Mr. Speaker, may I be the first to wish you a restful Whitsun recess.

For the benefit of future generations of insomniacs who may stumble across the Official Report of this debate, I shall give a brief account of how the London Residuary Body came into existence and what it is expected to do until the general election, when a Labour Government will abolish it.

In short, the LRB is the Government's dumping ground. It exists in a vain attempt to clear up the appalling mess left in London following the Government's ill-conceived, ill-considered and ill-finished abolition of the Greater London council. The main responsibilities of the LRB are set out in a written answer to me from the Under-Secretary of State for the Environment. They are:

"—to make compensation payments to staff of the GLC who were made redundant or employed on less favourable terms at abolition;

—management of the GLC's debt, and superannuation fund;

—to close the GLC accounts;

—to sort out records and files for onward transmission to successor bodies, and to tidy up unfinished business generally."—

there is a deal of that—

"—to manage inherited property, and unextinguished rights and liabilities not transferred to functional successors;

—to provide certain specialist services, including computer services, scientific services, research and intelligence, and miscellaneous transport services (all at the request of London boroughs), and Urban Traffic Control, on behalf of the Secretary of State for Transport;

—to plan the onward transfer, disposal or sale of property and for the continued provision of any of these services that remain necessary after the residuary body has been wound up."—[Official Report, 21 April 1986; Vol 96, c. 67.]

In other words, its object is to try to make sense of abolition, which all objective and thoughtful people—of course, I exonerate the Under-Secretary of State from such accusations—continue to regard as one of the crudest acts of party political spite in recent years.

Those functions must all be completed in five years, had the LRB five years to look forward to, but since it has only until the general election, perhaps the whole matter is academic.

I have said in the House on many occasions, and I suspect that I shall say it again before the next general election, that the abolition of the GLC had nothing whatever to do with the efficiency of local government. The Government are still unable to tell the House how much money will be saved by abolition or how much money it will cost. They do not know how many jobs will be lost or how many jobs abolition will create. They are unable to make accurate figures available to the House, for the simple reason that they do not know. The abolition of the GLC was all about the Prime Minister's personal hatred of county hall. It revealed her as petty-minded, vindictive and autocratic, and it has left London as the only capital city in Europe without citywide government.

Abolition of the GLC also removed from Londoners a sizeable chunk of their democratic rights and vested control of GLC services in a bewildering complexity of successor bodies: quangos, joint boards, joint committees, Government Departments and borough councils. Few, if any, of the GLC's services have been abolished. However, the democratic accountability of those who administer many of the services has been abolished.

The Government have said, among many other things, that they are taking those services out of the political arena. They are weasel words. What the Government are really doing is excluding from those areas of activity everybody's politics but their own. Disraeli's words about a Tory Government being an "organized hypocrisy" are just about as true today as when he uttered them in the middle of the 19th century.

Whatever their prostestations, the Government dislike democracy, and they certainly mistrust the people. The test is there. If the GLC had been so unpopular, why were the Government not prepared to let the people of London decide at the ballot box whether they wanted to kick out Ken Livingstone and his colleagues? The Government were not prepared to do so, because they could not trust the people. Instead, they are seeking to take more and more services out of the hands of democratically elected representatives and put them under the control of Tory trustees: business men, bankers, accountants and the like, who do their business behind closed doors and away from the glare of public scrutiny and public accountability.

The London Residuary Body is a typical example. The Secretary of State picks seven people who are completely beholden to him for their very lucrative appointments and are answerable only to him for their actions. Then he appoints as chairman of the London Residuary Body a true blue Tory whose Conservative party allegiances are beyond doubt. If the Labour party, when in government, had done that, they would have been a great row in Fleet Street. There would have been accusations about "jobs for the boys", but because the jackals of Fleet street serve mostly the interests of the Conservative party, they have uttered not a peep.

The chairman of the London Residuary Body, who is elected by no one and is accountable only to the Secretary of State, then makes a serious of partisan political statements attacking the GLC and its democratically elected councillors. As an elected representative I consider that to be the height of impertinence.

