starting at 3 am, which was an invaluable assistance to the work of the regular police.

But, although there is abundant evidence of enthusiasm for and dedication to police work by individual special constables in various parts of the country, I fear that I must tell the House that it does not seem to be matched by any corresponding enthusiasm for, or even positive interest in, the special constabulary by officialdom within the Government. As evidence for what I must call the persistently negative attitude shown towards the specials by the Home Office bureaucracy, I cite the most recent reports of the Home Office working parties on the special constabulary in 1975 and in 1981.

The 1975 report was a particularly dismal document, given over to what can only be called nitpicking in arcane sartorial arguments about the merits of shoulder flashes, diced cap bands and miniature metal bars as opposed to chevrons on police uniforms. All this seems esoteric to outsiders. All that is necessary is that special constables should look as much like regular police officers as is reasonably possible and not like some other branch of the administration, such as traffic wardens.

The same negative approach has characterised this year's working party report. Although not yet published, it is well known to be on much the same lines as the 1975 document, filled with frustrating emphasis on detailed minutiae and sadly lacking in positive, forward-looking proposals which are necessary to halt the withering on the vine of the special constabulary.

To me by far the most disappointing aspect of the 1981 report is its failure to recommend that special constables should be entitled to receive a Territorial Army-style bounty. I know that there are two views about the bounty, even within the special constabulary. It is all very well to stress the ideal of voluntary service in its purest form, but not against the background of a decline in numbers of the scale that I described earlier. If the present trend of wastage within the special constabulary continues, we shall have no special constables at all by the early 1990s. That is something that everyone wishes to avoid.

Against that background, we must look for new solutions and approaches to the two priorities of recruitment and training. I should like to put forward the following 10-point plan to revitalise the specials.

First, the Government should introduce a bounty exactly the same as the Territorial Army's. Incidentally, the Terriers have a voluntary spirit and enthusiasm that have in no way been defiled or sullied by the tax-free payment of a bounty of £200 or £300 a year, depending on their length of service. I believe that a similar bounty for the special constabulary would cost the country less than £300 million a year, out of a police budget of over £1,500 million, and do more than anything else to revitalise recruitment.

Secondly, the Government must initiate an advertising campaign for recruits. It is well proved that local advertising in particular pays dividends. I recall that in 1974 the Metropolitan Police special constabulary had an advertising campaign on the London Underground that cost £10,000 and in one year produced a 30 per cent. increase in the special constabulary strength in London.

Thirdly, we should encourage the regular police, many of whom retire in their early fifties today, to continue their links with the police service by joining the specials. A bounty, together with the realisation that the special constabulary has a real role to play in modern policing, along the lines of the contribution in Merseyside and in Brixton that I have described, would be an encouragement to many officers to do that.

Fourthly, we must ask the publicity departments of police forces, and of the Home Office, to be much more active in publicising the work and achievements of specials, so that the public are much more aware of their work.

Fifthly, we should make a new appointment of a senior civil servant within the Home Office to have responsibility for the special constabulary. As my hon. and learned Friend the Minister of State will know from the recent successful appointment of a new director-general of the prison service, a new face within the bureaucracy can make an immense difference to policy and enthusiasm for that policy.

At present there are disturbing grumbles about the lethargic and at times allegedly positively obstructive attitudes of low-level civil servants in the police department at the Home Office towards the special constabulary and the small funds directed to it. That is reflected to some extent in the working party reports, and I hope that my hon. and learned Friend will consider making the shake-up that is necessary within the police department and its personnel.

Sixthly, negotiations should take place with the Police Federation to sweep away the last remnants of Police Federation hostility to the special constabulary. The Police Federation has traditionally had a less-than-generous approach to co-operation with the special constabulary—an attitude that sprang from a mistaken shop steward-like belief that the use of specials by chief constables somehow, in theory, prevented overtime payments, and even jobs, going to regulars. Since the Edmund-Davies report on police pay, those fears, which were always extremely doubtful, have proved utterly without foundation, because today the regular police are well paid and get plenty of overtime.

Nevertheless, some vestiges of hostility remain. For example, on Merseyside, where there is a traditionally militant Police Federation branch, the federation does not permit specials to go on motor patrols with regulars. That is the sort of anachronistic nonsense that must be swept away—as I am sure it will be—as regulars and specials are seen to work more closely and with more mutual respect than ever before. Indeed, that has happened during the past few weeks on Merseyside.

Seventhly, on the training front, there is a real need for the Home Secretary to set aside a modest sum of money from the police budget exclusively for the better training of specials. That is perhaps the most urgent priority, given the situation that has been created by recent events. The country needs the manpower of specials as never before, but is is imperative that training is brought up to a higher standard. Weekend camps, more instructors and better equipment are all part of that training, but the funds for it will be found only if they are properly earmarked and allocated exclusively for the special constabulary.

Eighthly, I recommend the establishment of some separate training facilities for specials. For example, I know that the chief commandant of the Metropolitan special constabulary has put forward a proposal that one building at the Metropolitan Police complex at Hendon should be set aside for the training of specials and the housing of their equipment. He has even suggested that the building might be called "Whitelaw House", so perhaps that will immortalise the Home Secretary as the political leader who gave the special constabulary its proper priority in the police service.

Ninthly, I hope that the Home Secretary will raise the whole question of the future of the special constabulary when he has his next meeting with chief constables. Some chief constables are more positive than others towards the specials. The laggards need to be given a lead by the Home Secretary to ensure a united approach.

Of course, many chief constables do not need any such lead. For example, there was an admirable letter in The Times of 23 July from the chief constable of Warwickshire, Mr. Roger Birch, in which he gave generous praise to the specials in his area, particularly for their contribution towards community policing. I can do no better than to quote the last paragraph of his letter:

"By way of bonus to the community there is the fact that as part of their training Specials patrol with regular officers, which gives strength to our all too thin blue line engaged in community policing. Additionally, as men and women chosen from a wide spectrum of occupations and backgrounds, they provide a link for better understanding between the regular police and the community they serve."

Those words of the chief constable of Warwickshire seem to strike exactly the right keynote for the future of the special constabulary. The specials are an ideal bridge between the regular police and the community. Has there ever been a time when bridge building was more necessary?

The police manpower of the specials is always useful and at times invaluable. Moreover, the spirit of voluntary service which the specials embody is something which the country needs, which the Government are trying to encourage, and which could be of great personal benefit to the young men and women who may enrol as special constables.

I speak from experience as an ex-special constable when I say that voluntary police work is an immensely interesting and satisfying experience for any young person. However, all the good intentions and the personal or community ideals which go with them will come to nothing if the Government fail to act to halt the decline of the special constabulary.

For the reasons that I have mentioned, now is surely the right time for tie Home Secretary to take positive action to give the specials a far higher priority in both Home Office and Treasury thinking. If the Government were to implement all the items in my 10-point plan, including the bounty, advertising and training, it would still cost less than £5 million out of a law and order budget in excess of £3,500 million. That is why the tenth point of my plan is a political initiative by the Government to take a lead in this matter, and that is what I hope we shall hear more of in the response of my hon. and learned Friend the Minister of State, who is to reply to the debate.

I am grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Thanet, East (Mr. Aitken) for having taken this opportunity to bring before the House the problems of and the possibilities for the special constabulary. He speaks with personal experience of service in this admirable arm of our police service, and he is a doughty, persistent and valuable supporter of the special constabulary and its advocate in the House. As recently as 16 July, he raised many important matters on its behalf, and thus on behalf of the whole community that it serves.

I hope to deal with most of the points that my hon. Friend has raised. At the outset, I acknowledge gratefully what he said about the special constables in the Metropolitan Police force for their recent services in Brixton and Southall and—perhaps most notably in the public memory—two days ago on the occasion of the Royal wedding. What he said will be gratefully acknowledged by the special constables, and on their behalf I express my gratitude to him. Similarly, in Merseyside, the special constabulary has rendered conspicuous service in recent days, and continues to do so.

I noted with care my hon. Friend's 10-point plan. I can at once agree with some of his recommendations. Others are more controversial. Those with which I agree include his third point, that regulars who are thinking of retiring or coming to the point of retiring should be encouraged to consider joining the special constabulary, where they would contribute a welcome element of experience and knowledge. In some forces that already happens. It is a good idea, and I hope that it spreads.

I hope that the Police Federation and others who have traditionally seen some threat in a strong special constabulary will be encouraged by my right hon. Friend and by all of us to sweep away that idea. I hope that specials and regulars can treat one another as partners in a common service to the community.

I acknowledge the value of the letter by Mr. Birch, the chief constable of Warwickshire, which was published in The Times earlier this month. I, too, read the letter, as did my noble Friend Lord Belstead, who is the Under-Secretary of State with responsibility for the police service. He read the letter with great pleasure and approval.

It is particularly appropriate that we should discuss the special constabulary at this time. As my hon. Friend reminded us, 1981 is the one hundred and fiftieth year after the special constabulary was statutorily founded in the Act of 1831. The origins of the special constabulary are lost in history. It is probably the oldest voluntary service that we have. It took statutory form in 1831. In those days there was no regular police force as we now know it.

I wish to take the opportunity provided by my hon. Friend today to pay tribute to the work of the special constabulary generally—not those whom we have singled out today for special mention—in providing support for the police. Its members have a long and honourable tradition of service. It is as important today as it has ever been. As my hon. Friend said, only two days ago between' 800 and 900 special constables were in London on the occasion of the wedding festivities. Each winter, throughout the country, they regularly help at football matches. In summer, they provide valuable support in regulating the flow of traffic at holiday resorts and policing special events.

A most notable illustration of that was provided by the Coventry air show, where an emergency arose because of a march that took place there. The air show was controlled almost entirely by the special constabulary. All that is in addition to their help with the routine patrolling of the police service. Our thanks are due to them, and especially to their commandants. If an enthusiastic and knowledgeable commandant is in charge of the special constabulary, he makes an important contribution.

As my hon. Friend knows, during the past five years there have been two studies of the role of the special constabulary. I have to part company with him in his description of the reports. One has been published and the other was completed only this month. He thought that they were negative in their attitude. That is not fair. When the report of the second working party is circulated —it is already in the hands of the police advisory board—it will be a constructive and valuable report. I shall refer to its broad conclusions during my remarks.

Both working parties included representatives of the police staff associations and the special constabulary, in addition to local authority associations, the Home Office and Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary. They were representative of those who either form part of the police service or have an interest in its organisation.

The strength of the special constabulary has declined in recent years. I do not take as gloomy a view of that as does my hon. Friend. He knows that a significant factor in the wastage rate in recent years has been the earlier working party's recommendations that the retirement age for special constables should normally be 55. He will agree that that is sensible. The decline in numbers is also due, in part, to the efforts in recent years to retire members who are no longer active. He will know that until recently a significant proportion of the special constabulary did not turn up very often. By the end of 1979 chief officers reported that more than 85 per cent. of all special constables were performing duties regularly. That has been welcomed by the active members of the specials.

The Metropolitan Police has more than 1,600 special constables, the West Midlands more than 600 and Devon and Cornwall more than 900. In my county—and that of my hon. Friend—of Kent there were more than 500 in December 1980, a small increase compared with December 1979. It is not entirely accurate simply to point to the decline in numbers and say that that is evidence of what my hon. Friend describes as benign neglect. I do not think that that is right.

The working party that has just reported was set up to review the role of the special constabulary and to examine the scope for increasing its ability to help the regular police service. Clearly, as the police service has become more professional and the technical aids it uses more sophisticated, there are limits to the range of police duties that special constables can be asked to undertake. That is far from saying, however, that there is no place for volunteers operating in support of the police. Volunteers should be encouraged, and are encouraged by the Government, to play their part.

The working party concluded that there should be no major change in the role of the special constabulary. It confirmed that special constables should, after suitable training, perform police duties and exercise police powers under the supervision of regular police officers. That will enable regular officers to concentrate their experience and skill where it is most needed. Specials should be ready to take over routine policing functions in the event of an emergency, which would free regular police officers for large-scale police deployment. The Coventry episode is a good example of that. Those are exactly the sort of duties to which my hon. Friend referred both today and in the debate on civil disturbances on 15 July.

My hon. Friend referred to the problems that had arisen in the past between the regular police, represented by the Police Federation, and the special constables. It is true that there have been difficulties. Sometimes, the work done by special constables has been perceived by the regulars as a threat to or intrusion on their preserves. Those days are passing, even if they are not entirely past. I am glad to say that the Police Federation has said that relations with the specials has greatly improved in recent years.

As I said, there are limits to the sort of police work that special constables can be asked to do. The working party believes that the range of general duties that they carry out could be increased. That is a matter for local chief constables. The duties that special constables are asked to undertake in each force are a matter for the chief constables. It is in the interests of all regular police officers to encourage and make full use of the special constabulary. There would be greater understanding between the two arms if, during their induction into the police service, regulars were taught about the role and function of the special constabulary. It is plain that the better the training available to the special constabulary and the higher the efficiency that they attain, the easier will be their working relationship with the regulars.

It is essential that it should not be thought that to employ special constables is to run the risk of having to divert regular police officers to their support by reason of their having been insufficiently trained or being otherwise unfitted for the role in which they are deployed. I entirely take my hon. Friend's point about the need for up-to-date and adequate training. In due course he will see that the working party itself attaches great importance to that. An annex to the report sets out a substantial basic training programme that is recommended to chief officers of police.

The working party concluded that there was a need for greater variety in training. The purpose of training should be threefold—to convey essential information, to stimulate interest and to develop potential. In many forces, formal and frequently repetitive lectures are the staple diet of training programmes for special constables. Such lectures are not the best way to develop or to sustain interest. The working party, therefore, recommended that training should, wherever possible, take the form of practical demonstration or role playing. It recommended a two-year core programme of basic training that should be used nationally as a guide for the training of recruits to the special constabulary. The programme should be adapted to suit the training facilities available and the force requirements of individual localities. That programme would complement the training on the job that special constables receive by working alongside regular officers.

The working party noted that some forces held short residential courses for their special constables, usually over a weekend. It thought that such training should be continued because it would do a great deal to enhance job satisfaction and maintain proficiency. It also considered that a training programme on those lines would attract recruits, engender interest among serving officers and enable the officer in charge of training to assess the ability of the specials. It considered that there should be a probationary period of 12 months for special constables and that forces should introduce a recruitment test based on the standardised entrance test for the regular force.

It is important, especially in view of what my hon. Friend said, to note that the special constabulary is not a national force. It is based on individual forces, and rightly. Local efforts have been the basis of recruitment in the past, and that should continue. Serving specials themselves are probably the best recruitment officers. Their efforts can be valuably reinforced locally by advertising or by other means. A few forces encourage those on their waiting lists to join the regular police to become special constables. I have already mentioned that point. It is a first-class idea that we warmly encourage. I am glad that some forces have been successful in recruiting members of ethnic minorities as special constables.

The bounty is a matter of dispute and of controversy within the special constabulary. I hear what my hon. Friend says about it. Older members of the force believe that it would not be a good thing. Younger members on the whole tend to support it. It will be considered, but my hon. Friend knows well the financial constraints that exist.

My hon. Friend is right in speaking of the bridge between the community and the police service that the specials can provide. The close association of volunteers with the regular police as colleagues working together in the public service will greatly encourage our communities to support their police in carrying out their varied and difficult duties on their behalf. The Government would like to see the numbers of the special constabulary increased and their supportive capabilities enhanced.

The vexed question of Amble harbour has occupied me since I was first elected a Member of Parliament. The large file that I have with me starts with a letter that I received in December 1973 from the hon. and learned Member for Colchester (Mr. Buck), who was then a Service Minister, intimating a strong naval interest in developing a dock at Amble for reducing the magnetism of minesweepers. That is the starting point of the story. However, it was not the starting point for the local authorities. They had been engaged since before 1973 in trying to deal with the repair of the sea defences of the town of Amble.

Amble was once a busy port for the coal trade. Its harbour and sea defence works are, therefore, extensive, but they have become old and badly decayed without the income from the coal trade that had been used in earlier years to sustain, develop and maintain them.

Amble remains a vital fishing harbour for keel boats .1s well as for cobles. The fishermen who earn their living out of Amble have put their own money into it quite extensively in an attempt to turn the decayed coal harbour into a viable harbour for the fishing industry. In recent years the harbour commissioners have worked hard with the fishermen to try to do that. Many pleasure boats come into and go out of Amble, and many are moored there.

The harbour is run by the Warkworth Harbour Commissioners, but the main sea defence of the town is the north pier breakwater, which is the province of the local authority. It is leased by the local authority, which is responsible for its maintenance.

The North Pier breakwater is the defence not only of the harbour but of the town. If a serious breach occurred in it a large part of the town would be flooded, including many houses as well as commercial and industrial properties.

The breakwater is an extremely long structure. It takes a heavy pounding from the North Sea and it is now dangerously decayed. If it is not repaired, the harbour and all the works associated with it, as well as the town, will suffer serious damage. It is the repair of the breakwater that is the principal subject of the debate along with the role of the Ministry of Defence in the delay and difficulties that have arisen. Those are the aspects on which I most want to concentrate. I am glad that the Under-Secretary of State for the Armed Forces is to reply to the debate.

Alnwick district council and its predecessors had plans to repair the breakwater when the Ministry of Defence first appeared on the scene. It was in 1974 that the Ministry decided to build a degaussing dock. The project was very much welcomed locally. The idea of a permanent naval installation in the town was warmly welcomed and the council went to great lengths to try to assist the Ministry of Defence and the Navy. The dock was expected to provide over 30 jobs and considerable economic benefit. Apart from those factors, there was a genuine feeling among the people of a town long associated with the sea that they wanted to have the Navy working in the town. The citizens of Amble were proud to be involved with and to contribute to the sea defence of the United Kingdom.

It became clear immediately that the plans to repair the north breakwater would have to be modified to meet the Ministry of Defence. It was realized that the Ministry would have navigational requirements that had not existed hitherto. It was intended to bring quite deep draught vessels, at least by Amble standards, into the harbour. In addition, the materials used in the repair would have to take account of the special purposes of the dock that would be built, which was to reduce the magnetism in minesweepers. Therefore, the magnetic properties of the material used became an important factor in the design of the breakwater. For the same reason, work on it would have to be completed in one operation, because later work could limit the effective operation of the installation.

The correspondence with the Ministry at that time bears that out. The Ministry wrote the following letter to the council on 13 March 1975:

"It seems to us that the most efficient arrangement would probably be for any repairs which your council wishes to make to the remainder of the breakwater to be undertaken at the same time"—

that is, at the same time as the Ministry's own works—

"and there would appear to be advantages, if it proves possible, for the whole job to be undertaken as a single contract."

It continued to be the assumption of all concerned that it would be much more straightforward to complete the works as one job.

The minutes of a meeting in June 1977 between the council, the Property Services Agency and the Ministry of Defence state:

"If the Property Services Agency proposals are implemented, the work should be entirely contracted by them and some method would have to be found of apportioning the cost."

Again, the assumption was made that the works would all be carried out as one operation and one contract. That was clearly accepted on both sides. In any event, the council could not have gone ahead on its own without causing great difficulties to the Ministry of Defence. Its attitude at that stage and in every respect reflects its desire to be as helpful as possible to the Ministry and to smooth the way for the project.

Discussions proceeded on costs. The council took the lease on the breakwater from the harbour commissioners, which was an essential part of the handling of the project. However, deterioration continued while the discussions took place and nothing was being done to the breakwater, which suffered further damage from the sea. The passage of time only made things worse.

Then doubts began to arise about the dock project. The Labour Government reviewed the project and decided to retain it. The review caused further delay. The incoming Conservative Government cancelled the project in July 1979. It is not difficult to imagine the consternation with which that news was received in the town. I met the Under-Secretary of State for Defence for the Royal Navy the day after the project was cancelled. He seemed to recognise what a blow it would be and that he would have to consider the case that the council would advance for compensation for the extra costs that had arisen during the delay. The same message was clear in correspondence with the council.