If all this were free for Londoners — the studied insults, the pay-off to Tory friends — the ratepayers might not have such a major area of complaint. But this particular Tory stooge who chairs the LRB is being paid a salary of £50,000 a year. That has to be compared with the salary of the last director general of the Greater London Council, who received £44,000 a year. I admit that was not a bad screw, but it was for a very full working week, for controlling three times as many staff as those for which the LRB is responsible and for a budget twice the size.

The chairman's salary of £50,000 a year should also be compared with the £7,000 a year that Ken Livingstone received. Whatever people may think of him, Ken Livingstone worked very hard on behalf of London, and he did it for a pittance. The money that he received in taxable expenses and allowances ought to be compared with the remuneration of the part-time members of the LRB. They are doing very well indeed. They are receiving £6,000 a year for one day's work a week. That is an insult to all those GLC councillors, both Labour and Tory, who gave up their job prospects to run London's services and received very little for doing so.

I want to ask the Minister a series of questions. First, when will the LRB salaries be reviewed? One knows that they will be reviewed upwards but, when they are, will a public announcement be made, or will it be similar to what happened to the salary of the chairman of the board of London Regional Transport? His large salary increase was revealed only through an answer that I received to a parliamentary question. It came as a great surprise to LRT workers, who were being asked to take a cut of £50 a week in their fairly low wages, to find that the chairman of LRT had received a salary increase of no less than £7,500 a year. That was done secretly and behind closed doors. There was no public scrutiny and no public announcement. That is the way in which this Government behave. I want to be told that that is not the way in which the salaries of the members of the London Residuary Body will be treated.

I was also intrigued to learn that no women have been appointed to the LRB or to any of the seven residuary bodies that were set up after the abolition of the GLC and the metropolitan county councils. In reply to my question, the hon. Member for Mitcham and Morden (Mrs. Rumbold), the Under-Secretary of State for the Environment, told me that no fewer than 10 women were included in the 220 people who had been considered for appointment. But of course none of them was chosen. One can only conclude that the previous Secretary of State was a closet misogynist.

We know that the hand-picked men on the LRB employ over 4,000 staff and that they are responsible for a budget of £600 million. Beyond that, we know very little, if anything, about their day-to-day activities. That has to be contrasted with the GLC which, despite its faults—I am prepared to admit that it had a few — conducted its business in the full glare of public scrutiny. The press and the public had full access to all the deliberations at county hall. Despite that, the GLC was grossly misrepresented in both Fleet street an this House. The Minister is a living witness to that fact. There he sits today in his present position by virtue of the action he took in attacking the GLC, when the more thoughtful of his colleagues expressed public and private reservations about the Government's proposals to abolish the GLC.

In contrast to the GLC, the London Residuary Body holds its meetings in secret and its minutes are not made available. I have asked the Minister many times in the past, and I ask him again now, whether those minutes can be placed in the House of Commons Library. All that he has said to me is that it is a matter for the LRB. Naturally, the LRB refuses to disclose its minutes. They are made available only to Ministers and to Department of the Environment officials. This is offensive and undemocratic.

The Government have abolished democratic accountability over a large number of London services. They have set up a quango, called the London Residuary Body, and then refuse to answer questions in the House about its activities. What are the Government trying to hide? Why will the Minister not tell me how much London ratepayers' money is being spent by the LRB on, for example, consultancy fees or expenses, or its general running costs? Why does the Minister not tell us more about payments to ex-GLC staff? Why will he not tell us how much it has cost Londoners for the London Residuary Body to remove the GLC insignia from buildings and vehicles? That was a priority programme for the LRB, because it moved very swiftly to do just that after midnight on 31 March when the GLC was abolished.

Ministers are not consistent. I have asked questions similar to those that I have just asked about the activities of the London Docklands development corporation and about the South Bank board and I have received very full replies. I am not encouraging those Ministers who were courteous enough to give me those full replies to adopt the same attitude as the Minister at the Dispatch Box. I want that Minister to start following the example of other Ministers who are prepared to come to the House and give full information to hon. Members who are trying to carry out their democratic responsibilities. The London Docklands development corporation and the South Bank board are also non-departmental public bodies, like the LRB, and I do not see why the LRB should be treated differently.