On 30 July 1979 the Ministery of Defence wrote to the chairman of the council. The letter was signed by an assistant secretary. It stated:

"I can appreciate the difficulties that you and your council face. I am mindful of the problems that remain with the repair of the breakwater and the dredging of the channel. These two matters will, of course, be the subject of further negotiations between us. I am sure that all necessary action is already in hand towards this end."

I wish to stress the phrase "further negotiations between us". It was clearly understood in the Ministry that the council was left with a serious problem on its hands and that the Ministry would have to negotiate and discuss with it how it could be dealt with. The negotiations have continued ever since 1979, but they have failed to yield any result, despite numerous representations from the council and from myself.

The council's claim, which it detailed at considerable length, was prepared by the consultants who had been employed on the breakwater project from the very beginning and before the involvement of the Ministry of Defence. They produced figures of over £500,000, which were based not merely on inflation and cost increases but on a number of specific features, such as emergency work that had to be carried out to prevent an early breach by the sea and the possible damage that could result. That short-term work would have been unnecessary if the major project had been carried out. Many forms of additional work are now thought to be necessary as a result of the delay. It will be necessary to use additional stone because of the fall in the beach level. It will be necessary to introduce more piling, more concrete and more dredging. The work has become more complicated because of the action of the sea in the meantime. The sea does not wait for Government Departments and civil servants to discuss and argue. It carries on its relentless tearing away at the structures that man builds and makes his efforts seem puny.

Through its consultants, the council submitted its view on the additional costs. In the meantime, the delay over the breakwater was causing serious problems elsewhere and other Departments were making the situation far worse. The Department of the Environment took the view that the repair of the breakwater was urgently required and that no other work in the area should be grant-aided until it had been repaired. That had serious implications. The Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food took immediate cognisance of that and vetoed various grants that might otherwise have been given to the bodies concerned.

The harbour commissioners had applied for a grant under the Fisheries Act 1955 for the repair and development of the fishing harbour. That grant was refused and in a parliamentary answer the Minister of State, Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food said that

"consideration … must be deferred pending consideration by Alnwick district council of a scheme of work to the north-east breakwater which is in a poor state of repair and which protects the fish quay and the harbour generally."—[Official Report, 28 January 1980; Vol. 977 c. 492.]

That is a clear indication that the Minister felt that the harbour was in such a serious state that if nothing was done about the breakwater, the work would be pointless.

The harbour commissioners had more confidence than that and went ahead with the work without the grant-aid. The fishing community, which contributed substantially to the cost, is grateful to them for having done that. The continued operation of the fishing harbour would have become impossible if some of the work had not been done. That was not the limit of the meanness. The fishermen purchased and installed an ice plant in the harbour. The ice was to be used to freeze and protect fish. The Minister of State, Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, the right hon. Member for North Angus and Mearns (Mr. Buchanan-Smith) came to examine the ice plant. I was photographed with him as he scooped out the ice and said that it was a splendid development.

What did the right hon. Gentleman then do? He vetoed the grant-aid for which the ice plant would have been eligible, on the ground that it might be washed away because the north breakwater had still not been repaired. Yet again, innocent parties were heavily financially penalised because of continued delay over the breakwater project. Ministers were wrong to take the view that they did, particularly as the ice plant could have been moved in the event of flooding. However, I have cited it as an illustration of the part that other Departments have played in making everyone in the area extremely sore about the way in which Whitehall has handled the matter.

That was not the end of the troubles caused by the Department of the Environment. It is particularly galling that, after it had blocked every other Department's attempts to grant-aid projects in the area, it has written to the council within the last few weeks saying that it must carry out another survey into the economic justification for the breakwater repairs. It said that the council must seek to identify potential beneficiaries. In other words, it must identify whose houses will not be washed away if the breakwater is repaired and whose commercial property will not be damaged. The council must identify those who could then be asked to contribute to the cost of repairs. However, they are the very people who have already been deprived of Government grants that they would otherwise have been entitled to, namely, the harbour commissioners and fishermen

As if that were not enough, by removing the area's development area status—despite its high level of unemployment—the Department of the Environment has effectively prevented the council from receiving European aid towards the expenses involved. At every turn, the council has been blocked while it has sought some reasonable compensation from the Ministry of Defence for the extra costs that have resulted from pulling out of the dock project.

On 13 October 1980 the council took a deputation to see the hon. Member for Ashford (Mr. Speed), who was then Under-Secretary of State for Defence for the Royal Navy. As always, the deputation was sympathetically received. Nevertheless, the visit was followed by a refusal.

On 18 December 1980 I saw the hon. Member for Ashford. Again, I was sympathetically received. I also saw him informally at a later date. When I met the hon. Gentleman he made it clear that the Department was at least prepared to look at the figures, to consider the council's assessment of additional costs and to compare them with the Department's assessment. There were fairly wide discrepancies between the two. He was prepared to consider whether there was a figure that could provide the basis for an ex gratia payment. He made no commitment to such a payment but implied clearly that he was prepared to discuss it. He did make it clear, however, that no Government Department would entertain responsibility for the effects of inflation. No Government ever do. Therefore, the claim has concentrated on the additional costs that have arisen.

The Under-Secretary of State for the Armed Forces wrote to me on 14 July, declining to make a separate contribution to Alnwick's costs. I saw him on Tuesday of this week, and again I was given a sympathetic hearing. However, no progress was made towards achieving some help for the council.

What are the obstacles to assisting the council? The Government do not want to be seen compensating for inflation. We know that that is their position and we have no choice but to accept it. However, that does not affect the obligation to help the council with the increased costs that have arisen from delay. The Government then say that any aid that the Ministry of Defence could give could be clawed back by the Department of the Environment, which would not give additional grant-aid to the extent that the project had been supported by the Ministry of Defence.

That is not necessarily the position. These are only procedural rules and there is no statutory provision. They need not be, and should not be, applied in such a case as this. Even if that limitation were placed on any grant received, the council would still benefit from a separate contribution from the Ministry of Defence. It would be the equivalent, to the council, of receiving a 100 per cent. grant for that part of the project, instead of the 79 per cent. that it would receive from the Department of the Environment.

It has been said that the Ministry of Defence gave no written undertaking to contribute to the costs, let alone in the instance of withdrawal from the project. However, the understanding was obvious, and the correspondence makes it clear that the obligation existed. The Department's main worry is probably that it might set a precedent and that other authorities might constantly con le to it when it changed its mind and ask for compensation. However, the Department should consider that it is far worse to set a precedent that gives the impression that when the Ministry of Defence embarks on consultations with a local authority it will pull out if circumstances change and leave that authority financially worse off, without doing anything about it. If that view became widespread, informal co-operation between local authorities and the Secretary of State for Defence would become impossible.

I hope that the Minister realises how strongly people feel about this matter. The chairman of Alnwick district council, who is a loyal supporter of the Conservative Party and the Government, has written in desperation to Ministers and to the Prime Minister. Any Minister who comes near my constituency runs the risk of being met by a deputation from the council. I notice that the Leader of the House is coming tomorrow to fulfil a political engagement. He may be greeted by a deputation. Certainly the Home Secretary has had that experience. It shows the deep feelings of those of all political views. They feel that the area has been treated badly. In terms of numbers Alnwick is one of the smallest district councils in the country and has a population of only 26,000. It is faced with an enormous bill and feels that the Department that led it up the garden path for many years has not taken on its responsibilities. I appeal to all the Ministers involved, including the Secretary of State for the Environment and the Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, to recognise that this prevarication has done great damage.

I appeal, in particular, to the Under-Secretary of State for the Armed Forces to take a personal initiative and to safeguard his Department's reputation and that of the Navy for fair and reasonable dealings. If he took the initiative, he could cut through this bureaucratic mess. He may be tired from many months of ministerial responsibility and anxious to go on holiday. However, he will enjoy his few weeks' holiday much more and have greater peace of mind if he takes some action to ensure that the people of the district, who were so ready to welcome the Navy, get a fair deal. They will suffer severe financial consequences because the Royal Navy decided to pull out of the project. I appeal to the Minister to see that they get a fair deal.

As the hon. Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed (Mr. Beith) said, this is a long and detailed story. It begins with the fact that Alnwick district council is responsible for the north pier breakwater. Any scheme for its maintenance needs to be agreed with the Department of the Environment, which can meet up to 79 per cent. of the cost by grant in aid, under the coastal protection arrangements. In practice, the balance of the cost would not be borne entirely by the district council since Northumberland county council would make a contribution; currently it would be one-third of the balance, or 7 per cent., leaving 14 per cent. to be met by the district council. The payment of a grant is discretionary and is dependent on the Deprtment of the Environment's assessment of the benefits of the scheme towards coast protection.

The district council had—as the hon. Gentleman reminded us—engaged consultants to study the repair options for the north pier breakwater when, in 1975, the Ministry of Defence announced its intention to construct a fixed degaussing range at Amble. The dry dock to be built would have been protected by the north pier breakwater but, because of the need to prevent magnetic interference, the shore end of the pier would have had to be replaced by a structure without any metal. Discussions took place between, on the one hand, the Ministry of Defence, with the Property Services Agency as its agent for the works project as a whole, and, on the other hand, the district council and the Department of the Environment.

It was recognised that the maintenance of the breakwater, which was the statutory duty of the district council, was a proper charge to it, while Ministry of Defence funds would have to bear the cost of such additional works as were necessary for the naval project.

The PSA suggested that it would be sensible that any breakwater repairs that the council wished to be carried out should be done in conjunction with the main dock construction contract. Discussions then took place on a formula for cost sharing of the reconstruction and repair of the breakwater, which would have been to the mutual benefit of all, but no formal agreement had been reached as to cost sharing by the time the Ministry of Defence decided to abandon the dock project early in July 1979.

This decision was taken because various costs for the dock had risen from £7·4 million in 1974 to £39·3 million, with a worst case estimate of £48 million in 1979.

All of us in the House are used to defence costs sometimes escalating, but this was escalation on a massive scale, and it was not surprising that the Ministry decided to withdraw. This was partly due to the need for special foundations, exceptional measures for keeping the dock site dry during excavation, strengthened superstructure foundation, and uncertainty regarding the exact nature of the dredged material. There were also difficulties and teething problems in the design, which covered relatively new areas of building technology, such as glass-reinforced plastic building cladding. In any event, it was decided that alternative solutions would have to be found.

On hearing of the cancellation of the dock project, it was not surprising that the district council should write to my predecessor, my hon. Friend the Member for Ashford (Mr. Speed), expressing its extreme distress. It stated that repairs to the breakwater, which were to be carried out in conjunction with the dock construction and partly financed by the Property Services Agency, acting on behalf of the Ministry of Defence, would now have to be taken over by the district council, and that it would need a grant of almost 100 per cent. if the work were to go ahead.

That led to the official Ministry of Defence reply of 30 July 1979, to which the hon. Member has naturally referred. The Ministry of Defence said at the time that the repair would be

"the subject of further negotiation between us".

The negotiations that the Ministry of Defence had in mind would have involved the Ministry, the PSA and the Department of the Environment, but the district council has since argued that the words implied acceptance of a Ministry of Defence obligation over and above the grant in aid by the Department of the Environment. That, sadly, is not the case.

The district council then entered into discussions with the Department of the Environment, but, on finding that the 79 per cent. limit to grants could not be exceeded, it turned back to the Ministry of Defence early in 1980 for a separate contribution. There was then the inflation argument and it was said that inflation had pushed up the cost by about 21 per cent., and that the local authority would have to bear about £½ million of extra costs caused by the damage done by the sea.

In correspondence the district council acknowledged that, because all the figures produced to date had been estimates, it was extremely difficult to calculate the actual increase in expenditure that the council would face in undertaking the coast protection scheme and the cost which would have been incurred had the scheme proceeded in 1974.

Legal advice was sought from the Treasury Solicitor, who replied that no contract existed whereby the Property Services Agency or the Ministry of Defence had undertaken to carry the costs claimed, nor was there any wrongful act on its part which placed on it a legal duty to meet the claim. If the council had incurred any extra expenses which it would not otherwise have incurred by reason of the Amble dock project, there could be a moral claim to meet that wasted expenditure, but no such claim was being made.

The district council then asked for a meeting with the Under-Secretary of State for Defence for the Royal Navy, and the deputation was seen on 13 October 1980. There was a full exposition of the district council's case and of the financal burden now facing a small and poor local authority. My hon. Friend expressed his sympathy but restated the view that planning discussions between central and local government on roads and other such matters of common interest were often subjected to setbacks which could prove to be to the financial disadvantage of either side, and that he could not agree that a Ministry of Defence contribution in this instance was justified because of inflation. The Department of the Environment then examined the history of the case and concluded that any differences between the scheme contemplated in 1976 and that now found necessary were so insignificant in terms of cost that they should be ignored.

On the strength of this, my hon. Friend wrote to the council on 10 December reaffirming his view that there was no moral obligation on the Navy Department to make good any rise in costs due to inflation. He went on to say that he had checked whether in real terms the cost of repairs now necessary was significantly different from that which was necessary in 1976. But his conclusion was that the slight variation identified fell within the estimating margin appropriate to such a major scheme. He could, therefore, find no justifiable case for a separate contribution from the Ministry of Defence.

Furthermore, the estimated cost of the original district council scheme, which was never considered in detail by the Department of the Environment at the time, was £6,212,000 at current prices. The current scheme is costed at £4,756,000 at current prices. These figures illustrate how difficult it is to make valid comparisons and to be specific in attributing the cost of new works.

This latest development and the evidence in support of the council's claim that there had been a real cost increase received the fullest sympathetic consideration, first by my hon. Friend the Member for Ashford and then by myself. My conclusion was the same as that of my hon. Friend.

The situation in which Alnwick district council finds itself is fully appreciated by the Ministry of Defence, which has given the most sympathetic consideration to all the points raised. However, there was never any formal undertaking by the Secretary of State for Defence to the council over cost sharing. The Government and local authorities engage in a wide range of associated planning schemes, and delays or changes by either party unavoidably affect the other. The Government cannot indemnify local authorities against all changes of mind. Therefore, there is, in our view, no legal case for the Ministry of Defence to make a contribution.

Even if the Ministry of Defence accepted that there was a case to be put: on the grounds of real cost increase, and even if that case were to succeed, the actual benefit to the council would be small. That is because the Ministry of Defence contribution would be deducted from the total cost of the work before the Department of the Environment grant is assessed. The Department of the Environment grant would normally be 79 per cent. of the remaining cost of the works, and the net effect of the prior deductions of any Ministry of Defence contribution would be to reduce its cash value to only 21 per cent.

As the hon. Gentleman knows, there are well-established precedents. Under successive Governments the Treasury has naturally sought to establish rules so that Departments adopt the same procedures, and any request to waive the deductions of contributions by outside authorities from the total amount qualifying for the Department of the Environment grant would almost certainly not succeed.

I am sorry that I have to give such a disappointing reply to the hon. Gentleman, but I fear that the precedents are plain.

In this short debate on social studies in schools, I start from the proposition that a number of the shortcomings of our society can be attributed to our schools and that many of the shortcomings of our schools can be attributed to the educational theories instilled at teacher training colleges and by educational pundits under the auspices of various advisory bodies to the Department of Education and Science such as the Schools Council.

It is, therefore, worth highlighting nonsense and gobbledegook when it occurs, even if it is put forward with the best of intentions, as I feel sure must have been the case with the report recently published by the Schools Council—"The New Approach to Social Studies". It is the work of a group of teachers in the London borough of Merton, which is just to the north of my constituency. They examined the ways in which children of different ages gained an understanding of the concepts and methods of work in social studies. The Schools Council, which provided financial assistance for the project, is circulating the report to in-service training agencies in the hope that the ideas contained in it will be of interest and benefit to teachers.

Having read the report carefully, my fear is that it may add to the baleful and misleading influences that have already done so much in our schools to lower intellectual standards, overload the curriculum and prejudice the subsequent career prospects of all too many children.

Most people would agree that the cardinal objectives of our public education system could be fulfilled if all children were able to leave school with adequate knowledge of the subjects that really matter—for example, the English language and mathematics and probably at least one foreign language and one of the natural sciences—adequate understanding of those same subjects and adequate intellectual self-confidence to enable them to take an intelligent interest in many other things later in life.

However, first things must come first, and children should be taught the basic subjects and skills before tackling more diffuse areas, such as social studies. I suggest that when they embark on the latter they should be taught the basic facts of the various subjects before being encouraged to proffer their opinions or being subjected to what the authors of the report would doubtless describe as the "value systems" of their teachers. It is against this background that I wish to make a few cautionary points about the report, since it exemplifies all too clearly some of the most fashionable, foolish and insidious ideas that are current in modern British education.

First, does the Department of Education and Science share the view expressed in the report that the purposes of social studies can be adequately described as

"to develop children's interests in human affairs and their ability to think about them, to help children to understand the attitudes and values of other people and to develop their own value. system"?

Does not my hon. Friend agree that it is unsatisfactory to define social studies as "disciplines" in the transatlantic jargon and then to observe:

"if the disciplines are ways of thinking rather than bodies of knowledge, they should be taught as problem solving procedures rather than as factual information and the conclusions of others'"?

What is proper introductory teaching of these or any other subjects if it is not the imparting of factual information and the conclusions of others? There must be room in all good education for analysis and argument, but that can take place sensibly only after children have mastered the basic received knowledge in any subject area. Otherwise, the likelihood and danger is that social studies will come to be recognised as soft options—waffly subjects taught in waffly ways by ill-equipped teachers to unfortunate children who have been led to believe that the expression of ill-founded opinions is an adequate substitute for the proper grasp of the subject in question.

Secondly, does the Department share the view expressed in the report that it is necessary to lay the foundations of social studies in primary schools? Is it either timely or appropriate, for example, that children of primary school age should be expected to spend some of their scarce and valuable school time looking at child rearing patterns in the name of sociology or anthropology, grappling with the concept of "opportunity cost" in the name of economics or arguing about the culling of grey seals in the name of politics? Would it not be far better for children of primary school age to spend their school time learning to read, write and speak well in their own language, deal adequately with numbers and understand mathematics and, if there is time in the curriculum, being introduced to a foreign language or a natural science, or both?

Surely the authors of the report allowed themselves to be dangerously carried away by their own dotty ideas when they put such stress on the need for social studies in primary schools. I am not sure that it is even appropriate for such subjects to be taught in the early years of secondary education. They should rather be left until the age of 13 or so, during roughly the last three years of statutory education, when they could well be appropriate.

Thirdly, is the Department of Education and Science prepared to accept the financial implications of the report, which states clearly on page 25:

"We have come to the conclusion that the area of resources holds the key not only to effective learning by children, but also to effective teaching by staff. If the Head or Coordinator of middle school social studies wishes to implement the learning ideas and teaching methods which have been suggested, it is essential that he makes a wide array of resources available"?

Among the resources that the authors appear to have in mind are money for field work and visits, money to buy what they describe in their transatlantic jargon as "artefacts" and money to buy or hire films, slides, records, tapes of radio and television programmes, reprographic facilities and so on.

I suggest that at a time when it is difficult or impossible for many local education authorities to afford sufficient paper and textbooks or to employ sufficient remedial teachers, it would be folly to encourage such expensive social studies with only a very marginal educational value. Once again, we must remember that in our education system, perhaps more than in any other area of our national life, we must put first things first.

Finally, I ask my hon. Friend and his Department to consider carefully the future of the Schools Council, which is the sponsoring organisation for this lamentable report. By implication at least, the Schools Council in its foreword has commended all the main arguments advanced in the report. It therefore appears to condone statements such as that on page 31, which reads:

"Teachers are realising increasingly that teaching factual information is not in itself productive and that what really matters is children's understanding of the concerns, concepts and procedures of the geographer, the sociologists and the other specialists",

or the statement on page 43, which reads:

"It could be argued that the general educational value of the social studies is greater than that of languages and sciences."

It even appears to condone the statement on page 38, apparently from Professor Jerome Bruner of Harvard university, which reads:

"Any subject can be taught effectively in some intellectually honest form to any child at any stage of development."

How deplorable it is that a responsible advisory body, such as the Schools Council, should appear to condone and approve such rubbish. Indeed, it is only in the cautionary references to the difficulties of teaching social studies effectively to mixed ability groups that the authors of the report and their sponsors in the Schools Council seem to have said anything really worthwhile.

In short, at a time when education budgets are under great pressure and when it is in the national interest that we move away from the once trendy but actually rather dotty educational theories imported from the United States in the 1960s, my hon. Friend and his Department could do a valuable service to teachers and children by abolishing the Schools Council.

I realise that this would save no more than about £3 million a year in total. Nevertheless, that represents about one-twentieth of the total sum spent on school textbooks and might therefore be of at least marginal value in that area of provision.

I am aware also of the review by Nancy Trenaman of the functions, constitution and methods of work of the Schools Council, which it is hoped to conclude some time in the autumn. No doubt my hon. Friend will not wish to pre-empt the recommendations of that review, but I suggest that after a decent interval the Schools Council could be buried. If my hon. Friend could achieve that in the new year, he would ensure that people in education were thereby relieved of at least one source of ideas as fashionable, foolish and insidious as those contained in the report to which I have drawn the attention of the House today.

I am grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Carshalton (Mr. Forman) for initiating this debate, although as one comes to the end of Session one sometimes wonders to which debate one is replying.

I am particularly interested in this matter. My hon. Friend and I have always agreed about education matters—for example, about educational vouchers and, indeed, many other matters. In so far as people may be described in terms of the party to which they belong, historically we have not always belonged to the same part of the party. Nevertheless, I greatly respect my hon. Friend. We worked together on the subject time and again when in Opposition. I may say that in the not-too-distant past I was among the editors of the black papers, some of the views expressed there being not all that different from those put forward by my hon. Friend today. I know, too, of my hon. Friend's distinguished academic career at New college, Oxford, at Bruges, Harvard and Sussex. He therefore speaks today not merely from his instinctive Conservatism but from a distinguished academic background.

I believe that schools must cover four basic areas if they are to turn out children to fit into our present society. The first is basic literacy and numeracy, to which my hon. Friend referred. One reads from Solomon in the Bible that if one attains wisdom everything else will be added. Unless children are literate and numerate, everthing else is nonsense on the way. It is the ultimate deprivation.

We live in an age that is concerned about deprivation, and many of us join deprivation lobbies. There are two important deprivations in this area. The first is the inability to read, write and number. The second is continued ill health. Both are very serious. Basic literacy and numeracy must be taught, and there must be a body of knowledge. I return to what my hon. Friend has said. It is all very well to teach methods of approach so long as there are marker buoys or benchmarks on which to make judgments.

Thirdly, there is the question of skills to earn a living. Like much of the Western world, we have high unemployent at present. None of us on either side of the House likes that. In the long run, however, children must be taught skills which will enable them to earn a living when they leave school, upon which their pride in maintaining or being part of a family and everything else must eventually depend.

I hope that my hon. Friend will agree that there is also a fourth deprivation. Sir Robert Birley, when he was head of Eton, used to refer to this as "awe"—to be brought into contact with great thoughts, great poetry, great religion, great music and great art, not necessarily to absorb it but to know that it exists to uplift men at some time.

Those four factors have always seemed to me to represent the basic conditions on which schools should exist.

I should also add to my hon. Friend's comments about what can be done in the school day by a comment which is rarely made these days. Something that has remained constant in education while all else has changed or partly changed is the length of the school day. I know from my own experience that holidays are longer than they were in 1939. At that time, grammar schools had about six weeks' holiday while the elementary and primary schools had about four weeks. In our egalitarian age, they all have six weeks. Despite the raising of the school leaving age, therefore, 80 per cent. of children now spend less time in school than they did in 1939.

I was often approached by enthusiastic members of staff suggesting new subjects for the curriculum. We all like enthusiastic staff, just as you, Mr. Deputy Speaker, no doubt like enthusiastic Members of Parliament so long as they do not talk for too long. I always used to say that it was a good idea and that we should have a staff meeting, at which the member of staff concerned could begin by explaining what he would take out of the curriculum. They never pursued the matter, because they knew that they would never get it past the rest of the staff.

Personally, I have always been dubious about combined subjects. At their best, they can be beautifully taught. It is like mixed-ability teaching. Mixed-ability teaching by dedicated teachers who are prepared to work for 16 or 20 hours a day and who are wedded to it as though they had entered a nunnery or a monastery certainly works, but with average teachers it does not. It is the same with many combined subjects. I remember once saying that such projects were like cutting books up and sticking them back together in the wrong order and then regarding it as a great leap forward. It is all very well if people know what they are doing. During my time at Highbury Grove we tried to have a combination of so-called social studies in the first year. We did not go for anthropology, sociology or economics, but the course combined religious education with history, geography and a little science. It broke down after a year because the teachers needed so many meetings to agree on what they were doing that they had no time to teach in the classroom.

As a "reactionary", it has always struck me that it is a good thing to be in the classroom in time with something on the blackboard before anybody comes in and some knowledge of what one will be teaching and marking as time goes on. From time to time I hear people, not necessarily just on Conservative Benches, talking about subversion in schools. I am not suggesting that there is subversion in schools. If one takes away the structure of firm paths and clear definitions, one opens up an area where people can use the classroom to bring forward their views.

I was struck when my hon. Friend said that in many cases such teaching is for the advantage of the teacher but not for the advantage of the pupil. Each year the curriculum is new to the pupil. If a teacher has been teaching pupils to read for 40 years, it becomes a little boring in the fortieth year, especially for a 61-year-old who is about to retire. It might be more interesting to do something else. I feel sometimes that the so-called new ideas for education are for the satisfaction of bored teachers and not for the children who enthusiastically want to learn. Religious education has suffered similarly. It has been amalgamated with studies on general moral values and has become a walk round the museum of religion in Moscow instead of the teaching of a particular faith.

I shall defend the Schools Council in bringing forward its report, and I am sure that my hon. Friend will respect me for doing so. It is said on page 9 of the report:

"The main emphasis used to be on transmitting factual information."

We still need factual information. It helps to be able to tell the time so that we can catch the train rather than knowing where the train came from or being able to draw one on a board. It also helps to be able to add up rolls of wallpaper when buying it in this do-it-yourself age. Otherwise there may be an argument with the wife when there are seven rolls left at the end and the family cannot afford to go on holiday afterwards.

By all means, ideas and some philosophy should be taught with certain subjects; many teachers have done that. I am not defending or attacking the independent schools. The old public school headmasters, whatever they taught, be it Latin, maths or history, in the sixth form used the teaching of such subjects as a vehicle not only for imparting factual information but for developing the mind. Surely the good teacher does not need all sorts of gimmicks. He can use factual information in his approch and in the way that he questions the children so that their minds can be developed.

There has been a press release on the subject, which must be important as presumably what it says is what people want us to do. It says that the teaching of politics can begin as early as the age of seven. If I said that in a public house in Brent, North this evening—I would not necessarily be in a public house, as I am a Methodist, Mr. Speaker—I would be laughed to scorn. The people there would say that they wanted their children to be literate and numerate. Any person would say that, wherever he stood in the political spectrum.

The press release also states:

"The social studies—history, geography, sociology, anthropology, economics and politics—should never be an optional extra but an 'exceptionally important' part of the core curriculum up to 16 years."

How long do people expect the school day to go on if all those things are to be embedded in the curriculum as well? Will we have a two-shift school system in order to get through all the subjects? By all means, when one is teaching history some anthropology comes in, and when one is teaching geography some economics comes in. Sociology is part of history, in that we see how people fit into society, and it may also be included in religious education. However, I believe that such extensions should be a natural outcrop.

History is referred to on page 10 of the Schools Council document. I refer to history as I have written history and as I am a historian. The document states:

"It should be a 'patch' in which we can dig deeply, rather than a longer period over which we skate superficially. In that way we avoid the 'line of development' approach."

The Schools Council has been useful in concentrating the minds of my hon. Friend and me by putting forward subjects for discussion. Little did it know that such matters would be discussed today in Parliament.

People should know that there was a Roman Empire, that many different people came to this country, that there was an Industrial Revolution and the agrarian revolution and that there have been 10 centuries of monarchy in this country. There has to be a plan of teaching, otherwise people are lost. At times there are instant comments by people who are naively arrogant, who know only little patches of history and nothing of the thread running through it. What I have read in the document is excellent—for example, what is said about Pompeii, the Elizabethan age and the blitz. All such things should be taught, but I believe that they should be extras. Any good school will give mainstream teaching in the normal time and outside that time there will be projects for the children in the summer holidays. I am sure that the children in my hon. Friend's constituency, who are probably on holiday already, are working on their projects. Any good teacher makes sure that such projects are done, and has always done so. At the same time as the line approach is taught, the depth approach is brought in, and projects are included on the way.

My hon. Friend referred to the Schools Council, which is involved in this matter. I have always been dubious about the schools humanities project. As a schoolmaster, I always considered that it would do more harm than good. I have not changed my mind. In most schools, apart from those with bright sixth forms, that would do more harm than good.

The report referred to integration, which I commend. In Merton, there is a school for 7 to 9-year-olds, a school for 9 to 13-year-olds and a school for 13 to 16-year-olds. We could give our opinions on whether plants grow better when dug up and transplanted to another bed. I do not think that they do, but that is one of my normal reactions. However, if there is such a situation, it is probably good to have integration. The teachers got together and worked something out. The fact that the teachers from the first school, the second school and the third school met is good. I commend to teachers throughout the country that where people are moving from primary to secondary schools, or from first school or second school or to third school, the teachers should come together so that there is no repetition but an integrated curriculum throughout.

This remarkable document was the product of an integration scheme and it would be interesting if other areas took it up. The project did not originate from the Schools Council but was a local initiative of a group of teachers in Merton who were concerned about the continuity in the three-tier system. The Schools Council felt that the project would be of interest to other authorities. It provided the funds for the project and circulated it for the information of teachers and authorities. The Schools Council was set up for that job. One cannot grumble if an institution which one sets up does what it was intended to do. One could say, as my hon. Friend said, that it should not exist at all, but it was set up to work on the school curriculum and on examinations. Its functions are to promote education by carrying out research and development and publishing reports, documents and other material. One could not grumble about the Schools Council bringing out something which was totally in its remit.

In 1977, as my hon. Friend knows, there was a reformation—I do not intend to use that word as a religious term—of the Schools Council because some Conservative Members in Opposition pressed for a reformation. Since that time, there has been a considerable change in the work done. In this case, the Schools Council felt that it would be of interest for the authorities if it provided the funds for the project and circulated it for the information of teaching authorities. If the report means that in other areas where children move schools in the age groups 7 to 9, 9 to 13 and 13 to 16 from one authority to another and come together for English, mathematics and basic subjects, including social studies, there should be some continuity if they are to study them, it will have performed a useful function, as will today's debate, in showing what the Schools Council does.

As my hon. Friend the Member for Carshalton said, Mrs. Nancy Trenaman, the principal of St. Anne's college, Oxford, is reviewing the council's funding, its constitution and its method of working. It would be wrong of me to comment on that. The report will be out in the autumn. The Schools Council was established because it was thought that there should be a central body to act as a clearing house for various ideas. In the Schools Council or some other organisation we need a central clearing body. By bringing out the report the Schools Council is causing great debate. We should pay tribute to the Schools Council, although we have every right to disagree with some things covered by the report, as my hon. Friend has done. I have some sympathy with him.

The House will soon be rising for the long recess. Most of us will be seizing the opportunity to spend more time in our constituencies than we can normally do, and we shall be holding what, for want of a better term, we still call our surgeries.

It is not always possible to categorise the personal tragedies that people bring to us, but I hazard a guess that the largest single category of problems we encounter will relate to housing. There will be those without a home, sharing accommodation with in-laws, existing in one room or simply homeless. There will be those who, for personal reasons, wish to change their place of abode. Some will require specific repairs, and there will be those living in inadequate houses.

I want to confine the debate to one aspect of housing—that is, inadequate housing. But it is worth reminding ourselves that housing policy is indivisible. If we do not save those older properties which are capable of being renovated, not only will we add to the misery of those still living in them but we shall reduce the housing stock available to those unhappy families who are awaiting a home.

Some of the unfit houses are beyond repair. The only sensible course is to knock them down and use the site to build more houses or to fulfil some other public need. In most of our towns and cities there is a desperate need for land for all kinds of purposes. But some of the houses could be saved if money were available to improve and repair them. A house saved is equivalent to a house added. And often the occupiers, who have spent large amounts of their time and money on their present house, would prefer to stay there if the house could be renovated.

To decide how to deal with the problem, we need to know how many houses are unfit, how many could be made fit at a reasonable cost, how many fit properties are sliding into the unfit category, how many houses which are not unfit lack some essential amenity, what amenity they lack, where they are situated and what the people living in them think about them.

From time to time the Secretary of State commissions a house condition survey. The Department commissioned one in 1976, which gave us much useful information. It was based on a survey of 9,000 dwellings in the areas of 215 local authorities. We learnt that at that time 794,000 dwellings were unfit for habitation, of which 643,000 were still occupied. We learnt that a further 921,000 lacked at least one basic amenity and that a further 1,480,000 required repairs which were likely to cost more than £500 at 1976 prices. We discovered in which regions most of them were situated.

Since then, many other houses have deteriorated. The Environmental Health Officers Association estimates that about 1 million households are living in unfit houses and that 1½ million are living in houses which lack basic amenities. We know that those dry statistics represent a whole way of life for those who think of those units of accommodation as home.

In his book "No place like home", my hon. Friend the Member for Salford, East (Mr. Allaun) lets Mr. Harvey Earby tell his own story:

"In point of fact the kiddies have never experienced a bath. Up to nine months ago my eldest boy, George, he's five, had never seen a bath in his life. He was at one of the wife's friends when he saw one, for the first time. Julian and Marie have never seen one in their lives. So they don't know what a bath looks like. Or what an indoor toilet looks like either. So when it comes to bath-time about the best thing we can do is to get this plastic bowl out, fill it with hot water, and then we stand George in it to start with and then it's a case of a good wash down from head to foot, take George out, dry him off, put him down. Then the same process again … Occasionally, if it's not too cold we can wash them in the kitchen sink. It's a bit larger and a bit deeper ….

One morning we got up and it was a lovely shining morning, and I wandered in there"—

that is, the front room —

"and the children pointed out that there were some flowers on he wall. I just chuckled at it. I took no notice and I came back in here. I said to Marjorie, 'Good God, those children have got a fantastic imagination. One of them just came up to me and said there was flowers on the wall.' She turned around and said 'Well, there is.' I went into the front room, and sure enough it was. It wasn't flowers, it was fungus. In fact, it was toadstools, big ones too. About two inches in diameter."

When housing was debated in another place on 13 May this year, the Reverend Prelate the Bishop of Truro and my noble Friend Lord Soper described movingly the effect of these physical conditions on the people who live there, their family life and the social consequences which, unhappily, have been so much in the news recently.

Even that concept is not new. In his report of 1842, Edwin Chadwick had this to say:

"The removal of bad physical circumstances, and the promotion of civic, household, and personal cleanliness are necessary to the improvement of the moral conditions of the population, for that sound morality and refinement in manners and health are not long found co-existent with filth) habits amongst any class of the community."

He was saying that not everyone could overcome the lack of amenities, bad hygiene, overcrowding and the stress which went with bad housing.

From time to time all of us encounter letters like this, which I received from my constituency in March this year. It relates to a lady of 75:

"She has no hot water, has to go outside for water, the toilet and for cooking. Up until the past few months she has felt able to cope with these conditions, but now it seems to be getting too much for her".

Such are the conditions we are considering at a moment when unemployment in the construction industry is between 300,000 and 350,000—15 per cent. of that industry, the highest since the war. The workers who could carry out the improvements or renovations and, where necessary, demolish the unfit houses and build new ones are condemned to frustrating idleness.

Obviously, the most urgent remedy for those human tragedies is additional resources. Over the past year the Secretary of State has announced a complex of improvement and repair grants. We can only be grateful. At the same time, he has ensured that local authorities have no money to implement them.

Recently, the Environmental Health Officers Association carried out a survey among local authorities to see what was happening to the present system of improvement grants. It found that 33 local authorities still have a need for a slum clearance programme, but 65·6 per cent. of those authorities are having to cut their programmes or are having to delay them. I shall refer to the consequences of that in a moment. One of the consequences of the present housing improvement programme allocation is that only 46 per cent. of the cash which the authorities regard as necessary to meet their existing programmes is available, and it takes no account of the increased level of grants.

I could spend a great deal of time, if it were available, giving some of the frightening statistics which emerged from that survey, showing that so much of what is required is simply not being done because the resources are not being made available.

One could imagine other things which could be done quite quickly, too. This morning I received from the National Homes Improvement Council its proposals for neighbourhood housing services, of the kind which are being pursued so successfully in America. These are matters, perhaps, which the House can discuss on other occasions.

But, even before we consider the provision and direction of the vast resources which are necessary, we can provide for those who have to administer these remedies more effective administrative tools for their purposes. The Environmental Health Officers Association has identified at least two steps which could operate as catalysts to make the resources more effective.

The first is that although authorities have the power to take certain action, depending on the category into which a house falls, identifying the category is something of an administrative nightmare. There are 57 different pieces of legislative machinery relating to unfit housing. There has been no consolidation since the Housing Act 1957. The House will know that I and my hon. Friends have done all that we can to encourage consolidation. I know that work is proceeding on that subject and I hope that it will quickly bear fruit.

The other vital need is to provide up-to-date information. How many of the unfit houses revealed in the house condition survey of 1976 have been demolished? How many have been renovated? How many more houses have subsequently become unfit? What action has been taken about them, and with what results? We have known for some time that there has been a need for a further house condition survey similar to those conducted in 1971 and 1976. For some time prior to February 1981, some of my hon. Friends were asking the Secretary of State when he proposed to commission one. Until February of this year his answers hardly demonstrated a warm enthusiasm, but in the debate on 11 February he announced that he was

"commissioning a new English house condition survey to be undertaken on the same pattern as that which took place in 1976."—[Official Report, 11 February 1981; Vol. 998, c. 895.]

That was one of the few announcements made by the Secretary of State in this Parliament which was universally welcomed. Since then we have heard very little of the matter. My principal purpose today is to invite the Minister to give the House some further news on the subject. If this survey is to be on the same pattern as the 1976 survey, it may be worth looking to see what that pattern was.

It fell into two parts. There was a survey relating to the physical condition of houses; it was also a social survey undertaken by interviewers from Research Survey of Great Britain Ltd. The social survey was a very helpful inquiry into the kinds of people who lived in unfit houses, what they thought of them and what they did about them. Perhaps the Minister will confirm that the new survey proposes to take a similar form.

The physical condition survey involved visits to a sample of houses—9,000. It was important to ensure that each official applied the same standard and, in the words of the report:

"checking that the results were not invalidated by atypical judgments."

There is in this country a body of people whose training and experience fit them particularly for interpreting statutory provisions relating to aspects of public health and to environmental amenities and applying the statutory provisions to the concrete situation. They are the environmental health officers. Assessing a situation in the light of their technical knowledge, measuring it against a statutory standard and enforcing the statutory provisions is their life's work.

The profession has grown up by reason of historical conditions in Britain, which in the past has led the world in matters of public health. It is a peculiarly British institution. If one attempts to discuss it with, for example, some of our European colleagues, one has to begin at the beginning and explain how one profession has come to acquire this combination of techniques which blend into its expertise. Yet when foreigners come to know about it they are invariably impressed that there are some things which we in Britain still do better than most other countries.

I say at once that I declare an interest in this matter, though in no sense is it a financial one. I have the honour to be a vice-president of the Environmental Health Officers Association. That, if not an interest, constitutes at least a prejudice.

The expertise of EHOs was recognised in November last year when the divisional court of the Queen's Bench Division considered the case of Patel v. Matel. The magistrates' court had had to consider whether certain premises were in such a condition as to constitute a statutory nuisance under section 92 of the Public Health Act 1936. Evidence had been given by an EHO and a former EHO. The magistrates, purporting to apply their own knowledge of the area, had rejected that evidence.