When I started asking questions about the activities of the LRB I received from the Under-Secretary silly, glib non-answers. Then, I am pleased to say, older and perhaps wiser counsels prevailed and the replies became slightly more forthcoming. I am marginally grateful for that, but the position is still far from satisfactory. In a letter dated 29 April to my hon. Friend the Member for Blackburn (Mr. Straw), the previous Secretary of State said:

"Residuary bodies' day-to-day policy concerns are matters on which it would not be usual or appropriate for me to intervene or comment."

Why not? The Government set up these wretched bodies to replace democratically elected councils; surely it is their responsibility to answer for the actions of their creatures.

In the same letter, the Secretary of State spoke about

"a degree of independence that residuary bodies have from Ministers."

Yet in an answer to me on 11 April the Under-Secretary said that his Department was in regular contact with the London Residuary Body about the discharge of its functions. If the LRB is as independent of Ministers as we are told, why are there so many meetings? Why is Parliament not informed of what is transacted at those meetings? In his reply of 21 April the Minister said that no central record was kept of all the meetings.

Again I ask: why not? Why are central records of these meetings not kept? It was Parliament that decided to abolish democratic control of many of London's local government services, and Parliament should also be prepared to make itself accountable to Londoners for the efficient running of those services. Of course, Parliament and the Government have not been prepared to make themselves accountable, and that is an insult to London and to democracy.

According to a reply that I received on 11 April from the Parliamentary Under-Secretary, Londoners have very few rights in respect of LRB activities. He said that, subject to statutory requirements, it was for the LRB itself to decide the information it makes available to members of the public. Imagine a local authority being given that sort of right, being able to pick and choose the information that it made available to the press and the public.

In reply to further questions from me, the Under-Secretary said that residuary bodies had been asked to prepare their first annual reports for the past year from their establishment to 31 March, 1986 and to adopt the financial year thereafter. This means that the first LRB report will cover the period from 12 August 1985 to 31 March 1986 — a period prior to the abolition of the GLC, when the LRB had no effective responsibilities for London's government.

I hope that messages will continue to flow from the civil servants to the Minister, so that he will be able to answer some of my questions. It seems that the earliest the House will receive the inadequate first report of the LRB will be in about the autumn. That means that we are not likely to receive the post-abolition report until the autumn of 1987. I understand that to be the position, but the Minister can correct me if I am wrong. We might have a general election before then. in which case the matter is academic, but I suspect that that report will be hushed up, because it will be too politically embarrassing for the Government to reveal it in the run-up to the general election.

The whole situation is unsatisfactory and smacks of a cover-up. When will the first and second reports of the LRB be laid before Parliament? Will Parliament have a full opportunity to examine and discuss these reports on the Floor of the House? What matters will be covered by the reports? As I understand it, the content of the reports is a matter for consideration.

This is the first opportunity that the House has had to debate the affairs of the LRB, and because of that I should like to ask the Minister another series of questions about the board's current activities. First of all, what percentage of ex-GLC staff have received redundancy pay? How many of them have received their redundancy pay in full?

Is the Minister aware that a number of ex-GLC staff who have received neither redundancy pay nor unemployment pay are being refused unemployment pay at Department of Employment local offices because officials in those offices are trying to establish whether any of the staff received pay in lieu of notice? We all know that no staff received pay in lieu of notice. I hope that the Minister will speak to his right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Employment in order to ensure that those ex-GLC staff receive some money to live on, because the Government are responsible for the economic distress of those people.

Secondly, is the Minister aware of the appallingly low morale of LRB staff? How many staff have quit the service of the LRB since 1 April? Is it true that so many staff are leaving at the moment that the LRB is having to rely on agency staff and outside consultants to do its work? The notes keep coming and I hope that that will continue, because the Minister is cleary in need of information. Thirdly, is it true that, on the 10 completion teams that have the job of trying to tidy up the mess after abolition, there are 109 vacancies, about a 30 per cent. shortfall? If that is true, what reasons can the Minister advance for such an unsatisfactory state of affairs?

Fourthly, is it true that the sum of £1·4 million or thereabouts has been made available for selective pay increases to staff who are proving difficult to retain in the service of the LRB? Fifthly, is it true that all the notepaper with the heading, "The LRB—An Equal Opportunities Employer" was destroyed on the instructions of the chairman of the LRB? If that is true, why was it done? Is the LRB not an equal opportunities employer? How much did that little exercise cost London ratepayers?

Sixthly, has the Minister read Building magazine dated 9 May? That quotes the Building Employers Confederation which says that its members are owed a total of £500 million for completed work and that the LRB's paperwork is in complete disarray. When can those contractors expect payment? Clearly, delays in payment have serious consequences for the future of their businesses.

Seventhly, what is the current disposals policy of the LRB in respect of GLC property? I understand that the Minister's Department has issued draft guidance notes advising residuary bodies to consult successor bodies before disposing of any property. I assume that that will cause considerable delay, because time must be allowed for those consultations to take place. I do not moan about such consultations, but I should like to know what the situation is at the moment. The Minister should now be able to tell the House about the projected sales figures for property disposal by the LRB in its first and second years.

Eighthly, why have the Government delayed the announcement of the distribution to the London boroughs of some £18 million of GLC balances? I understand that the distribution was agreed by the LRB on 28 April but was then vetoed by Ministers.

Ninthly, why is the LRB being allowed to sell off the Elephant and Castle shopping centre for less than its commercial value to a company called Land Securities plc? I thought the LRB was there to get the full market rate for properties that it sold privately, so that the benefit would go to London ratepayers.

Tenthly, when will the LRB be able to make an announcement about the future of Hampstead Heath and Covent Garden? Those matters need to be sorted out. It is over two years since abolition was first proposed, and we still do not know about the future of Hampstead Heath and Covent Garden. I am particularly concerned about Covent Garden, because I would like to know whether the Covent Garden Area Trust will be allowed to purchase all the ex-GLC property, or whether the Minister will allow property speculators to make a fat killing in this prime area of London.

My 11th question concerns what is happening about Thamesmead, because that intrigues a number of people. Is it true that the Thamesmead Trust expects to receive Thamesmead for nothing, plus £15 million from the LRB, and that the LRB is refusing to oblige? We understand that this is what the chairman of the trust is expecting. Is the Minister prepared to publish the study by the Department of the Environment on Thamesmead, drawn up by Coopers and Lybrand?

Finally, what is happening about county hall? When are the consultants due to report to the LRB? I am sure that the Minister is aware of the great anger that will arise in London should the LRB, with his approval and that of his colleagues, sell off county hall for a hotel development. Is he aware—if he is not, he should be, and so should a potential purchaser — that if county hall is sold as an hotel and goes into the private sector, the Labour Government will compulsorily purchase county hall and return it to public service?

The Minister should answer these questions. I am not so naive or optimistic as to expect that he will give me a fulsome reply now to all these questions, but I hope that he will be prepared to write to me. I shall keep returning to this matter and asking these questions. It is not just me being nosey. The Minister and his Government have set up this unelected, unnacountable quango, and it is incumbent on them to answer for the actions and policies of that quango—here, where it matters, in the House of Commons. I shall be returning to the House time and again to ask questions on matters relating to the abolition of the GLC and the work of the LRB, because in that respect, my patience and determination are infinite.

The Government have a duty to answer these questions. If they do not, the accusations that are being made—that they are not interested in open government, that they want to take more and more powers from local authorities and vest the powers in unelected, unaccountable quangos made up of hand-picked political trusties and passing out of the public domain—will be seen to be true. Such a course of action would be anti-democratic. It is the antithesis of everything that this place is supposed to stand for, and of everything that the Government mouth from the Front Bench, but one gets used to that level of cant and hypocrisy from this Government.

The Government will curse the day when they decided to abolish the GLC. As I correctly predicted before the elections on 8 May, the GLC factor, which ran heavily through the elections in London, and which was one of the reasons why the Conservatives were so badly beaten in the elections, will continue to affect the people of London. The Minister may care to reflect on the fact that I now represent the only one-party borough in the country. That is a reflection of the trust and faith that the people of Newham have in the Labour party.