Giving judgment, Lord Justice Donaldson said:

"In deciding some questions of fact, magistrates are entitled to draw on their own personal experience either of the locality or of life in general. But when it comes to deciding whether the condition of premises is or is not liable or likely to be injurious to health, one is moving outside the field where a tribunal is entitled to draw on its own experience. That is a matter upon which the tribunal needs informed expert evidence. This tribunal had informed expert evidence, and bearing in mind that they were not entitled to substitute their own opinion, the evidence was all one way."

So, there was the court recognising that the application of statutory standards to housing was a matter of expertise, and an expertise peculiar to EHOs.

What was more natural than that in 1976 the Department should acquire its labour force for the survey from among EHOs? It recruited 45 of them, and the local authorities willingly co-operated in seconding them for six weeks. They were briefed for three days by departmental officers as to exactly what was required, and I know of no complaint about their lack of care or expertise or any variation in standards. So, when the Secretary of State said that the survey was to be conducted on the same pattern as in 1976, everyone assumed that he would, naturally, employ EHOs, but it seems that that is not so. He has not announced this, so far as I am aware, but it has become clear that the preparations have not been proceeding along those lines. When the Department was asked in correspondence by the Environmental Health Officers Association, it confirmed that for this survey half of the surveyors were to be recruited from among EHOs and the other half would be drawn from the private sector.

That appears to mean surveyors and architects in private practice. I have no complaint against surveyors and architects in private practice. There are good and bad in every profession. I would not dispute that the majority are competent, careful and as good as their professional counterparts elsewhere in the world. All I say is that their professional expertise is not concentrated in the area of applying statutory standards of unfitness. If it is sought to conduct the survey with the minimum of atypical judgments resulting from different backgrounds, training and experience, how much more sensible is it to choose all the surveyors from the same group and to choose EHOs as in the past?

What, therefore, is the reasoning behind the departure? If it is an example of the Secretary of State's concern to save money, that would at least be consistent, but common sense suggests that employing people in private practice is likely to involve greater cost than seconding officials from local authorities. If I am wrong in that assumption, no doubt the Minister will explain the reason. In the absence of an explanation, however, the House is left with the suspicion that the Secretary of State's obsession with saving public expenditure evaporates when it clashes with his favourite political slogans.

Are there any complaints about the work of EHOs? In a letter of 14 July to Mr. Tyler, the secretary of the Institute of Environmental Health Officers, Mr. Ballard of the Department said:

"The contribution that EHOs have made in the past has been a valuable one. The Secretary of State's decision to widen the field of recruitment on this occasion is not intended to devalue in any way that contribution, but should be seen as in line with his wish to involve the private sector as fully as possible in the area for which his Department has a responsibility."

There we have it. To fit in with the doctrinaire concern to replace public servants by representatives of the private sector, whether or not it is relevant to the problem or appropriate to the task, we have this change in practice. That is why 81 hon. Members have signed my early-day motion on the subject. That is why I am grateful for this opportunity to ask the Minister how this departure from practice can help solve the practical problems of people living in unfit houses.

In the short time available, I shall try to answer some of the points made by the right hon. and learned Member for Warley, West (Mr. Archer). The Government attach the greatest importance to the survey. We are as concerned as the right hon. and learned Gentleman to make certain that the results should be accurate and informative. We are taking all possible steps to ensure that this will happen and that the survey will give the best possible value for money.

The right hon. and learned Gentleman is being a little hard in talking about delay in announcing anything. He will recall that previous surveys have taken place in 1967, 1971 and 1976. A survey in 1981 therefore means the same intervening period as occurred between the last two surveys. With great respect, I think that the right hon. and learned Gentleman was unfair. It is essential that successive surveys should be carried out on a similar basis if comparisons of the results are to be valid. I do not, however, agree with the right hon. and learned Gentleman's suggestion that successive surveys should be the same in every detail.

Each time a survey is carried out, we learn lessons that enable us to improve the next survey. For example, this time we are stratifying our sample to get more information on the houses most at risk. We are redesigning the survey form for the physical inspection and also the questionnaires for the interview survey to collect the necessary information in the most economical way. We are developing our techniques of analysis in order to produce vital information more quickly. I cannot imagine that anyone would object to these changes.

It will also be realised, I am sure, that different types of staff have to be used for each of the three stages of the survey. In 1976, the physical condition survey was carried out by environmental health officers, the interview survey was conducted by interviewers employed by a market research firm and the brief local authority questionnaire was completed by the local authorities themselves. That does not mean that things have to be done in exactly the same way this time. I do not hear arguments that the interview survey must be carried out by the same market research firm that undertook the work in 1976. If we were to employ that firm again without considering other possibilities, I think that the right hon. and learned Gentleman would be right to criticise us.

I cannot help wondering why the right hon. and learned Gentleman assumes that one stage of the survey—the physical inspection—must be done by staff drawn from a given group simply because they have done it on previous occasions. In fact, we have decided to draw half the surveyors required for the physical survey from the private sector. It is important that the private sector should be involved as fully as possible in all the areas of work for which we are responsible. We are therefore recruiting 30 professional staff from among the membership of the RICS and the RIBA. I should like to express our gratitude to those bodies for their help.

The other 30 will be drawn, as before, from environmental health officers that local authorities have kindly offered to second to the Department for six weeks. If anything is needed to show that we have confidence in the professional skills of these officers, the fact that we arc continuing to use their services surely makes this clear.

As we have already told the Environmental Health Officers Association, my right hon. Friend's decision to widen the field of recruitment is not intended to devalue. the contribution that environmental health officers have made in the past and will continue to make. Nevertheless, I do not accept the right hon. and learned Gentleman's assumption that environmental health officers have a monoploy of expert knowledge in this field. It goes without saying that the staff we are recruiting from the private sector are all fully qualified surveyors or architects. It is a condition of their employment that all have experience that is relevant to the survey. We have specified that they must be experienced in surveying all types of dwelling, including the older properties on which we shall be concentrating. They will be familiar with the characteristics of housing action areas and general improvement areas, with the standards required for grant-aided improvements and repairs and with the standards applied in deciding whether a dwelling is unfit and, if so, what statutory action is necessary.

I do not accept that professionally qualified staff with years of experience in this field are less competent to assess the condition of dwellings just because they happen to be employed in the private sector rather than the public sector. It is true, of course, that when 60 individuals exercise their individual professional judgment, they may not always agree in their conclusions. No criticism is implied when I say that this is just as true of environmental health officers or valuation officers as of any other group of professionals. This is why we have always run briefing courses for all those participating in the physical survey, and why we shall continue to do so this year. Part of these courses is devoted to making certain that surveyors interpret the questions on the survey form in the same way, but the most important part consists of practical exercises. All the surveyors are taken to inspect a selection of houses, carefully chosen to represent the different types that they are likely to encounter in the survey. Each makes an individual report. They are then helped to compare notes.

We do not stop there in ensuring consistent standards. Our own staff monitor the work of those carrying out the survey while they are in the field, undertaking spot checks and discussing any problems. This constant quality control has worked satisfactorily in the past with environmental health officers from a wide variety of backgrounds. I am confident that there will be no problems this time.

I should like to dispose of the allegation that the Government are not concerned with minimising public expenditure or ensuring value for money. The House may be interested to know that the total external cost of carrying out this English house condition survey—there are separate arrangements for Wales—was estimated in February at about £400,000. This amount included the cost of employing environmental health officers for the physical survey. We now expect to be able to carry out the survey for a total external cost of £350,000. We may even be able to reduce that figure with no corresponding increase in internal costs.

I suggest to the right hon. and learned Gentleman that a reduction of over 12 per cent. in estimated costs demonstrates clearly that the Government are conscious of the need to save public expenditure. I do not know what else I can say to convince him or to convince the many hon. Members who have signed the early-day motion, perhaps without having knowledge of all the facts. This is occasionally the problem, as many hon. Members have found, in getting people to sign early-day motions. I do not happen to be a believer necessarily in the number of names attached to early-day motions. There is often just as much value in one signature on an early-day motion—that of the proposer, who should know something about the issue. As a vice-president of the Environmental Health Officers Association, the right hon. and learned Gentleman should know something about the subject and has demonstrated that he does.

I hope, therefore, that the facts—I emphasise "facts"—that I have given will dispel any worries of the right hon. and learned Gentleman and environmental health officers. We look forward to the officers cooperating with the private sector surveyors and architects and producing in the end what we all want—the information on which the Government can base their views and their policy decisions for the future. That is the purpose of the survey. I have no doubt that it will be accomplished in the way that the Government propose.

I have asked for this debate to seek to focus attention on the great disquiet felt it the Forest of Dean about the possibility of opencast coal mining in the Cannop valley. Much effort is being devoted both locally and nationally to developing the Forest of Dean as a national forest park. During recent discussion on the Forestry Bill, the Forest of Dean was recognised as a special case. I spoke at some length about the efforts being made by the Forestry Commission and others to develop forest trails and picnic sites in the Forest of Dean to encourage more tourists to visit the area.

I appreciate that opencast coal mining creates a number of jobs. I make no bones about the fact that jobs are scarce in the Forest of Dean, but considerable effort is being made by all sorts of enterprise to encourage a growing number of tourists to visit the area and thereby create more employment through catering for the needs of tourists. A great attraction of the Forest of Dean is the tranquillity, beauty and peace that people can enjoy. New enterprises being set up include craft shops, craft centres, small hotels, shops catering for the needs of visitors, camp sites and picnic grounds.

But, of all the attractive spots in the Forest of Dean, the Cannop valley is probably the most outstanding, for it combines the ancient industrial heritage of the district through the Cannop ponds together with a fine stand of old oaks which for hundreds of years have symbolised the Forest of Dean and are still much admired today.

It is here in the Cannop valley as well as elsewhere in the forest that rich deposits of coal apparently have been found. 1 say "apparently" because one local newspaper says that up to 18 million tonnes of coal have been found beneath the surface of the Forest of Dean and up to 1 million tonnes beneath the Cannop valley. All this coal is relatively close to the surface and can be worked easily by opencast methods.

Lest the House should think that the people of the Forest of Dean are unrealistic in their campaign to stop opencast mining in the Cannop valley and have no thought for the nation's future energy requirements—a subject which taxes the brains of us all—I might point out that recently local politicians agreed and co-operated over an opencast mining operation on a 200-acre site in Woor Green. This operation is now complete and in my opinion is a fine example of co-operation among local authorities, local politicians reflecting local opinion, the operators, who have been sensitive to the needs of the area, and the Forestry Commission. It is fair to say that the conservationists, having seen what has been done at Woor Green, are greatly reassured that some of their fears were ill founded.

The local authority, through its planning department, ensured that the site was well screened. When driving along the road past the site, unless one looked very carefully, it was impossible to see that there was anything going on behind t screen of trees, because there was very little noise and nothing could be seen from the road.

The operators, Northern Strip Miners, laid a new road to gain access to the site and planned the road to go out on to a major road, which was approved by the planning department, so that the minimum of difficulty from congestion with heavy lorries entering and leaving the site would be caused.

The operators also controlled the dust extremely skilfully when the operations were in progress. They dug ponds to preserve the wildlife and to encourage wildlife into the district in future once they moved away. The Forestry Commission has replanted many trees and shrubs in the area which has been cleared by this opencast operation. In addition, considerable work was generated for local people on the site.

It is interesting that, since I have been the Member of Parliament for Gloucestershire, West, only one person has come to see me at my advice centres complaining about the way in which the site was being operated. I put this person in touch with the manager of the site and the complaint was soon sorted out.

I raise this matter to highlight local recognition of the national need for coal and to show what can be done in the Forest of Dean when these diverse interests work and live side by side with thoughtfulness and planning.

The county planning authority has only once refused an application for opencast mining in the Forest of Dean. That was in the case of a site at Ruardean Hill. It was refused on drainage grounds. An appeal went forward to the Secretary of State and he, unfortunately as it turned out, allowed the application. When the operation was completed and the site was reinstated—it must be said that it was well reinstated—whenever it rained, serious flooding occurred below the site. Water cascaded down the road and houses on a lower level were flooded.

The local authority was involved in a great deal of work and went to considerable expense to put matters right. In my opinion, this underlines the value of a little local knowledge in such situations.

We want each application for opencast coal mining in the Forest of Dean looked at on its own merits. Having said that, I must emphasise that the Cannop valley is a sensitive area and that local politicians are nervous that a decision to approve opencast mining in this area could be taken behind their backs and without their involvement.

The fear is given credibility by the fact that the Secretary of State for the Environment has amended the'. Gloucestershire county structure plan, which clearly presumed against any further opencast mining in the Forest of Dean. However, presuming against it does not necessarily preclude it. But the Secretary of State has seen fit to alter this emphasis by saying that opencast mining may take place provided either that the land is improved as a result of the operation or that there is no serious conflict with amenity considerations.

Who is to decide these issues? Are they to be decided by some faceless bureaucrat in Whitehall who does not even know the whereabouts of the Forest of Dean? What about the local politicians who want to be involved? This is what I seek to highlight, because they are nervous that they will not be involved, even though they have demonstrated their willingness to co-operate and to see both sides of the argument in the past.

I see it as my job as the Member of Parliament for the area to make sure that all shades of opinion are given the opportunity of a fair hearing and, if necessary, to go to the highest levels to make sure that it happens. The Gloucestershire county council has responded speedily to the amendments to the Gloucestershire county structure plan and has followed the correct procedure to the letter. But, with news in a local newspaper of the massive size of these coal discoveries, I felt that I had to bring the matter to the attention of the House and to express the disquiet which exists in the Royal Forest of Dean about the potential clandestine rape of the Cannop valley.

I emphasise again that my constituents are very nervous about the future of opencast coal mining in the Forest of Dean, and I should like an undertaking from the Department of the Environment that irrevocable decisions and actions will not be taken surreptitiously or in a clandestine manner before local interests have had every opportunity to express their views, to raise objections or to back any proposal, if that is what they wish to do.

I appreciate the concern that my hon. Friend the Member for Gloucestershire, West (Mr. Marland) has expressed. As we all know, he is extremely assiduous in meeting the needs and requirements of his constituents, and it is right that he should have taken this opportunity to raise the matter in this debate.

I welcome this opportunity to speak about opencast coal mining in the Forest of Dean and, in particular, the Cannop valley. When I refer to the Forest of Dean in this context, I mean the forest itself, as administered by the Forestry Commission, and not the district of the same name. I shall deal first with the Cannop valley before considering the broader context of the forest.

The surface area of the valley has not previously been affected by mineral workings. The coal seams in the vicinity of Cannop ponds cover an area of some 90 hectares, about three-quarters of which is covered with conifers planted about 1972. The balance of the area features oak about 150 years of age, much of which traverses the area in three broad strips. The total reserves of coal in the area are said to be about 1 million tonnes.

The private company that now owns several of the seams purchased them from a company that was granted planning permission for test drilling in 1979. But before coal extraction could take place a further planning permission would have to be obtained.

I am unaware of any application for opencast mining relating to the Cannop area. Unlike an application from the National Coal Board—which would be made to my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Energy—an application from a private operator would be made to the county council as the appropriate local planning authority. Thus, in the first instance, the decision would be taken by councillors. This, of course, means that local people and interests would be able to inject their views into the debate. No doubt the planning authority would consider the possible impact on the local environment. I am sure, too, that the Forestry Commission would be consulted. There is no question of a decision being taken in advance of considerable local discussion.

Even if planning permission were granted, the applicant could not begin extraction immediately. First, the operator would have to obtain a lease of the land from the Forestry Commission, which would first refer the case to my right hon. Friend the Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, in whom responsibility for the Forest of Dean is vested.

If my right hon. Friend agreed in principle that the commission should grant a lease for mining, the commission would negotiate the conditions with the company after taking account of local views. It is likely that, as was the case at Woorgreens—which I shall mention later—the commission would be closely involved in the detailed restoration plans for the site.

The possibility of opencast operations in the Cannop valley depends on many factors. It may be that no development will take place, but if it does it will have to take account of all the factors.

I assure my hon. Friend that I have taken note of the concern he has expressed on behalf of his constituents in the area and that we shall study and bear in mind all that he has said.

The planning policies of the area will soon be governed by the Gloucestershire structure plan, which was submitted to my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State in March 1980. It included a policy relating to opencast coal mining in the Forest of Dean.

That policy was among the matters selected for discussion at the examination in public of the plan that took place in September 1980. Local interests were represented at the examination, as were the Department of Energy, the National Coal Board and the Forestry Commission. Following the examination, my right hon. Friend published in June his proposals to modify a number of policies in the plan. They took account of the report of the panel that conducted the examination.

Among the proposed modifications was one designed to make the policy relating to opencast mining less restrictive and to permit opencast mining, subject—and I emphasise this—to certain conditions. They were that the land was improved as a result of the operations and that there were no serious conflicts with amenity considerations.

As my hon. Friend has said, the proposed modification has given rise to a significant number of objections which we are considering prior to the approval of the plan.

We are concerned with how we make the best use of our resources. As is frequently the case, we have to take a number of conflicting factors into account before reaching any conclusion as to what our policy should be.

The conflicting factors in this instance can be summarised as the need to be able to extract coal should it be required; the need to improve land for forestry and agriculture when it can be justified; and the need to protect the countryside as a natural habitat of wildlife and as a place of recreation and enjoyment. I noted what my hon. Friend said about the welcome that visitors receive in the forest and about the importance of tourism to the area's economy.

Our island has been blessed with coal, but we can work it only where it can be found. It would be highly imprudent of us, in the light of the uncertainty surrounding future energy supplies as a whole, to overlook the potential contribution that any source of energy may make, even if, at the end of the day, it is decided not to develop it.

The National Coal Board is seeking to maintain a level of opencast production of at least 15 million tonnes per annum. That level of production was called for by the board's "Plan for Coal" and confirmed in 1974, and "Coal for the Future" published in 1977.

As I understand the position, the board has no plans for opencast production in the Forest of Dean at present, although there may be a need for the coal at some time in the future.

As will be clear from my earlier remarks, however, we are not concerned only with opencast mining by the National Coal Board. The Forest of Dean, which has great traditions, which I am pleased to acknowledge, is unique in that most of the coal seams are privately owned. In the 1950s and early 1960s a number of planning permissions were given for the opencast extraction of coal in the forest and the surrounding area. Within the Dean forest park there are no current permisions that have not been taken up.

In order to get the topic we are debating in focus, I would add that the Forest of Dean, which is about 10,000 hectares in extent, is thought to have about 400 hectares of potential land for opencast working—only 4 per cent. of the total. The 400 hectares tend, however, to lie in the centre of the forest. They are concentrated in four or five sites.

I do not think there is any disagreement between myself and my hon. Friend that there are parts of the forest that have been badly damaged by mineral working in the past. There is scope in such areas to improve the land to make it more suitable for forestry or agriculture. The degree of improvement that follows from a scheme for restoration can be measured only over a period of years, but there are examples throughout the country where restoration following opencast mining has been successful.

A good example of that has been at Woorgreens in the forest where about 54 hectares of poor quality forestry land—which included more than 95 per cent. of conifers—has been considerably improved after opencast extraction of about 244,000 tonnes of coal. Indeed, experience on the site in the planting years 1979–80 and 1980–81 has indicated better growth and survival on the opencast site than on normal clear fell sites. The restoration of the site has permitted the inclusion of more oaks than would previously have been feasible.

Therefore, in the long term, opencast coal mining need not be all bad. It can enable us to develop one of our natural resources and, by means of restoration, lead in some cases to better soil conditions. But it can, of course, also seriously conflict with the protection of our natural environment. As a veteran of lengthy debates on the Wildlife and Countryside Bill, I am only too well away of the depth of feeling rightly held by many people.

In an area such as the Forest of Dean and, in particular, the Dean forest park, which is intended to provide a centre for recreation and enjoyment of the countryside, those environmental considerations assume a particular significance. That makes it all the more important that, if any future workings were to be authorised, any nuisance such as noise and dust should be kept to a minimum. It is important, too, that conditions are imposed to ensure thin the landscape suffers no long-term ill effects. However, it is worth noting that during the working at Woorgreens few environmental problems were encountered.

It is clear from what my hon. Friend has said, and from the objections we have received in connection with the proposed modifications to the structure plan, that many people are concerned with the potential damage to the natural environment and amenities in the forest.