When we occupy the Government Benches, we shall amply reward the people, and we shall look after our friends just as the Tories have looked after theirs. The Government now know and understand that they made a monumental error of judgment in abolishing the GLC. That fact will haunt them right the way through to their certain humiliation at the next general election.

I join the hon. Member for Newham, North-West (Mr. Banks) in wishing you a happy and refreshing recess, Mr. Deputy Speaker. It is always a great pleasure to listen to one of the delightfully restrained performances from the hon. Gentleman, to which the House has become accustomed. No one doubts that he was one of the most highly political chairmen of the Greater London council—an office that had traditionally been a non-political position. He will never lose an opportunity to re-run what has begun to sound like one of the old movies that one sees flickering on the television screen—the story of the GLC that has now gone.

However, for the second time in two months, I have to disappoint the hon. Gentleman. When he secured the Adjournment debate on 27 March this year, his forecast of chaos and disaster when the GLC was abolished was wrong, and it is still wrong—even more so that it was then.

The truth is that the hand-over of functions to successors went extremely smoothly, and as we have always said, the boroughs and other successors were perfectly capable of taking on their new responsibilities. After all, the boroughs have run over 80 per cent. of the local government of London and are now, quite rightly, running the rest as well. All the excessive advertising that was going on when the GLC was spending London ratepayers' money has, quite rightly, stopped.

The number of redundancy claims submitted to the London Residuary Body suggests that we were right to estimate that about 3,500 posts would eventually be saved. We have just announced that the number of claims was 3,000. Additional posts will be saved, for example by voluntary early retirement and by further redundancies. There have been widespread and significant reductions in rates—nobody can be in any doubt about that—and they are directly attributed by many of the London boroughs to the abolition of the GLC. Voluntary bodies have found, as we never doubted, that the overall funds available are perfectly adequate for their needs.

It is hardly surprising that, in the hon. Gentleman's disappointment, abolition is bringing about all the benefits that we said it would, with none of the chaos that he forecast, the hon. Gentleman should turn his attention to the London Residuary Body as a target—as he sees it, the fresh ogre. The hon. Gentleman has painted what one can only describe as an imaginative picture of some secretive, all-powerful organisation running out of control.

The truth is rather more modest. The LRB's role is limited, technical and transitory. Its role is limited and technical because its sole purpose is to wind up the affairs of the GLC. We always recognised that, in bringing to an end an organisation of the size and complexity of the GLC, there would be residual issues that would need to be resolved and which could not readily be transferred to successors. These include disposing of surplus property, making compensation payments to GLC staff made redundant or re-employed by successors on less favourable terms, managing debt and superannuation and dealing with certain oustanding legl rights and liabilities.

The hon. Gentleman has read out a written answer that I gave him in the Official Report, which spelt out in precise detail the role of the LRB. Its task has been likened to that of the executor of an estate. It is to finish or liquidate the transitional items and return any cost incurred, and, more particularly, the receipts and surpluses generated to the ratepayers of London, where they rightly belong.

When formulating the LRB's powers and duties we also recognised that there would be a limited number of common specialist services and other functions which successors would find useful but for which there would be no time to make permanent arrangements before abolition. The Act therefore provides for the LRB, if requested to do so by successors, to act as a temporary home for these services, provided that there is a prospect of permanent arrangements being made in due course. The services which the LRB has taken on include research and intelligence and scientific services, which are being run at a level agreed with the boroughs and on a recharging basis. The LRB is also maintaining on a temporary basis the GLC's former central computer service. In addition to these services, the LRB is acting as a temporary home for Thamesmead which will pass to the elected local trust later this year. As the hon. Member has mentioned it, perhaps I can take this opportunity to say something about the LRB's role at Thamesmead.