I assure my hon. Friend that, although I cannot anticipate whatever policy on this subject in the structure plan will finally be approved, some reference will be made to the need for any proposals to avoid serious conflict with amenity considerations.

The research working group on inequalities in health was set up under the chairmanship of Sir Douglas Black by the Labour Government in 1977 to review information about differences in health status between the social classes, to consider the possible causes of those differences and their implications for policies, and to suggest further research.

It was commonly accepted by Governments and Departments that the group had a gigantic task. It has been well known for many years that health inequalities in this country are great. Despite more than 30 years of the working of the Health Service, they show few signs of diminishing. Indeed, they may be increasing in some respects. The causes of the inequalities are deep-rooted and complex and Sir Douglas Black and his colleagues must be congratulated on producing such a splendid survey, which not only provides invaluable factual information but proposes 37 recommendations for the solution of the persisting problems of health inequality.

The report, produced in August 1980 by the Department of Health and Social Security, ran to 400 or more pages. It was clearly not designed for popular reading, for the Government priced it out of the market, perhaps deliberately, at £8 a copy. That was not exactly calculated to make it a best-seller. If the Government had been seriously concerned about these problems, they could have produced a short, cheap, popular version and ensured that it received widespread publicity and debate. In the event, the present Secretary of State made it abundantly clear in his foreword to the report that he had no intention of implementing its recommendations, now or in the foreseeable future.

The right hon. Gentleman estimated that the amount of cash involved

"could be upwards of £2 billion a year".

I do not know how he arrived at that figure. Perhaps the Minister will tell us. Did he take into account, for instance, the savings that might accrue from the implementation of the recommendations on preventive medicine? I accept that their implementation would cost a great deal of money, and that those who produced the report might be criticised for being too ambitious in their recommendations. But the fact that the recommendations would cost so much is an indication of the shortcomings of our health policies, not only in the NHS but in a much broader sense, encompassing such problems as child poverty, which is mentioned in the report, health and safety conditions at work, over-eating, our drinking habits, what I call the menace of the lollipop and fags society, about which the Government should be concerned, and a multitude of other factors that affect our health.

At the outset I remarked on the amount of factual information in the report. Much of it occasions no surprise, but some of the facts should be put on the record. I take them at random from the report. The first is almost too obvious: a child born to professional parents can expect to live five years longer than a child of an unskilled manual labourer. Secondly, at birth and during the first month of life the risk of death among children of unskilled manual workers is double the risk among children of professional workers. Thirdly, mortality rates, arguably the best available indicator of the health of different social and occupational classes, tend to rise inversely with falling occupational rank or status for both sexes and at all ages.

The report also makes some interesting international comparisons. For example, in 1978—the latest year for which figures were available to the working group—rates of perinatal mortality were significantly higher in England, Wales and Scotland than in Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland and the Netherlands. France and Germany had rates similar to though slightly lower than this country's.

Deaths in the first year of life are considerably higher in England, Wales and Scotland than in the Nordic countries and the Netherlands, though it is fair to point out, as the group did, that there have been improvements in the United Kingdom rates since 1960.

One of the report's most crucial observations was made at paragraph 6.95:

"early childhood is the period of life at which intervention could most hopefully break the continuing association between health and class."

It is therefore critically important to concentrate on steps to reduce health inequalities in childhood. It will be interesting to hear what the Minister has to say about that.

That brings me directly to the urgent need, especially in these days of acute financial stringency, to focus on the importance of preventive medicine. It is regrettable that after 30 years of the Health Service social class differences in health have actually widened in some respects. My conclusion—I suspect that it is also the Minister's conclusion—is that whether people remain healthy or become ill depends largely upon conditions outside the scope of the Health Service. The Government's future policies on health should be geared to that proposition.

Over many years, the eating of good, wholesome food and the provision of good housing conditions and good hygienic sanitation have done more to improve health than have medicine and medical services. Today, a large proportion of ill health arises from the problems of urban living and increasing industrialisation, as well as the consumption of over-large quantities of unsuitable food and drink. The abuse of food and drink, the overconsumption of starches, sugar and alcohol and the inhaling of cigarette smoke, petrol fumes and industrial dusts of all sorts are the biggest health menaces today. The preventive medicine proposals of the Black report are, therefore, by far the most important, not least because they can be effected without the expenditure of vast sums of money—which must appeal to the present mean Government.

Limitation of time prevents me from dealing with the proposals in detail and, in any case, many fall outside the direct responsibility of the DHSS. For example, the Black working group argues at length about the need for a comprehensive anti-poverty strategy. It points out that in 1966 it was estimated that 750,000 old-age pensioners were living below supplementary benefit standards—that is, below the poverty line agreed by the Government. Inevitably, if they are living below poverty level and are of advancing age, there must be a deleterious effect on their health.

The report states that

"in 1967 a further report on a survey of families with children estimated that there were over 160,000 families with half a million children who were living under the new supplementary benefit scale rates"—

again, with health implications. If one is living below the poverty line, it follows that one has an inadequate diet, probably inadequate housing conditions, and so on. Table 6.2 of the report shows that, on the basis of DHSS estimates,

"in 1977 over 14 million people … had incomes of not more than 40 per cent. above the supplementary benefit level as laid down by supplementary benefit scales."

Of those, over two-fifths were old-age pensioners. Among those folk there was, and still is, much evidence of multiple deprivation in diet, housing and environmental amenities such as open spaces, parks, recreational facilities and leisure activities of all sorts. All these contribute to the ill health or the inadequate health of millions of our people.

The Black report made recommendations on the need for Government initiatives on diet, the over-consumption of alcohol, the provision of more recreational facilities in inner city areas, the encouragement of more television educative programmes on health education, more health education in schools and legislation to phase out all advertising of tobacco products. I notice that my hon. Friend the Member for Brent, South (Mr. Pavitt) is present. He has been active in successive campaigns in this regard.

The report also recommended the banning of sponsorship of sporting activities by tobacco companies. It is absurd arid a contradiction in terms for men and women to be seen playing games—whether tennis, cricket, football or whatever—to improve their health while killer advertisements are spread around the grounds. When the games appear on television it is often free advertising. The report also recommended annual increases in the duty on cigarettes in line with rises in income.

The report then proposed various other measures that should be taken outside the National Health Service. I do not expect the Minister to reply on these matters, but it is necessary to have co-ordinating machinery within the Government to make sure that all these recommendations are looked at in the round.

For example, I mentioned the need to abolish child poverty. If the question of children's health is to be tackled, a comprehensive attack should be made on child poverty. Black recommended that that should be adopted as a national goal for the 1980s. What more laudable objective could there be for the next decade? In my opinion, it is far more laudable than the projection of the Trident missile programme of £5,000 million in 15 years. In my view, and in the view of many other people, it would be infinitely better to spend £5,000 million on the attack against child poverty than on weapons of destruction.

Of course, that would require a redistribution of financial resources. I quote paragraph 30 on page 366 of the report, which says it will require

"a redistribution of financial resources far beyond anything achieved by past programmes, and is likely to be very costly".

Of course it is costly. All these programmes are costly, but they are no more costly than the programme on Trident. Nothing is more extravagant and destructive than that programme.

I recommend paragraphs 24 to 27 relating to the increases in child benefit to 5½ per cent. of the average gross male industrial earnings. They say that larger child benefits should be progressively introduced for older children, that the maternity grants should be increased to £100, and that an infant care allowance should be introduced over a five-year period, beginning with all babies born in a year following a date to be chosen by Her Majesty's Government. Those are very ambitious proposals. The sky is the limit. Of course, no Government can accept proposals of that nature.

However, other recommendations in this part of the report would cost little or nothing. For instance, it is suggested that representatives of the DHSS, the Department of Employment, the Health and Safety Commission and the Health and Safety Executive, the TUC and the CBI should draw up minimally acceptable and desirable conditions of work.

In paragraph 9.81 on page 335 and elsewhere, the report calls attention to the inequalities in the death rate among people belonging to different occupational classes. Table 9.6 on page 377, in relation to males between the ages of 15 and 64, shows that death rates among people such as university teachers, company secretaries, office managers, Civil Service executive officers, Ministers of the Crown, Members of Parliament and senior Government officials are relatively low compared with those for coal miners, fishermen, labourers and other unskilled workers, including steel erectors and riggers. The report says, quite pertinently but not surprisingly:

"There is still a tendency to accept poor working conditions as an inevitable accompaniment of particular jobs".

One has only to visit a building site to see how primitive are the sanitary conditions, the canteen facilities, and even the safety of the job. Workers are far too ready to accept conditions of work which would not be acceptable among the professions that I mentioned.

Recommendation 31 suggests that Government Departments, employers and trade unions should devote more attention to preventive medicine through work organisation conditions and amenities and in other ways. If we are to tackle our modern health problems in an effective manner, we need new Government machinery. It cannot be left to the Department of Health and Social Security. There must be greater co-ordination between Government Departments in the administration of health-related policies as outlined in chapter 9 of the report.

I end by making what I hope will be a constructive suggestion. I hope that within the next few months the Minister will, as part of his holiday task, draw up a detailed written response to the specific recommendations of the Black report, and especially those recommendations that are capable of being effected without the expenditure of vast sums of public money. During the past two years there have been two vital reports on health matters—the report of the Royal Commission on the National Health Service of July 1979, and the Black report on inequalities in health in August 1980. In addition, there was a comprehensive report by the Expenditure Committee in Session 1976–77 specifically on the subject of preventive. medicine.

There is no shortage of reports on the matter. There is no shortage of evidence of the vital need for a vigorous pursuit of preventive medicine policies. We have, however, been desperately short of a positive, vigorous and imaginative approach by the Government to the challenge that the reports present.

I hope that this short debate will have been an expression of the sense of urgency with which many hon. Members and many outside the House view these matters. I hope that the Government will take notice of it.

I rise briefly to make three points. First, I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Fife, Central (Mr. Hamilton). I underline his point that we must have a debate on the Black report at the earliest opportunity. Secondly, I wish to put on record my gratitude to the Minister, who undertook not to block the Bill on preventive medicine that I put before the House a short time ago. The Government did not block the Bill, nor did the Whips. It was blocked by the machinations of the tobacco industry.

Thirdly, I wish to underline the last point made by my hon. Friend. Because of the two reports, many of the working parties within the Department and a large number of research bodies set up within the Labour Party need not do their work again. There is sufficient material in those two reports for the implementation of a health policy that could put the NHS back on the road on which it originally started. They contain enough policies for the next four or five years. I hope that the various recommendations in the report receive the attention for which my hon. Friend has pleaded.

I have listened to the hon. Member for Fife, Central (Mr. Hamilton) speak many times about the National Health Service. His speech this afternoon was more restrained and persuasive than most. He and I can be accused of many vices, but over-eating is not one of them.

The Black committee comprised four distinguished people, who worked for the best part of three years and produced a mammoth 400-page report. At the end they concluded:

"we do not believe there to be any single and simple explanation of the complex data we have assembled".

The House will not expect me, within 15 minutes, to solve some of the persistent problems of inequality that the Black report and the hon. Gentleman mentioned.

I am grateful for the opportunity to explain the Government's attitude to the report of Sir Douglas Black and his colleagues. I know that Labour Members pay considerable attention to the report's recommendations. My right hon. Friend and I have acknowledged that it contains much useful information. We have been pursuing a number of matters that are the subject of recommendations in the report. However, we have serious reservations, especially about its conclusion on the causes of inequality in health and some of the expensive recommendations to deal with them that are contained in the report.

The hon. Gentleman criticised the arrangements for distributing the report. My Department made it available for discussion in August last year. I understand that 2,600 copies have been sold by the Department. Except for a short period last year when stocks ran out, copies have been available to those who want them. The report is, of course, available to hon. Members.

The evidence in the report reveals that, in spite of a striking overall improvement in the health of the nation, there is generally little sign of health inequalities diminishing between social classes. As the hon. Gentleman said, there are some signs that they may even be increasing. The report proposes the expenditure of substantial sums to try to put matters right.

I make two main criticisms of the report. First, there is no guarantee that if we implemented the recommendation inequalities would be eliminated. Sir Douglas wrote in a letter to the BMJ on 2 May 1981 that the persistence of inequalities in health was due

"In the main to the very structure of our society."

In a lecture earlier this year, Sir Douglas said that East Anglians, who in terms of average earnings and State funding have been about the poorest in the land for as long as reliable statistics have operated, had one of the lowest perinatal mortality rates, the greatest longevity and lower rates than the average for ulcers, coronary heart disease, drug addiction and alcoholism. That example points to the importance of factors other than economic ones in health.

Even if we believed that expenditure would solve the problems, the resources are not available. My second criticism is that the report is much less forthcoming about the type of measures that might be implemented, given the constraints on public expenditure. I think that the Opposition have accepted that the report is somewhat unrealistic. It was discussed in the House on 27 October 1980. The right hon. Member for Salford, West (Mr. Orme) agreed that the Black proposals could not be

"done overnight at a stroke. It would be impossible."—[Official Report, 27 October 1980; Vol. 991, c. 85.]

The hon. Gentleman asked me about the costings. The research group prepared costings for only some of its recommendations and these are as follows: increase in child benefit £970 million, increase in infant care allowance £870 million, expansion of day provision £150 million, free school meals £200 million, universal allowance for disablement £24 million, special programme for deprived areas £30 million. The total is £2,244 million. That leaves out of account the costings of two other programmes—increasing the maternity grant and age-related child benefit. I have excluded some rather general recommendations that are difficult to quantify—for example, the cost of local authorities making provision for all types of housing need and other recommendations about standards of pay and welfare benefits.

My Department has provided an up-to-date estimate based on November 1980 prices of the net cost, which is £3,683 million, to which one has to add an increase in the maternity grant, which would amount to £55 million, and age-related child benefits of £1,110 million. That produces a total of £4,848 million.

The research group proposed that some of its recommendations could be paid for by the withdrawal of the married man's tax allowance for families without children. One could do that. However, it would mean taking money away from one group and giving it to another. The Government have responsibilities for all members of society. They could not lightly take such a step. There are some recommendations that have little cost consequences, but the recommendations are not presented in such a way that enables them to be picked out in order of priority.

There are some problems with the methodology. I wonder whether mortality rates are the right way to measure health. I concede that they measure life, but I am not sure that they are the right proxy for measuring health. I also wonder whether it is right to look at the problem in terms of occupation and class rather than in terms of levels of income, housing and education. The working group suggested that there were inequalities in health care. The key problem is to relate health use to health needs.

The lower income groups receive more health care in absolute terms, but the question is whether they receive more or less in relation to need. The working group based its conclusions on an analysis of the published tables from the General Household Survey. We have had another look at that and find that those on lower incomes do not receive less service than those in higher income groups in relation to need. There is some evidence to show that they receive more. A good deal more study of this complex problem is needed before we shall find the right answer. It would be a pity if the document came to be regarded as some sort of bible. The proper way to look at it is as a valuable mine of evidence and information.

We agree with some of the recommendations, particularly those on prevention, which the hon. Member for Brent, South (Mr. Pavitt) mentioned. We are reaching the point of diminishing returns as regards investment in acute medicine. If we want to see a substantial improvement in the nation's health, it will come about through preventive health measures and education. There are recommendations in the report on child accident prevention, health education, smoking, drinking and other matters. We attach great importance to this subject, and the guidance to health authorities, which we published in February—entitled "Care in Action"—devotes a whole chapter to ways in which health authorities can encourage prevention and healthy living.

Since the report was published we have issued, with the Department of Employment and the Health and Safety Executive, a discussion paper on "The Problem Drinker At Work". We have reached a new agreement with the tobacco industry on restricting the advertising of cigarettes. We have increased our grant to the Health Education Council by £1 million for special anti-smoking programmes, which are aimed at children and which feature Superman and Mr. Nick-O-Teen. I am glad to be able to announce that we are increasing our grant to Action on Smoking and Health by 40 per cent., to £112,000. ASH does excellent work, in partly neutralising the millions of pounds spent by the tobacco industry on persuading people to smoke. It is important to build on the change of opinion against smoking and to maintain the progress that has been made.

The vote on seat belts, which the House took on Tuesday, is evidence that, given the opportunity, the House would be prepared to legislate on matters that have traditionally been left to the individual. On a more controversial note, I invite the hon. Members for Fife, Central and for Brent, South to use their influence with their party. One of the Black committee's recommendations was that there should be regular annual increases in the duty on cigarettes, in line with rises in income, to ensure lower consumption. That is exactly what we did in the Budget and the subsequent measures. On 6 July, my right hon. and learned Friend the Chief Secretary said:

"The real value of the duty on cigarettes has fallen substantially from past levels and this increase, together with the larger increase my right hon. and learned Friend imposed in the Budget, go only part of the way to restore the position. The duty…will be below the levels of 1974, 1975 and some earlier years."—[Official Report, 6 July 1981; Vol. 7, c. 74.]

However, the Labour Party voted against the Budget increases and the subsequent increases in July. If the Labour Party will only accept the Black recommendations when they are expensive and will oppose them when they bring money in, it will take it a long time to implement the report. Perhaps we can see some consistency between the Opposition's Treasury spokesmen and their health spokesmen.

I turn to the subject of pay and conditions at work. Most of the recommendations in the Black report fall to the Department of Employment. I should like to ask my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary of State for Employment to deal with the comments that have been made on that subject. I was asked to spend my holiday preparing a comprehensive response to the Black report. I had not anticipated spending my holiday in that way, and my family would be distressed if I did. However, I shall try to write to the hon. Gentleman and to explain how the Government will respond to the report's many recommendations.

The Government place a high priority on the nation's health. As my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister said on Monday, we have protected the National Health Service from the difficult decisions that we have had to take in other areas of public expenditure and we are proud of it. Moreover, we are complementing what the NHS can spend by encouraging private investment and expenditure on health. That is a slightly more controversial note. But we see that extra money coming in as being available for health care generally and perhaps taking some of the pressure off the National Health Service. I see the progress being made by encouraging health education, personal responsibility for health, and encouraging voluntary organisations to help in the personal social services and helping to complement the NHS.

That is the right way forward, given the difficult economic circumstances in which we find ourselves, rather than committing ourselves to the rather expensive solutions outlined by the Black report, which we are not absolutely convinced would deliver the goods.

Last week Mr. Ken Livingstone, leader of the Greater London Council, announced a 120 per cent. rise in the GLC rate precept. Next year GLC rates will be 54p in the pound, against 25p at present. This is a matter of such consequence that it must be raised in the House.

As Sir Horace Cutler, the GLC opposition leader, has said, the consequences of Labour taking over the GLC last May are now becoming apparent. The refusal of the GLC to make reasonable economies in expenditure to meet Government targets imposed in the interests of sound finance, together with the proposed reduction of 25 per cent. in London Transport fares, has already led to the announcement of a supplementary rate of 11·9p being levied. That is an additional levy of £60 per year on the average London household.

Now, our worst fears are being realised. The last Labour-controlled GLC promised free London transport, and within two years had doubled fares. Mr. Livingstone's Marxist group have much worse in store. The 120 per cent. rise is just the first instalment. As I told the House on 28 April this year, the real cost of Mr. Livingstone's determination to waste other people's money is likely to be a tripling or quadrupling of London's rates bill.

I should like to give the House two illustrations from my own constituency of what it will mean to ordinary people. The first is a house and garage in Oxford Square, Paddington. The conjectural rates for 1982–83 will be £3,199·68—an increase in 1982–83 over 1980–81 of £1,624·29. The increase in 1982–83 over 1981–82, including the supplementary rate, will be £831·03. That does not include any proposed increase in the ILEA, the Metropolitan Police precept or the Westminster city council rate.

My second illustration is a flat in Hyde Park Place, where the rates for 1982–83, taking into account the proposed 120 per cent. increase, will be £2,479·68. That is an increase in 1982–83 over 1980–81 of £1,258·79. The increase for 1982–83 over 1981–82, including the supplementary rate, will be £644·03. That is the measure of the mad Marxists' control of the Greater London Council.

A small part of the rates increase is attributable to the loss of Government grants—a penalty for refusing to curb expenditure—but the Government's determination to curb total Government spending must be welcomed. In particular, the total Government contribution to Greater London, under the new block grant system, according to last week's Civil Estimate, will be £1,316 million. Under the old system it would have been £1,424 million. That is a decrease of 5·6 per cent.

The decrease must be seen against the background of the whole economy. We must create wealth to get the nation's economy on to a sound footing, and that means selling goods and services at home and abroad to people who want to buy them.

Excessive public current expenditure is a luxury that the nation cannot afford. It has to come from taxes or from borrowing money, and, either way, it drains the wealth creators upon whom we ultimately depend. It has a stranglehold on the nation which, unless checked, will choke us to death.

In trying to bring about a reduction in public sector expenditure, local government must be one of the prime targets. It now accounts for almost one-third of total Government expenditure, and has increased dramatically in the past 20 years. For example, in 1980 local government employed the equivalent of 2,060,000 full-time workers, which represents an increase of 55 per cent. since 1960.

Almost all those jobs have been bought at the expense of jobs in the wealth-creating sector, which can succeed only by satisfying customers. At its most simple level, a rate increase of £10,000 to employ an additional local government worker means that a private company will have to lay off another person to pay the rates.

However, far more disturbing than the general increase in local government expenditure is the proportion of that expenditure which is current as opposed to capital expenditure. In 1978–79, direct net current expenditure was £12 billion. In real terms, that is double the level in 1960. In contrast, direct capital expenditure increased in real terms by little more than 10 per cent. over the same period. Capital expenditure can often be justified. Only local government can initiate the building of roads and bridges, the improvement of sewerage systems, the introduction of street lighting and the renovation of inner cities, which are all essential elements in creating an economic framework in which private enterprise and the wealth-creating sector can thrive.

The expenditure is often in the form of contracts to the private sector, and in the case of the construction industry, which has spare capacity coming out of its ears, involves the creation of real jobs. The Government proposal to invest £65 million in the new London Docklands Development Corporation is an example of that kind of investment.

Local government expenditure will now be financed under the Government's new block grant system, which is based as far as possible on an objective view of what a typical standard of local government service costs. It has moved away from the reliance on past expenditure as a measure of need.

Whereas the majority of local authorities have shown thrift and responsibility in the way that they spend other people's money, some Labour councils have continued to be guided by callous dogma and to spend as if there were no tomorrow. That money will now have to be raised from the ratepayer. Although I sympathise with the luckless ratepayers of Camden, Lambeth and Islington, I also believe that, as a matter of principle, the electors who elected those councils should foot the bill.

I am confident that under the new system, where the relationship between a council's spending and rate rises is much closer, the ratepayers of profligate Labour councils will say that enough is enough. There was a significant swing against Labour's infamous Ted Knight at the recent GLC election, and we can expect a similar fate for other spendthrift Labour councillors at the local government election in May 1982. Indeed, there is even a possibility that Labour borough councillors will try to persuade Mr. Livingstone to curb his expenditure. They face re-election just one month after the increased rates bills are sent out next April, which is not a happy prospect for them.

I applaud this kind of democratic control, but it has one substantial drawback. More than 60 per cent. of London's rates are paid by commercial ratepayers who have no vote and thus no voice in spending plans. The staggering extra precept which Mr. Livingstone intends to raise next April will drive many London businesses to the wall, with inevitably disastrous consequences for employment in London.

I cite some examples of what this will mean in central London. The conjectural rate, allowing for a 120 per cent. increase, proposed by the mad Marxists of County Hall will mean that British Home Stores in Oxford Street will pay £353,409·60 in 1982–83—an increase over 1980–81 of £141,261·01 and an increase over the 1981–82 rate, including the supplementary rate, of more than £78,000. That cost will be passed on to the customers. The price of goods in the store will increase. The price of food will increase. Even the pensioner who receives a rate rebate will therefore he paying the rates that this man Livingstone inflicts on the people of London.

Coming closer to the home of the Labour Party, the comrades may not be pleased to find that the conjectural rate for Transport House in Smith Square in 1982–83 will be £168,759—an increase over 1980–81 of £75,147·39 and over 1981–82 of £37,524·06. Perhaps it will be docked from the levy.

I cite the further example of a small takeaway food shop in Warwick Way, SW I to balance the picture. Under the proposed increase, the rates for 1982–83 will be £2,077, an increase over 1980–81 of £925, and over 1981–82, including the supplementary rate, of £461. Everybody will be affected.

Already many businesses are indicating that the size of the rates burden is a crucial factor in determining whether they continue. For the giant Shell company, which currently pays nearly £6 million in rates on its South Bank headquarters, Mr. Livingstone's latest demands will total £1·4 million, even before Lambeth decides how much extra to charge.

The GLC Labour councillors try to blame the Government for unemployment in London, but it is they who, through these monstrous rate bills, are driving jobs out of London. The Government have asked local authorities to reduce their spending in real terms by £5·60 in every £100 over a period of three years. More than half of the local authorities have either done so or are within striking distance of doing so. Yet the Marxists in control of the GLC are determined flagrantly to disregard the overall public interest. They are callously indifferent to business and employment prospects in London and to London ratepayers.

The situation is now becoming so severe that the Government should seriously consider the abolition of the GLC. The Government came to power with a mandate to get government off the backs of the people. The GLC is a prime example of a redundant bureaucracy where this mandate could be fulfilled.

Looked at in detail, it is difficult to see what role the GLC fulfils. It was intended to be a strategic authority for the whole of London, but it is the Government who take major strategic decisions affecting London. It was not the GLC which was given the responsibility for deciding whether a third London airport was required and, if so, where it should be sited. That decision was made by the Government. The GLC was not directly involved in so relatively minor a matter as the move of the Covent Garden market from Westminster to the South Bank. Responsibility for even that central London matter was retained by the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food.

At the other end of the scale, particularly in planning and traffic management, the GLC exercises parallel and often overlapping powers with the borough councils. That makes for a great deal of duplication of effort and administration and provides fertile ground for dissension.

Moreover, besides having no identifiable role, the GLC pays its members little. Consequently, it attracts a large number of young politically ambitious members who are using their membership only as a stepping stone for higher planes. The new Labour group at the GLC has an average age of under 30. In effect, the GLC has become an expensive institution without a role, where ambitious young Marxists have a platform and can cause as much havoc for everyone else as they like.

If the Government are determined to reduce public expenditure and to get Government off the backs of the people, it might be advisable to abolish the GLC. The truth is that here in London we are both over-governed and over-taxed. We should strike now to rid ourselves of an unwanted burden.

Last Wednesday the whole capital and the whole nation rejoiced at the Royal wedding. It is ironic that over at County Hall the republican Marxist blew up his black balloons on his own. The people of London celebrated in their homes and in the streets, and he got the biggest comeuppance that any nation can inflict on extremists. Let us complete that job by removing the GLC and let us be sure to hold the rates in check. Unless we do so, it will be the people of London who lose, through higher costs, higher charges, higher prices and fewer jobs. I look forward to hearing the Government's response.

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Paddington (Mr. Wheeler) on raising this subject and the way that he has dealt with it this afternoon. I know that he speaks for millions of people in this country—householders and business men, taxpayers and ratepayers—when he expresses concern about local government expenditure and the burdens that it imposes though the rates.

My hon. Friend has spoken particularly about London, a subject on which he is very well qualified, but many of the points that he made apply equally elsewhere, although there are not so many areas that have experienced the temporary mental aberration of electing a leader such as the GLC has—for a short while.

There are some respects in which it can be argued that the rating system itself is in need of some basic revision. Much of the reason for disquiet over rates in many parts of the country, however, including London, is simply that ratepayers have been faced with rate demands which appear to be excessive and which, all too often, are the result of excessive expenditure by local authorities. Concern for what people and businesses can afford to pay so often seems to be of little consequence these days.

It is true that London's increases have been somewhat higher than those outside the capital. After a number of years in which the previous Government made repeated increases in London's share of the rate support grant, some correction of that bias had to take place. Even so, had not been for overspending by London authorities—I emphasise that because the matter was within their control—London's share of the rate support grant would still be higher than at any time before 1978–79.

During the period when London's share of the grant was increasing, some boroughs used the extra money to increase their spending, while others used the grant to keep down the rates. In those areas, rate increases over the period of the Labour Government were much lower than the average for the rest of the country, and rate poundages still tend to be below average. At bottom, however, rates are decided by what authorities decide to spend.

That is why the Government, as part of their strategy for controlling public expenditure as a whole, have taken measures to try to secure a reduction of 5·6 per cent., compared with 1978–79, in the volume of local authority current expenditure. The Government regard a reduction of this order in local government spending as a vital element of their policy of public expenditure reductions to help restore the health of the economy and increase the present scope for real investment on the future.

Some authorities, however—quite irresponsibly in my view—so far have not been willing to co-operate with the Government in pursuing this aim. This year the initial budgets prepared by local authorities showed that they were planning to spend about £800 million—5·3 per cent.—above the target level that the Government had set. Now it has been suggested that this is a matter for the local authorities themselves to decide, and that the Government are not entitled to take a view.

I reject that entirely. During the quarter century that I spent in local government in London, local authorities accepted—irrespective of the party that controlled Parliament or them—that it was right for the Government to take a view on how much local government as a whole should spend. It is surely fundamental that any Government have a right—indeed, a responsibility—to decide how much of its available resources the country can afford to devote to local authority services. Equally, local government has a responsibility to observe the limits set by the Government, and authorities in the past have prided themselves on doing so.

So my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State announced to the House on 2 June that he was asking all English local authorities to re-examine their budgets and to revise them to conform to the Government's targets. At the same time he warned that, if the response was not satisfactory, he intended to ask Parliament in the autumn to reduce the total of rate support grant for 1981–82 by about £450 million.

My right hon. Friend will be looking at the revised budgets very carefully, and the results of his consideration of those budgets, and of other representations that have been put to him, will form the basis of the judgments which will underlie the supplementary report that he will lay before the House in the autumn.

The subject of high-spending policies brings me naturally on to one of the central points of my hon. Friend's speech: the spending plans of the Marxist-controlled GLC.

Although it is interesting that there are members of the controlling group at County Hall who would run 10,000 miles to get away from the label of "Marxist", they have not yet had the courage to stand up and say what they mean in public. I think that they may. Some of them may be biding their time, but I have sufficient confidence that some of them will recall that they had a decent past in local government and will not allow it to be sullied by those who now lead them.

On 22 July, just a week ago, the leader of the GLC was reported as having told a meeting of leaders of Labour-controlled London boroughs, just as a throw-away remark as he slipped away at the end of the meeting, according to the press, that next year's GLC rate would be approximately 54p in the pound compared with 25p at present—a staggering increase of 120 per cent. With that prospect in view, I find it easy to understand the reaction of my hon. Friend when he called for the abolition of the GLC as an institution, though I know he will understand that all that I can say to him on that point is that I shall ensure that my right hon. Friends are aware of the views he expressed in his eloquent proposition and the factors that have led him to put it forward, not for the first time, as was inaccurately suggested in a leaflet circulated by "Dopey the Dwarf" at County Hall, Mr. Livingstone, who could not even get the spelling of his name right on the leaflet. I suggest that my hon. Friend continues to make known his views on this point.

I think, though, that it is even more instructive to look at what Mr. Livingstone's party colleagues in the boroughs had to say publicly when they were presented with his announcement. Councillor John O'Grady, the Labour leader of Southwark, said that there were "gasps of astonishment" from the meetings of Labour leaders. Quite why they should have gasped, I do not know. Everyone has been warning them of what would happen, but they chose to think that perhaps it would not happen. As I said in the House a few days ago, Councillor O'Grady added, understandably,

"the GLC is in a Walt Disney situation."

It is most interesting that I have had several telephone calls from those who are active participants in the Labour Party, all saying what an interesting choice of Walt Disney characters I pinned upon Mr. Livingstone.

Another Labour deputy council leader, who asked not to be named, was quoted by The New Standard on 23 July as saying:

"What the hell does Livingstone and his lot think they are playing at? I have now got to pass on a massive increase to ratepayers one month, and ask for their vote the next".

Councillor Roy Shaw, the Labour leader of my own borough of Camden, said, in a neat piece of understatement,

"This will cause considerable problems for the boroughs".

He should know all about the problems caused by Mr. Livingstone. He had to fight him off for three years or so when Mr. Livingstone was trying to challenge him for the leadership, both in actual and philosophical terms, of Camden council. Roy Shaw succeeded in doing so, but at great cost.

Nor is it only Mr. Livingstone's party colleagues in local government who do not see eye to eye with him. I observed a quotation in today's edition of The Sun from a Labour Member of Parliament advising him

"to belt up, at least in the interests of the Labour Party"

and accusing him of "spouting nonsense" in urging GLC councillors to refuse to make spending reductions.

But, really, no one should be surprised—my hon. Friend has said it, and I repeat it—at the bizarre excesses and attitudes that we are now seeing almost daily from the Marxists who masquerade under the name of Labour at the GLC. Developments of this sort were clearly predicted by hordes of people before the GLC elections in May—by many of my right hon. and hon. Friends, by those in commerce, by Sir Horace Cutler, and by many others, including myself, in debate in this House. My hon. Friend's feelings about the plans of the Labour GLC are shared by many people, inside and outside this House, and not least by the domestic, industrial and commercial ratepayers, who will have to bear the cost of these appalling and irresponsible proposals.

My hon. Friend mentioned the problems posed for businesses in his constituency because of the burden of rates. It has been argued by those who defend high spending policies financed by high rates that rates represent only a small proportion of business costs and that, by implication, we should not worry unduly about the burden that excessive rate demands represent to industry and commerce. That argument, as I am sure my hon. Friend agrees, wholly misses the point.

At a difficult time when it is vital for the economy of the country to encourage the establishment of the prosperous and competitive industrial base that we need in order to produce wealth to generate employment and support realistic and effective local services, any excessive or avoidable burden on firms that are striving to achieve or maintain viability is one burden too many. It is crystal clear that high rates, like high costs of any other sort, can have a telling effect on prospects for jobs and for industrial development, and this is illustrated by the examples that my hon. Friend has cited today.

Those who try to pretend that this is not so, with the inevitable serious effect on employment, ignore the growing mass of evidence which shows what is happening. For the present, I cannot offer my hon. Friend any instant solutions to this problem. I assure him, however, that it is very much in the Government's mind.

I remind him, too, that when my right hon. Friend on 2 June announced to the House his intentions in relation to action this autumn on rate support grant he said that the Government were also considering further measures, including the possibility of legislation next Session, which may be necessary to bring home to individual local authorities, including, of course, those which raise their finance through the precepting system about which my hon. Friend was so concerned, and to their electors the consequences of high-spending policies.

The Government are, of course, aware of the importance of giving a fair deal to the domestic ratepayer. In their consideration of the whole field of local government finance, the Government are concerned not only with the consequences of excessive expenditure but with the extent of the inequities in the way in which local revenue is raised at present through the rates. My right hon. Friend has therefore announced that the Government will issue a consultative document in the autumn on the alternatives to domestic rates. The broadest possible range of potential alternatives is being examined, and none is being ruled out at this stage.

Consultation will be very wide, and we shall certainly look forward to receiving the views of my hon. Friend and other hon. Members on the document when it appears. This document will concern domestic rates, as I have said. The replacement of non-domestic rates by some other form of revenue is not envisaged. Nevertheless, the domestic and non-domestic systems are, of course, closely interrelated and the Government will keep the problems and interests of non-domestic ratepayers very closely in mind as our thinking develops.

My hon. Friend has done the House a great service in drawing attention to this problem. It has been a very timely debate. My hon. Friend made a sensible and thoughtful contribution on a topical subject. I hope that what I have said has reassured him that the Government are thoroughly aware of the points that he has put forward and that we are determined to take the action that is needed to tackle the problems that exist in the area that we have debated today.

It can be argued, I suppose, that there must be something odd about a ballot in Mr. Speaker's office that leads to my debate following immediately on a similar one. I hope that the Minister will not mix up his notes in answering the two debates. I take up the point of the hon. Member for Paddington (Mr. Wheeler) about Marxists who use local government to come into this place. I can think only of the hon. Members for Hampstead (Mr. Finsberg), for Hornsey (Mr. Rossi), for Fulham (Mr. Stevens), for Northampton, South (Mr. Morris) and for Twickenham (Mr. Jessel) and also the right hon. Member for Worcester (Mr. Walker)—all young Marxists, who used local government to get into this House.

I wish to draw attention to the appalling financial situation facing the London borough of Hackney. I continue to argue that Hackney, by any yardstick, is being wrongly penalised. The question whether what has happened is legal is a matter for some other place to decide. I believe that the borough planned to spend less in cash terms in 1981–82 than it spent in 1980–81. In view of inflation, increasing responsibilities and the additional burdens placed on the London borough of Hackney by the Government, one can only marvel at the attempts made by the council to meet the unprecedented control now being exercised over local government by the men in Whitehall. The reward for trying to meet the target was a penalty involving the loss of £17 million of Exchequer grant.

I am sorry that the hon. Member for Paddington, who was so interested in rates in London, has now left the Chamber. The withdrawal of £17 million has meant a rate of 56p in Hackney, which is not so wealthy as the hon. Gentleman's part of Westminster, where people speak in terms of millions of pounds. We can speak only in terms of hundreds of thousands of pounds. Therefore, not only is the borough council penalised on the rate support grant. It is also penalised by the Government on partnership, which is quite outrageous. Furthermore, it is even penalised on urban aid.

Not surprisingly, the council had to raise its rate by imposing an increase of 55p in April. That was due entirely to the actions of the Government. The council has cut spending, yet it was penalised.

Interest rates are still very high and are still rising. The House has to realise that an increase of 1 per cent. in the interest rate costs Hackney borough council £450,000. Since currently it is paying between 12½ per cent. and 14 per cent. for its money, it is costing £6·3 million, or an 18p rate, just to finance the work that it has had to do as provided by statute.

In addition, the cash limit set by the Government was based on a 6 per cent. increase. The Minister knows that that is rubbish and totally unreal. In fact, the NALGO settlement was 7½ per cent. The Minister may say that that is the council's responsibility for negotiating so high. But only today we read that his Government have negotiated the same increase with their civil servants. I take it that there will be no penalty on the Government. They will not suffer the withdrawal of funds. Yet they have made precisely the same settlement.

The council has to finance the difference between the rate increases which will have to be levied as a result of the difference between the real world and the fictitious world in which the Government live. That additional sum will have to be found from the rate fund. But then the council will be subjected by the Government to being included in a further penalty, and the increases will be added to the target calculation.

In an earlier debate, I heard the Minister discussing ways of solving the heating charges problem. I listened to him carefully since this is one of Hackney's problems. The Minister identified four areas in which he thought councils could operate to help alleviate the problem. Our heating charges in Hackney are exactly the same as those quoted by my hon. Friend the Member for Islington, South and Finsbury (Mr. Cunningham). However, if Hackney took the Minister's advice and used any one of his four suggested solutions, each of them costing money, it would incur even further penalties.

Those hon. Members who listened to that debate found it hard to contain themselves in silence. It is misleading the House to suggest that Hackney, with exactly the same problem, could do what the Minister suggests without involving itself in greater penalties and having to raise even additional rates to pay for it and to overcome the penalties.

We hear continually from Ministers about the need to make more and more people unemployed. Hackney is now being forced to sack some 200 building workers because Ministers believe that it will save money. But it does not save money. Quite apart from the morality of deliberately creating a vast army of unemployed, it costs more in the first year than any money that is saved, and that money is an abortive cost. It is of no value to the country, to the council or to the ratepayer. But the bill goes to the ratepayer in the end, because the Government impose even greater penalties upon the council.

At the same time as the Government demand the sacking of staff, they harass the council of the London borough of Hackney to do more and more work. Only yesterday the Minister for Housing and Construction informed me by letter that he was naming Hackney borough council for intervention under section 23 of the Housing Act 1980 because he concluded that the council had been too slow in processing applications for the sale of council property.

Let me set out the facts. Between October last year and the end of May the council received 943 applications, of which 776 had been checked, with 229 being returned as incorrect. The right to purchase was admitted in 524 cases and denied in 13.