The hon. Gentleman criticised the way in which the LRB has acted, but he has been very unfair. The LRB has temporary ownership of Thamesmead. By agreement, the day-to-day management of the area is already being undertaken by Thamesmead Town, which is the private company controlled by residents, and which will assume full ownership very shortly. Thamesmead Town is currently using the LRB staff who were previously employed by the GLC on the Thamesmead operation. Everyone concerned agreed that it was better for the new company to become immediately involved in running Thamesmead from 1 April to make for the simplest and smoothest transition from the GLC. Residents and staff have benefited from this arrangement.

The company will shortly make offers of employment to the LRB staff at Thamesmead. There will be no compulsion on the staff to work for the company, but there is every indication that the large majority of them want to do so. Mr. Clive Thornton, the company's chairman, has been greatly encouraged by this support and by the commitment shown by the staff to the new company and to continuing to work for the good of Thamesmead.

The process of selling Thamesmead is a matter for the LRB and Thamesmead Town. The valuation process is now proceeding. The LRB and the company are anxious to finalise matters as quickly as possible so that Thamesmead Town can become fully operational and serve the residents to the best of its ability. The LRB has taken an enlightened and practical approach to the problems of Thamesmead and Lam pleased to be able to endorse it.

I have said that the LRB's role is transitory. The Act requires the LRB to endeavour to wind itself up by the end of five years but, in practice, most of its work will have been completed long before then. The task of making redundancy payments is virtually complete already. The common specialist services will be handed to the boroughs before long. The LRB's property disposal programme is already under way, particularly in respect of individual sites and properties. Of course some groups of properties must be considered together and their future must be considered more carefully, but even here the LRB is making progress.

The LRB is already discussing in detail arrangements for the disposal of Covent Garden with those directly concerned — the City of Westminster, the London borough of Camden and the Covent Garden Area Trust. This is a quite proper concern for local anxieties about the future of the area, and gives the lie to claims that the LRB has embarked on some reckless asset-stripping programme. In short, the LRB is pressing on wieb its duties in abusinesslike, speedy, and effective manner.

The hon. Member asked whether all of this does not cost a lot of money, is not the LRB's budget huge and does it not employ a vast army of people.

I never said that.

Once again, I fear that I must draw the hon. Gentleman's attention to the facts. The LRB's budget for 1986–87 provides for net revenue expenditure of about £480 million. But, of that, some £300 million is accounted for by debt charges. Most of this sum relates to housing stock already transferred to the boroughs. The boroughs were paying for that anyway, and it did not feature in the GLC's budget. A further £100 million is accounted for by charges to the boroughs and other successors for services provided by the LRB on their behalf. It is imposing a levy on the boroughs of £48 million—equivalent to a 2·5p rate, block grant apart. Thai: should be put in the context of GLC budgeted expenditure of more than £700 million in 1985–86, and a precept of 34p, although I readily accept that the LRB's functions are more limited.

That is generous.

Apart from those figures, there are substantial balances in the GLC's accounts. The Budget forecast that these balances would amount to at least £116 million. The LRB has just announced that it is distributing a further £18 million to the boroughs. That shows the extent to which the GLC took money endlessly and, unnecessarily from Londoners, who will get it back.

We expect even greater capital receipts to accrue from sales of surplus GLC property. The LRB has forecast some £30 million net coming from this source in 1986–87 alone. The bulk of those receipts will be returned to London's ratepayers. The Act enables my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State, to provide for certain of these receipts to be paid over to a trust for the benefit of voluntary organisations in London. We shall shortly be consulting on the terms of an order which will require the LRB to make over funds to the trust for London, which is presently being set up by the City Parochial Foundation. We intend that some £10 million will be paid over for this financial year.

On staffing, one has only to consider the facts to realise how groundless are the claims that have been made. The LRB employs about 4,300 staff at the moment. That includes staff required for a short time to clear up the GLC's offices. For its own requirements, the LRB employs fewer than 2,000 staff, and many of these are needed for only a short time.

The hon. Gentleman made much of the fact that members of the LRB are not directly elected. That is a funny old criticism coming from him when one bears in mind the jobs-for-the-boys antics that used to go on in the GLC. I think especially of London Transport before it was rightly changed to London Regional Transport.