The borough council has given me an interesting breakdown of the figures. A total of 301 applicants are in three-bedroomed houses. There are only a handful of such houses in the constituency, and one can see what sort of future faces those on the waiting list. Another 42 applicants are in four-bedroomed houses, of which there are even fewer in Hackney. I have discussed that problem with the Minister. All that is an argument for another day, but Hackney borough council is carrying out the task demanded by the Government in the Housing Act, yet the Department of the Environment is taking action against the borough.

In the past two or three weeks more than 20 staff in the treasurer's department have been employed in paying benefits that should have been paid by the Department of Employment and the DHSS. Hundreds of people who should have been queueing outside the offices of those Departments have been queueing outside the town hall and receiving benefits there. But there has been not a word of praise from the Government for the council's action in saving those people from hardship.

While those 20 or more staff have been paying benefits, they have nor been able to process housing purchase applications or even to collect rates for the borough. The council's rate collection has been falling behind, but Ministers are not courteous enough even to acknowledge publicly the great task undertaken by the council. The Government's only action has been to issue a notice to the council stating that they are dissatisfied with its actions.

There is still doubt about whether the money paid by the council on behalf of Government Departments will be added to its volume total. Two weeks ago I was promised a letter confirming that the money would not be added to the total, but I have still not received it. Half an hour ago I telephoned the Department to ask why the letter had not arrived and I was told that it was on its way and that it would confirm that the money would not count in the volume total. It is perhaps significant that it has taken two weeks for that decision to be made.

Hackney has 16,000 families—46,000 people—on its waiting list. They desperately want two, three and four-bedroomed houses, but the council is being made to sell the homes in its stock. The council cannot build any more properties. It is already in the penalty box, and if it spent any more on building council houses the Government would penalise it even more. The average rates paid in Hackney are £399·47—about 50 per cent. more than the level in Bromley and three times the level in other parts of the country.

I have pleaded with the Minister for justice for Hackney. We have discussed the matter a number of times, and I pay tribute to the hon. Gentleman's courtesy to me, but I continue to argue for justice for the borough. It may be said that the council's philosophy is different from that of some other authorities, but that is no reason for unfairly withdrawing money from the borough.

The Minister knows that I have produced evidence that shows beyond peradventure that the council is conforming with Government policy, but it is still placed on the hit list. It is being forced to carry out the sales policy; it is being forced to accept the transfer of 26,000 GLC properties, many of which are in a deplorable condition. There is no precedent for such an arrangement. It is a case of an unwilling seller and an unwilling buyer. It is being forced to carry out the work of Government Departments in default and, at the same time, it is being forced to sack more and more people.

How can the Government justify their onslaught on Hackney borough council? How can they justify the resulting attacks on the people of Hackney in the face of all the evidence that I have offered over months? Surely the time has come for the Minister to accept the facts and to agree that enough is enough in the way in which the Government are treating the London borough of Hackney.

I am not quite sure whether I live in the same world as the hon. Member for Hackney, South and Shoreditch (Mr. Brown). He appears to have one view and I have another. My view seems to be shared by many people. I shall try to stick to the facts, and I hope that what I say will put those facts on record. Then I shall be perfectly content for people to see whether the hon. Gentleman's statements stand up to the light of day.

Perhaps I ought to begin by outlining the new rate support grant system that was introduced in England last year by the Local Government, Planning and Land Act. Rate support grant consists of two elements—domestic rate relief grant, which is paid to all rating authorities to compensate them for the 18 ½p rate relief given to all their domestic ratepayers, and block grant. Block grant is by far the more important, amounting this year to about £8,000 million, which is nearly half the total expenditure of local government.

One of the main functions of block grant is the equalisation of rate poundages—ironing out the inequalities between authorities by making more grant available to those with greater needs and lower rateable values. The object in general is to ensure that all authorities, whatever their rateable value, can provide arty given level of service by levying the same rate poundage on their ratepayers.

That is achieved by calculating for each authority, according to a general formula, the cost of providing a typical level of service. This cost is known, in a somewhat odd phrase which is, I fear, becoming familiar to the House, as its "grant-related expenditure", or "GREA". GREA is not an expenditure target; it simply provides the common reference point necessary for the calculation of grant. Grant is then set so that all authorities spending at GREA are able to charge the same rate poundage, whatever their rateable value, so that any difference in expenditure per head above or below this level has in each case the same effect on the poundage. That means that a minority of authorities—those with high rateable values—which would otherwise be able to finance large increases in expenditure from comparatively small increases in their rate poundage may actually be paid less grant the higher their level of expenditure. That does not mean that such authorities are unfairly disadvantaged. On the contrary, it means that resources are distributed equally between authorities according to their needs.

The full effects of poundage equalisation have not this year been felt in inner London. The rateable values of the City and Westminster are so high that they receive no grant, and by falling outside the block grant system they are able to retain the advantage of their high rateable values. Some of this is then redistributed to the other inner London boroughs, under the Greater London rate equalisation scheme, which is made each year under section 66 of the London Government Act 1963. This year, Hackney has benefited from the scheme to the extent of £4 million. In addition, because rateable values are on average higher than those in the rest of the country, block grant is adjusted so that the poundage required to finance any given level of expenditure in inner London is lower than that required elsewhere. This, of course, has the effect of further reducing rate bills in inner London.

Despite these special provisions, London has of course lost grant compared with last year. Part of this loss arises from the general reduction in the planned level of local authority expenditure and the cut of 1 per cent. in the grant percentage—factors which applied equally to all authorities throughout the country. The Government have also stemmed the flow of money from the rest of the country to London which had characterised rate support grant settlements in the recent past.

In 1975–76 London's share of grant was 13·3 per cent. By 1979–80 it had reached 17 per cent. In 1978–79 Hackney received more grant than was necessary to finance the whole of the borough's services, and was able to charge a general rate that was 4·47p less than the precepts levied on the borough by the Greater London Council, the Inner London Education Authority, the Thames water authority and the Metropolitan Police. This continuing drain on the resources available to the rest of the country could not be justified or allowed to continue.

This year's settlement therefore reduced London's share of grant to 15·8 per cent., which is still larger than in any year before 1978–79—hardly a severe retrenchment. Taken together, the grant losses implied by the settlement amount to £108 million, compared with budgeted local authority expenditure this year in London alone of nearly £2,500 million.

When the settlement was drawn up, it was announced that, as in the past, local authorities as a whole would be expected to spend in line with the Government's expenditure plans. Nobody seriously involved with local government on either side of the House has ever suggested that the Government do not have the responsibility of setting the overall expenditure guidelines within which local authorities should work, and local government has in the past prided itself on meeting those targets. The hon. Gentleman and I in our own local government careers followed this line. The hon. Gentleman knows that full well.

I accept that it is easier to meet a target that is rising from year to year than one that is falling. Difficult decisions have to be made; difficult choices have to be faced. When it became clear that the country could not afford to maintain public expenditure at its present high level, and my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State announced that he was asking local authorities to reduce the volume of their expenditure by 5·6 per cent. compared with 1978–79, I do not pretend that the task was necessarily easy.

The hon. Gentleman rightly said that we could not discuss in detail today a case that is sub judice. He mentioned the "penalty box" in relation to rate support grant. Without giving any expression of view, I should like to quote the facts that are on record. The following is an extract from the agenda of Hackney borough council dated 28 January 1981, which is a public document:

"We received reports of the meetings of the Panel at our meeting on 7 January. In the light of these reports and a full discussion of the issues in the political context and having regard to the financial and other implications for the authority, the Panel recommended us not to apply for waiver. We endorsed their recommendation and agreed to take no action to secure exemption from the liability to a reduction of rate support grant under the transitional arrangements provided in the Local Government, Planning and Land Act, 1980."

I reserve comments for a time when the court case is decided. Those are the facts, on public record.

I do not believe that the reductions that the Government asked for are in any way impossible to achieve. A figure of 5·6 per cent. over three years is not too terrible a reduction. When local authorities drew up their budgets this year, it nevertheless became clear that they missed their targets. In aggregate they were planning to overspend by 5·3 per cent.

My right hon. Friend accordingly asked all authorities to review their spending and to try to bring it back into line with our public expenditure plans. We have asked for revised budgets to be submitted today. When we have examined them, we shall know how far local government has responded to our request. We still hope that local authorities will have been able to make the savings that we are asking for. If not, the first consequence will be that claims will exceed the total of grant available, and entitlements will have to be reduced to bring them back into line. The greedy will be penalising the more thrifty. This alone would reduce London's grant by a further £44 million.

My right hon. Friend also said that we may have to consider asking Parliament to approve a reduction in the rate support grant which would have the effect of reducing London's grant by another £57 million.. I stress that none of this is inevitable. The remedy lies in the hands of local authorities themselves to act responsibly. I hope that the hon. Gentleman will use his undoubted influence in Hackney to good effect.

Mr. Deputy Speaker, you will be pleased to see that only one hour and three more speeches after mine stand between you and the Summer Recess.

First, I wish to express my support for what my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for the Environment is trying to do to bring local authority public expenditure under control, although I wish that his efforts could be directed with equal ferocity against Government expenditure. Be that as it may, I believe that it was quite wrong in the past for local authorities to set their own levels of spending and retain the right to put their hands in the pockets of the taxpayers at large, particularly as those who pay rates account for less than half, some say much less than half, of those on the voters' list—in other words, those who are responsible for electing the local authorities.

Consequently, there is often a conflict of interest between the electorate and the ratepayer, who are not one and the same, although those who demand a generous level of service, because they do not assume a direct responsibility for rates, nevertheless appear to be the first to complain about unemployment, without realising the effect that those costs have on an employer's ability to employ.

However, some ratepayers are fortunate in occupying property in an area that is run by a prudent and cost-conscious local authority. The London borough of Redbridge is one such authority, having had the good fortune to be Conservative-controlled since its formation in 1964.

However, in spite of the careful and diligent way in which the council has gone about its task of providing the services that Parliament requires of it, and of anticipating what additional expenditure it can afford, it finds itself at present in an extremely unhappy situation. Apparently, the present rate support grant figures were calculated from a baseline or snapshot which was taken as the authority's expenditure in 1978–79. In my opinion, that is where the present system is defective, because I do not consider that the 1978–79 figures fairly reflect need. They might represent wants, but not necessarily needs. Consequently, those authorities which took little care to curb their wants into the needs that their ratepayers could justly afford start from a much higher base of both expenditure and staff than authorities which have been cost-conscious throughout.

In my opinion, the new way of calculating grant-related expenditure is to be applauded as the first positive step towards determining what local authorities really need to serve the population in their areas, although the statistical figures and multipliers that are used in these calculations are, I understand, produced largely by the local authorities themselves and their associations. It is therefore important to ensure not only that the correct weighting is provided but that those figures are not manipulated between and within areas by internal pressure which might arise—for example, in Greater London between the inner and outer London boroughs. If a national adjustment is required by the Secretary of State because he wishes to reduce expenditure, he should look to those figures and not to some historic baseline—the 1978–79 outturn—if he is confident that the grant-related expenditure figures are properly calculated in the first place.

It therefore seems quite wrong that a penalty should be considered by way of a hold-back in grant, because that would have significant implications for both the council and its services, particularly if the Secretary of State intends to introduce limitations on rate increases for 1982–83.

As a result of the policy of reducing expenditure adopted by Redbridge since 1975, reductions up to the current year have amounted to £16 million at current prices. If those reductions had not been made, the current rate would have been 38·9p in the pound higher. They are significant factors when considering further reductions and the baseline from which the Secretary of State is now considering the hold-back provisions.

Under those provisions, because the council is alleged to be an overspender by 1·4 per cent.—£849,000 on the arbitrary guideline—it will lose £586,000 in grants. If decides to reduce expenditure by £750,000, leaving a difference of £99,000 excess expenditure, the grant penalty will remain the same at £586,000. There is no continuous correlation between the level of overspending and the grant penalty. That results in some authorities.' grant penalty substantially exceeding their excess expenditure, even though difficult and conscientious decisions have been taken to reduce expenditure.

The efforts made to reduce expenditure should be recognised. The Secretary of State should seriously consider reducing the penalty for those councils that just miss the target by a small percentage, perhaps under 1 per cent. Such councils should be subject only to a small penalty—for example, 5 per cent. That would give a protection of 95 per cent. rather than the 75 per cent. that applies at present in the zero to 2 per cent. band. That would provide greater encouragement to councils to meet the figure next year, quite apart from the problems of cash limits and further expenditure reductions.

The Secretary of State is of the opinion that the London grant is still too high and more grant should be transferred from London to the provinces by way of an increase in the London clawback. Apart from that factor, the possibilities of a change in the grant mechanism must be faced with the adoption of percentage equalisation, which would move grant from outer London to inner London.

Clearly, Redbridge has already significantly reduced expenditure and already has a lower level of service provision than neighbouring authorities—that is supported by statistics—with the possibility of further reduction in grant due to grant mechanisms. The room for manoeuvre within any rate limitation policy is virtually infinitesimal and may result in a damaging impact on services for the community.

The rate limitation will be applied on the basis of a percentage on the existing rate levy. If that rate levy is already of the lower order, there can be little room, if any, for manoeuvre. However, those authorities that are spending more and have a higher rate levy clearly have more room for manoeuvre and flexibility in their budgets. Any percentage increase applied to a higher rate levy results only in a higher ceiling

The various factors that the Secretary of State will be considering as a policy for next year will operate to the detriment of Redbridge. It has been a prudent authority, having reduced expenditure between 1976 and 1979 by 5·6 per cent. and having the third lowest manpower ratio per head of population for outer London, being 16 per cent. lower than average.

The council is being penalised for having been prudent, because the base from which all comparisons are made is much lower than for many councils and the room for manoeuvrability must inevitably be considerably smaller in those authorities with much higher expenditure. I hope that my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary can acknowledge that Redbridge is not an overspender in the popular sense of the word.

The grants are partly calculated on the total rateable value of the authority, that being the assessment of the council's ability to pay for its own expenditure and, therefore, how much grant it should receive. If those values are becoming out of date—as they are—and if the trend is moving against London as a whole—as it is—it is quite wrong to try to claw back so much from London. We must take account of this fact if we are not to have the revaluation that should have been carried out before now and allow for the fact that the rates are out of date and that the ability to pay in London is now proportionally much less than it used to be. That is an important factor that must be taken into consideration if we are to be fair in assessing what rate support grant should be given.

This is not the first time that my hon. Friend the Member for Ilford, South (Mr. Thorne) has drawn the last subject on the last sitting day before a recess. When he did so on a previous occasion he spoke on town planning in Redbridge. I hope that he was satisfied with what came out of that debate.

Indeed.

I hope that he will be equally satisfied with that which emerges from this debate. I am grateful to my hon. Friend for raising the issue It is one of topical and wide importance, since today is the day by which we have asked authorities to submit revised budgets for their current expenditure plans in 1981–82.

The points that have been put to me about Redbridge are in principle and in substance the same as those put to us on behalf of many authorities—the way the current expenditure targets that we have set for this year have been constructed and the various special circumstances that we should take into account, whether entirely local or of wider application, in considering the responses of authorities in their revised budget.

The starting point is our wider economic objective of containing and reducing public expenditure. Unless we get that right, nothing else can come right. If we do not achieve this and the related fall in public borrowing and taxation, we shall not be able to achieve the objectives of reducing inflation and interest rates and arranging for the release of resources for investment in the private sector. I shall not go any further into the wider economic issues today. I hope that my hon. Friend will feel that my remarks set the debate in a proper context.

The real point behind my hon. Friend's speech is, I think, how we should set out to meet this objective as far as local authorities generally, and the excellent London borough of Redbridge in particular, are concerned. I hope that it is agreed between us that local authorities must play their part in the reductions that are necessary. Their revenue spending on current account amounts to some 20 per cent. of public expenditure generally. In England in cash terms this year planned spending will be approaching £20 billion all told. They employ over 2 million people.

Our public expenditure plans require a reduction by 5·6 per cent. in the volume of current expenditure in local government in England in 1981–82 compared with the spending by local government in the financial year 1978–79, which had just ended when we came into office. This measure of spending covers wages and salaries, goods and services. The pay bill makes up around 70 per cent.

In January of this year we had to consider how best to secure delivery of this overall public expenditure target for local government. My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State consulted the local authority associations about this but they were unable to offer positive suggestions.

My right hon. Friend therefore concluded that the Government would themselves have to propose targets for individual authorities. In doing so we faced a dilemma. The Government have never been in a position to form a judgment on the particular circumstances of individual authorities in a way that would permit us to lay down individually tailored targets, because to attempt to do this would have involved us in a wholly unacceptable degree of central scrutiny and supervision of individual authorities' budgets and could well prove unworkable in practice. We were therefore obliged to adopt a general target.

My hon. Friend has clearly explained why he and the London borough of Redbridge feel that a general target based on the 5·6 per cent. reduction is unfair. He referred to the level of expenditure in the 1978–79 base year, and to the history of tight budgeting and control over expenditure and staff since the borough's inception in 1964. In these circumstances he suggested that for Redbridge the 1978–79 base already reflects a low level of spending as a result of years of careful housekeeping. By contrast, it was suggested that some other authorities without such a background have a relatively higher base from which to make the 5·6 per cent. reduction that we are now asking for.

My hon. Friend suggested by implication that we in the Government might construct individual targets for every authority, including Redbridge. These might take into account the level of service that we believe the authorities should provide, the level of staff that we think is needed to provide the services, and so on. This is an interesting thought. I believe that it would have the effect of fundamentally altering the present relationship between central and local government. It would amount to the Government going into local authorities, looking at the books, and taking decisions about the quality of each service provided, and how the authority should organise and manage itself accordingly. In effect, the Government would be deciding the policies and priorities of each local authority. It would also imply decisions about rate levels and the use of balances, to cover expenditure not financed centrally from grants and subsidies.

I wonder whether Redbridge—or any other local authority—would really want to accept this shift of decision-making to the centre. For our part, we would take a lot of convincing that such a step would be the right one to take. It would need a reversal of the stance taken by successive Governments over local government finance and expenditure. That is not to say that we should not consider a change if we believed that it was in the best interests of good government, centrally or locally. But we should need to be convinced that the gains outweighed the costs.

At this point, I should like to explain briefly why we have not hitherto gone down that path. There are over 400 local authorities in England. Together they employ around 2 million people. The range of local circumstances and detail that they can and do take into account is enormous. The Government have never been in a position to take the detailed decisions based on these local circumstances which add up each year to every authority's rate fund budgets and rating decisions. In practice, we could not do so without a very large increase in the number of officials, even if they could acquire the detailed local knowledge of the authorities concerned.

In principle, could any Government take on this task and still preserve a healthy, independent local government, which people of integrity and ability would want to serve?

With these considerations in mind, the Government's financial relations with local government—at least, concerning rate fund spending—have had to be framed in legislation and conducted in practice in general, not specific, terms. For example, rate support grant has always been distributed under a formula—both under the old system arid under the new one—under which the various needs assessments are now separately identified.

The local circumstances of authorities will affect their entitlements to grant depending on how they relate to the formula. But the Government have never made unique assessments of overall expenditure levels or grant entitlements based on the particular circumstances of individual authorities. Nor has the legislation under which rate support grant is paid been framed with this in mind.

My hon Friend also referred to the importance of the need for early information about these targets. I recognise that local authorities want to know as swiftly as possible so that they can work out their figures. It was as a result of our 1980 review of public expenditure, which was announced by the Chancellor of the Exchequer on 24 November, that the 2 per cent. reduction for 1981–82, provisionally given in the March 1980 White Paper, had to be increased to 3 per cent., because of the deteriorating general economic situation.

Despite that regrettable but necessary change, the authorities should have had sufficient time to take it on board within their final budgets and rate-making cycles. When I was in local government, that decision was made in ample time. With his experience, my hon. Friend will accept that it was made in sufficient time for the adjustments to be made. In addition, my Department's circular letter of 23 January gave each authority its individual target, based on the value of reduction required for 1981–82, implied by our expenditure plans and the rate support grant settlement announced in December.