What the hon. Gentleman said is quite untrue. The LRB is not a local authority and does not exercise local authority functions. As I have explained, its role is defined precisely in the Act and it is limited and technical. Parliament has accepted that it would not be appropriate to have an elected board of management to run the LRB. It is best managed by a small body of members appointed for their expertise and understanding of the job that the body has to do, in much the same way as development corporations are managed. It is always open to Ministers to review salaries, but we have no present plans to do so.

The LRB must be subject to public scrutiny and accountability. It has gone to some lengths to discover the views of boroughs about various aspects of its activities. I assure the hon. Gentleman that a report will be lodged in the Lirbary. The first one will be in September and they will follow annually.

Ministers are answerable to Parliament for those of the LRB's affairs over which they have control. The fact that I am here today, and that Ministers have answered more than 50 questions tabled by the hon. Member alone about the LRB's affairs is proof of that. On those matters over which Ministers do not have direct control, the LRB is quite ready to respond directly to questions and requests for information from hon. Members and the public at large. I do not need to tell the hon. Member that the LRB has responded quite openly to the seemingly endless stream of questions he has put to it from time to time. Furthermore, the Act requires the LRB to produce an annual report which, as I have said, will be lodged in the Library of the House. We have subjected the LRB to the scrutiny of the Parliamentary Commissioner.

The LRB will handle public money, and must be accountable for it. Therefore, the Act requires it to publish an annual statement of accounts, which will be laid before the House. These accounts will be subject to audit in the same way as local authority audits and any report the auditor makes will also be published.

You will agree, Mr. Deputy Speaker, that these are clear, firm and effective measures for ensuring that the LRB is fully accountable for its actions to Parliament, to the London boroughs, and to the public. It is frankly difficult to see what additional safeguards the hon. Member for Newham, North-West could reasonably expect there to be provided.

Once again, Mr. Deputy Speaker, I must disappoint the hon. Gentleman. There is no chaos, no disaster. The LRB is in place, performing its limited and short-lived duties economically, and openly. We shall respond by letter to the hon. Gentleman's detailed questions and we shall presumably continue to receive a stream of parliamentary questions from the hon. Gentleman, to which we shall also respond.

In my concluding remarks on 27 March, I said that in a very short time people would be asking what all the fuss over abolition was about. Given the hon. Gentleman's contribution to today's debate, they must already be doing so.

On a point of order, Mr. Deputy Speaker. This morning, I was forced to come to the House by a circuitous route as I was prevented by the constable on duty from entering Birdcage Walk. I am aware that rehearsals for trooping the colour were notified in the all-party Whip, but the presence of my vehicle would not have disrupted the tail end of the parade. If, on a Friday morning when the House is sitting, it is necessary to have rehearsals, constables should be told of the Sessional Orders. I hope that Mr. Speaker will draw this matter to the attention of the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police.

I am sorry that the hon. Gentleman has been inconvenienced. I shall cause immediate inquiries to be made.

The House of Commons Library computer tells me that this is the 14th occasion on which I have raised the issue of the Cornish tin crisis. with special reference to Geevor mine in my constituency, since that crisis broke on 24 October—almost six months ago. I am grateful for the opportunity to return to the subject, because this may be my final plea to the Minister given certain circumstances which I shall mention later.

I am grateful for the tremendous support that I and my colleagues from Cornwall—the hon. Member for Truro (Mr. Penhaligon) and my hon. Friend the Member for Falmouth and Camborne (Mr. Mudd)—have received in the matter. We have been supported by hon. Members on both sides of the House—an enormous number of who, six months ago, hardly knew of the existence of the tin mining industry in Cornwall. They have expressed genuine anxiety for the industry's future and especially for the future of the miners who, unfortunately, are in a serious positon today. There has also been an enormous upsurge of support in Cornwall for the industry. That has shown once again that the industry is special to Cornwall and is part of its heritage. The industry goes deep. not just into the soil, but into the minds of the people of Cornwall.