Having said all this, I assure my hon. Friend that I am not dismissing the valid points he has put to me this afternoon about how a general target can interact with an individual authority's circumstances. As I said at the beginning, we have had similar representations from many quarters. Some have covered local circumstances, others more general points.

My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State has made it clear that he will consider all the points put to him about the targets and the proposals to hold back grant in certain circumstances before coming to decisions. I stress that no decisions about hold-back have been taken. The budgets are still coming in. Then they have to be analysed. When decisions are taken, they will need to be put to the House in the form of a supplementary rate support grant report for approval.

I understand that Redbridge's initial budget implies a current expenditure volume 1·4 per cent. above the individual target that it was set. I am happy to accept the fact that this appears to be so. If the tables published by my Department did not pick up the amendment earlier, I am very sorry. What it means is that Redbridge is within easy sight of achieving its individual target and of obtaining full exemption from the effects of a general reduction of grant where that may be necessary.

We nevertheless require the help of all authorities if the Government's overall public expenditure target is to he achieved. Any savings that Redbridge will be able to make will be of direct benefit to its own ratepayers. That is of maximum importance in such a well-run borough.

The case that my hon. Friend has raised is one that we shall need to examine very closely, although I hope that he will understand why our decisions will have to be taken on the basis of general rather than purely local considerations. But his points will, in addition, be particularly useful to us as we look to the future, when we shall be planning expenditure in cash and not volume terms.

Before going any further with the review, will my hon. Friend give an undertaking to go back beyond 1978–79, because the performance over the previous five or 10 years is also relevant to what a local authority can now afford to cut? If its expenditure was almost cut to the bone when it started in 1979, it is then extremely difficult to go on cutting. On the other hand, those local authorities which had grown very fat by 1979 have a lot more to cut, and it is not so difficult to cut off 5·6 per cent. Would by hon. Friend be kind enough to look at the matter?

In the year 1978–79 in particular, my local authority was having a very difficult time. It had just taken on stream many additional commitments that were required of it by the Government, and the situation was very difficult. I am confident that in the future Redbridge will go on doing what it has done in the past by being an extremely good housekeeper, but it is starting from too low a base.

My hon. Friend has made a very important point. But I do not think that I can give him the undertaking for which he asks, for a wide variety of reasons, the main one being that whatever date one picks is bound to be a difficult date for somebody. He has the benefit of representing a borough that has remained under sensible political control since its inception as a shadow council in 1964 and as an elected council in 1965. Some of us are in areas where councils have changed politically from time to time.

It would be impossible to offer to consider any other date than the one we have taken. If we had picked 1977–78, some people would have said that we should have gone back to 1975–76. Unless we went back in the case of London to 1963–64, and in the rest of the country to 1973–74, I do not think that it is possible for me to give the undertaking requested by my hon. Friend. We have had the figures and targets for a while. However, I shall make certain that my right hon. Friend has drawn to his particular attention my hon. Friend's cry from the heart, but, because of our friendship for many years, both outside and inside the House, I would not want to give my hon. Friend the impression that there might be a change in the date.

At the end of his speech my hon. Friend raised the broader questions of rates and the rating system. I can only refer him to my earlier speeches, the first in reply to my hon. Friend the Member for Paddington (Mr. Wheeler), which dealt with rates in London in general, and the second in reply to the hon. Member for Hackney, South and Shoreditch (Mr. Brown), which dealt with some of the problems in Hackney. I hope that what I said was sufficient to reassure my hon. Friend. It should have demonstrated that the Government are well aware of the burdens that excessive local authority expenditure is placing on too many ratepayers in London and elsewhere. There may be a case for changes in the way in which the present system distributes the burden on ratepayers.

I explained the measures that the Government have taken to ensure that expenditure by local authorities is contained within reasonable bounds. I reminded the House that my right hon. Friend announced that the Government would publish in the autumn a consultative document on alternatives to domestic rates that will look at the extent of the inequities in the way that local revenue is raised from that source. I hope that when it comes my hon. Friend will send in the views that he expressed and any more that he feels are relevant when he has read the document. We want the widest measure of response.

I also recalled earlier that my right hon. Friend announced that the Government were considering further measures, including legislation next Session, which may be needed to bring home to individual local authorities and their electorates the consequences of high spending policies.

I trust that my hon. Friend will feel satisfied that he has raised a matter of great importance. Although he raised it in relation to Redbridge, it none the less has wider implications. I assure him that the Government will take on board the points that he has made and that my right hon. Friend will bear them very much in mind in preparing his document and coming to his decisions.

I beg to ask leave to withdraw the motion.

It is a great honour to speak on the last day of term; indeed, in the last debate. I am pleased to see my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary of State for the Environment in his place to debate this extremely significant matter. I hope that he will relate what we say to our right hon. Friend the Prime Minister.

The significance of the debate is that it comes just two months before the Commonwealth conference is due to take place in Melbourne, when undoubtedly the whole issue of the Gleneagles agreement will be high on the agenda. It also comes at a time of great relevance to the problems in New Zealand over the South African rugby tour. I say immediately that I fully support the actions of the Prime Minister, Mr. Robert Muldoon. He has been extremely brave in many of his decisions, although he has kept well within the Gleneagles agreement. It is sad that in The Times the other day he was quoted as speaking of his own little country being rent asunder by the terrible actions of yobs and hooligans of the extreme Left.

As the House will know, the Gleneagles agreement was made by a Labour Government in 1977 and confirmed by a Conservative Prime Minister in 1979. It has never had the approval of the House, which is a cause of shame that should be highlighted. From my researches, I do not believe that it has been debated on the Floor of the House, certainly not since the Government came to power in May 1979.

The agreement has been interpreted in many and varied ways by those considering it from a legal angle, and not least by the notable lawyer Edward Grayson, who has discussed the matter at great length and in legal terms has driven a horse and carriage through it.

We must remember that the agreement itself at all times stands out against apartheid. I believe that all Members of the House and many in South Africa are absolutely against apartheid. The agreement seeks only to discourage and dissuade. It puts no imperative legal binding on any Government to stop their own international sportsmen from practising their arts wherever they choose.

Sadly, the agreement has now become an easy political weapon for anyone wishing to mount a vendetta against South Africa. Indeed, it has given such people a respectability which they do not deserve. As the House will know, they have now involved the United Nations in a treaty and an agreement which is of absolutely no concern to them.

Great progress has been made in the integration of multiracial sport in South Africa. The House will recall that I have raised this matter on several occasions, and I do not intend today to go into the detail of that progress. Suffice it to say that the various fact-finding missions that have been to that country, including the International Cricket Conference, a delegation of French parliamentarians and, indeed, our own British Sports Council, led by Dickie Jeeps, and several individuals who have been there merely on holiday, have almost all reported that great progress has been made towards full intergration of virtually every sport in South Africa. Hard on the heels of that news, the South African Government have recently announced intended legislation to ease certain other laws.

Regrettably, I believe that that progress has been ignored by the British Government, apart from one or two peremptory remarks noting that some small progress had been made. It is also sad to report that some Ministers who were concerned about this matter before coming to office in 1979 seemed then to put forward an attitude towards South Africa rather more friendly than their attitude today. It is also a great tragedy that, so far as I know, no Minister has visited South Africa since the Government came to office. Without that actual measurement of progress, a complete mockery is made of the Gleneagles agreement.

During this time, opponents of South Africa have been extremely vigilant. Only today I was privileged to visit the international games for the disabled at Stoke Mandeville, where earlier in the week a despicable demonstration took place against the South African athletes. I had a short discussion with Miss Joan Scruton, who is the secretary of the games. She related sadly that international sportsmen of all colours from the South Africa team—cripples, the unfortunates of society—were being got at by extreme anti-apartheid demonstrators.

In South Africa itself, the organisation SACOS, which is well known to my hon. Friend, has been carrying out a physical vendetta and intimidation against certain people. The funds upon which it relies are of doubtful origin. It is well known that the organisation has strong connections with Moscow and Eastern Europe. It has now put out an obnoxious black list to try to prevent sportsmen from playing where they are.

Without doubt, active Governments and even members of Commonwealth Governments are now using the agreement to get at sportsmen. Only today I heard that the Trinidad representatives at the disabled games had been prevented by their Government from taking part. The tragedy of New Zealand has prompted Prime Minister Robert Muldoon to talk about the "experienced organisers of the extreme Left" who are organising the demonstrations.

I regret that while Her Majesty's Government continue to support the Gleneagles agreement they can only encourage those opponents of free sport, however unwittingly that is done.

We begin to wonder where we go from here, because we now have the black list. The English cricket tour to India is under threat because Geoffrey Boycott, one of our prominent players, is on the list. We wonder what will happen to the meeting of Commonwealth Finance Ministers and whether it will be held in the Bahamas. If that happens, I hope that Britain will refuse to attend. We wonder what will happen to the Commonwealth conference and whether those two allies—Australia and New Zealand—will come to blows. We wonder also whether relations between the United Kingdom and those two countries will be soured because of the agreement.

The Commonwealth Games are under threat because of the actions of Governments who, although within the Commonwealth, seem to be becoming almost enemies of Britain. The South African rugby team is due to go next to America, and I am pleased to report that it has received full co-operation from the United States authorities. For the first time for many years visas have been issued for the players to go there.

We must remember, in the context of the Commonwealth, the various civil liberties in South Africa that are being objected to by the enemies of that country. There is significance in a letter in The Times today from Professor John Hutchinson, who outlines some of the civil liberties that are being flouted in certain Commonwealth countries. In India, for example, he talks about "constitution-bashing" by the Prime Minister. In Guyana, which is a name well known to sportsmen for what happened over the Jackman affair in the winter, he talks about the attitude there towards "awkward immigrants". We all know about the massacres that have occurred in Uganda. If those things are happening in other parts of the Commonwealth, why should South Africa be singled out for this vendetta and the various boycotts?

When the Commonwealth conference begins, and when the Gleneagles agreement is discussed, there will be a great temptation for the whole matter to be left alone, on the basis that because it is not legally watertight the matter can be left where it is and we can continue as we are. There will be those who will seek to strengthen the agreement and there will possibly be those who will seek to weaken it, although they will be in the minority.

I hope that my hon. Friend will pass this on to my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister. In my view, and in the view of many hon. Members, that agreement should be abolished. In Mr. Muldoon's words, "it is now dead" It has become an extremely easy weapon for the political extremists to use, and while it exists they will use it to full effect. It is extremely divisive and sets one country against another. There is not much Commonwealth spirit in that. It is also extremely discriminating against sport.

One wonders why sport should be singled out in this way. If the vendetta is to continue against South Africa, why is the business world not to be penalised? Would that have anything to do with the fact that investment by this country in South Africa is considered to be up to about £9,000 million? Would it have anything to do with the fact that about 250,000 jobs in this country could be dependent upon South Africa? The discrimination against sport is despicable.

I am pleased to report to the House that the right hon. Member for Birmingham, Small Heath (Mr. Howell)—I have informed him that I would say this—was quoted in The Guardian of 22 March 1975 as saying that

"He was totally opposed to apartheid, but he did not believe that foreign governments should intervene. If business men could travel freely to South Africa, then there was no reason why sportsmen should not."

The right hon. Gentleman has continued an active campaign against South Africa and South African sportsmen. Even out there, while the vendetta continues, South Africa is supplying vast quantities of food to keep alive various countries around it. It also supplies manpower to those various countries.

It will need a bold decision by my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister if she considers scrapping the agreement. It may lead to the break-up of the Commonwealth, however sad that may be. It will lead to the loss of old friends, but it will mean the introduction of new ones. I believe that one day the blackmail and the bluff have to stop. One day the real truth must be told. South Africa's enemies will not stop until they achieve the overthrow of the white National Government, by whatever method they choose. By continuing to support the agreement, the Government are giving credence to those aims. I implore my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister, through my hon. Friend here today, to consider those facts with great urgency before a final decision is concluded.

I rise briefly to support the case that has been advanced by my hon. Friend the Member for Luton, West (Mr. Carlisle) in an articulate speech. He is widely respected in the country for the stand that he has taken on the subject, and he has highlighted a number of important issues.

The Gleneagles agreement should never have seen the light of day. It is undoubted blackmail, and the sooner it is laid to rest the better. If my hon. Friend is the Minister for sport, let him stand up for sportsmen, because the vast majority of sportsmen in this country want to participate in sport throughout the world, and that includes South Africa. If, as we are advised by the intellectuals in the media and elsewhere, reason, debate and discussion are the way to make progress in the world, surely it is only right that that should be carried into sport so that sportsmen from the Western countries such as the United States, France, Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom can go to South Africa and show the South Africans how sport across colours, creeds, and different countries can work.

My hon. Friend knows that great progress has been made in South Africa already. As my hon. Friend the Member for Luton, West said, Dickie Jeeps, who chaired a visiting delegation to South Africa, showed in a detailed report that sport in South Africa was rapidly being fully and properly integrated. We have seen on our television screens the chaos—

I hope that my hon. Friend will leave me time to reply.

This debate can go on until 7 o'clock approximately.

Order. The Adjournment motion was moved again, and this debate can last for half an hour.

I shall give my hon. Friend plenty of time to reply.

We have seen some disgraceful scenes in New Zealand, where a handful of protestors were allowed to rip down fences around a rugby ground to prevent 20,000 rugby supporters and enthusiasts from watching a game of rugby football. It is appalling that the police did not take action. There are occasions when I am tempted to say that we should let the police turn a blind eye and allow the supporters of rugby to get at these people—these trendy, long-haired layabouts and louts, these trendy extraordinarily Marxist-Christian clerics who seem to encourage the breakdown of society as we know it for reasons known only to themselves.

The scrapping of the Gleneagles agreement will speed up the total integration of sport in South Africa, and the more that the South Africans can travel throughout the world, playing their games, the sooner they will bring changes to their country. Those are the changes that many of us want to see.

But is it not appalling that at Stoke Mandeville, where handicapped people are working together in the world for disabled persons' games, a protest took place and the South African team was put in a difficult position by the anti-apartheid movement? The team was greatly embarrassed, especially as it contained at least seven blacks from South Africa.

I hope that my hon. Friend will make a meaningful response to the debate and will say that the Gleneagles agreement will not be renegotiated at the Commonwealth conference. The sooner it is laid to rest, the better.

I am only sorry that my hon. Friend the Member for Macclesfield (Mr. Winterton) has left me so little time in which to respond as he asks.

I cannot but admire the persistence of my hon. Friend the Member for Luton, West (Mr. Carlisle) for again bringing the subject of sporting links with South Africa before the House, because he managed to have a debate last month on the same subject.

My hon. Friend has questioned the Gleneagles agreement. The date of the agreement is significant. Commonwealth Heads of Government issued their agreed statement in 1977, the year after that in which over 20 countries, most of them Commonwealth members, had boycotted the Olympic Games in Montreal. A similar threat hung over the following year's Commonwealth Games in Edmonton. But the Commonwealth was only following a lead already given by sportsmen themselves.

For example, as early as 1970 South Africa had been expelled from the International Olympic Committee and the International Cricket Council, and in 1976 from the International Amateur Athletics Federation and FIFA. This was nothing to do with the Commonwealth or with Gleneagles, so sport took its own action before the Gleneagles agreement came into discussion.

Gleneagles was thus a policy statement which acknowledged and sought to reduce the confusion of what sportsmen themselves were already doing.

The "Gleneagles agreement" is a misnomer. It is not a formal agreement. It is simply a joint statement of policy by Commonwealth Heads of Government. The authority of Parliament was not sought at the time, and has not been sought since—because no such authority is necessary. Gleneagles, however, received wide publicity at the time, and it was open to any Member to raise it in the House, as can be done with more formal treaties and agreements. In fact, it has been raised on several occasions, including the present. The Government have frequently confirmed their acceptance and support for Gleneagles, which calls on Governments to discourage sporting contact with South Africa.

As with any policy statement, different interpretations are possible. I have considerable sympathy for the New Zealand Government in their present difficulties over the Springboks' tour of their country. They have made clear their opposition to the tour, but the New Zealand Rugby Football Union has chosen to ignore their advice. Mr. Robert Muldoon has amply fulfilled his obligations under Gleneagles to discourage the tour.

One of the tragedies of the Springboks' current tour of New Zealand is the effect that it is likely to have on world sport. Never was there a greater need for quiet diplomacy than now, but, instead of this, we have confrontation in New Zealand and banner headlines.

As we have already seen, the meeting of Commonwealth Finance Ministers next month has been switched from Auckland to the Bahamas. The Commonwealth Games in Brisbane due to take place in October 1982 are under serious threat. Should the Springboks team fly to the United States of America after their New Zealand tour to play three games as planned, the 1984 Olympic Games in Los Angeles also come under threat.

Blackmail again.

As a rugby man myself, I am deeply sorry that it is rugby which is spearheading this confrontation in international; port. It is too easy for rugby leaders to claim that politics is none of their business, but it is naive to believe that sport and politics do not mix, especially where South African sport is concerned.

Individual sports must take a broad view and not look only at their own self-interest. A rugby tour such as the present one can have repercussions for the whole of sport.

The Springboks New Zealand tour has focused attention on Gleneagles only two months before the Commonwealth Heads of Government meet in Melbourne. My hon. Friend has suggested that the Commonwealth itself might be at risk, but the Commonwealth has an amazing resilience. I hope and expect that the present difficulties will be solved in the spirit of compromise and good sense, as other problems have been in the past. Indeed, Gleneagles itself is a good example of the Commonwealth process at work.

We must expect some pressure at Melbourne for the strengthening of Gleneagles, but I am confident that the Prime Minister and her colleagues will find a way of resolving this difficult problem.

I should certainly like to comment for a moment or two on the International Stoke Mandeville Games for the Disabled, which both of my hon. Friends have mentioned, and rightly so. My hon. Friend the Member for Luton, West has expressed his dismay at the recent attempt by the anti-apartheid movement to disrupt these games. I most certainly associate myself with his dismay.

Let us look at what is happening at Stoke Mandeville. These games, which end on Sunday, have disabled athletes of various races from South Africa among the competitors. We knew of their participation in advance but decided, exceptionally, that this friendly sporting gathering did not warrant our taking any action under Gleneagles to discourage the event.

We are totally opposed to apartheid but are also deeply concerned for the disabled, who have a heavy enough burden to bear in their everyday lives. It would be wholly inappropriate in our view to draw them into the political arena because of the South African presence.

Indeed, South African disabled athletes have competed at these annual games for many years without hindrance or complaint from anti-apartheid groups or from the previous Administration. That this is the International Year of Disabled People only adds to my conviction that we were right not to intervene. In my view, last Sunday's demonstration at Stoke Mandeville was repugnant.

The press has reported that attempts will be made to add the name of Miss Joan Scruton to the United Nations black list. She has been closely associated with these games for many years and plays a key role in the promotion and development of sport for the disabled. I can only add any own view that it would be a tragedy if her splendid work was inhibited in any way.

In my closing remarks, I should like to look at what has happened during recent years in South African sport. Changes have undoubtedly taken place in many sports towards integration, although greater advances have been made in some sports than in others. Both my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister and I have acknowledged at Question Time that progress is being made.

Only recently the South African Government announced their intention of amending some of their apartheid laws as they affect sport. I understand that the changes proposed, based closely on the report of the South African Human Sciences Research Council last year, would affect the Group Areas Act, the Liquor Act and the Black (Urban Areas) Consolidation Act. They have also undertaken to review the Reservation of Separate Amenities Act.

Those proposals, which would have a fundamental impact on the playing of sport, could also, just as importantly, have an impact on the "off the field" activities which we in this country take for granted as a normal part of the sporting scene. They are as important as playing the game itself.

I would only add a word of caution. We cannot expect changes to take place overnight. Legislation itself takes time. Its acceptance by the people will probably take longer. However, clearly these moves are to be welcomed. Who can doubt that the isolation of South Africa in the world of sport has contributed significantly towards this process and the speed at which it has been attained?

The Government reaffirm their adherence to the Gleneagles agreement, but we hope that the progress in South Africa will continue so that eventually sporting links can be re-established. That must be the aim of all free and freedom-loving nations and particularly those that want to play sport, one with another.