I pay tribute to those who have waged an unceasing campaign to save the industry, especially in Cornwall. I begin with the management of Geevor mine. The chairman, Mr. Wallis, and the deputy chairman, Mr. Gilbert, have worked tirelessly with their staff to prepare applications to the Government and have done their utmost to ensure that the mine survives, as I hope and pray that it will. I pay the greatest tribute to the men, who have worked extra time at the bottom of Geevor mine—not a pleasant thing to do. They worked an extra hour a day when the mine was operating. They have not given up hope, and my plea to the Minister is to hold out some hope for the future of the mine and those men.

Those of us who took part in the march through London in February — the Cornish tinners' march, as it will become known in Cornish history—were proud to do so. It was a tremendous occasion that brought home to the city of London, to Fleet street and to the House the plight of the industry.

The facts are well known, and I shall not take up too much time relating them. We all know how the crisis broke upon the industry with the suspension of trading on 24 October on the London Metal Exchange, and of the attempts, in which the Government took the lead, to try to put together a rescue package for the International Tin Council. Unfortunately, that attempt failed. Once it failed, because of the attitude of other countries, that which we feared happened: the price of tin crashed disastrously, and, during Easter, Geevor was forced to take the drastic step of laying off most of its 375 employees. It has now turned some of the layoffs into redundancies, partly because some of the men wanted it that way, and partly because there was pressure to do that. I cannot praise the management of Geevor strongly enough for its responsible attitude and the way in which it has had the welfare of the staff at heart. That is appreciated and acknowledged in west Cornwall.

I need not rehearse the importance of the industry to the economy of west Cornwall, because that has been said many times. The social life of that part of west Cornwall, which is about seven miles from Land's End — the Pendeen and St. Just area—depends on Geevor, and its closure was the biggest blow to that part of Cornwall for many a long year. Dare I suggest that it is the biggest blow this century to that part of Cornwall, with its already high unemployment. The communities of St. Just and Pendeen have taken the blow, as one would expect, with great fortitude, but with a feeling of uncertainty about the future. One of the worst effects of the closure is the uncertainty about the future, which has lasted for six months.

At the outset, I said that this might be my final plea on the matter, and I wish to explain what I meant by that. As is well known, on 9 April, Geevor submitted an application to the Government for assistance to carry out a development programme and to maintain full production and employment at the mine. After meetings with the Government, Geevor was asked to submit a new application, and that will be sent to the Minister this weekend. I am grateful to my hon. Friend the Minister for that. After pressure from me and others, the Government agreed to make available £40,000 to the mine, in addition to the £40,000 that was made available by the county council—I pay tribute to the county council for doing it—to enable the pumps to continue at Geevor while the revised application was drawn up and considered. That money will run out in the first week of June. At a meeting with the county council a week before last my hon. Friend the Minister said that he expected to be in a position to come to a decision before the money ran out for the care and maintenance operation.

Therefore, if the application goes in this weekend, as I understand that it will, there will be no occasion between then and the decision, if the Minister takes it on time as he thinks he will, for me to raise the matter again in the House as it will be in Recess. That is why I am particularly grateful to have this opportunity.

There has been a development today in that Geevor has issued a statement which, for the sake of greater accuracy, I want to quote. It says:

"The Directors of Geevor Tin Mines announce that they have reached a conditional agreement to acquire Marine Mining Cornwall Consortium in exchange for the issue of 2,200,000 new ordinary shares".

Later in the statement, the company says:

"As has already been announced, Geevor requires to invest in completing the present Victory Shaft Sub-incline extension and opening a new auxiliary mine at Botallack so that it is able to compete on even terms in the tin market once the depression brought about by the collapse of the International Tin Council's buffer stock has lifted. The proposed recovery of tin from sea bed dredging"—

that is the marine mining operation—

"will also require some capital expenditure and the total programme now envisaged is some £25 million spread over 5 years. The programme would provide continuing employment for about 200 of the existing Geevor Marine Mining workforce, rising in due course to 500 when market conditions enable dredging to begin followed by the resumption of underground mining."

The statement goes on to announce that the company is proposing to try to raise £2·5 million through a rights issue.

The attempts to come to some arrangement with Marine Mining, a company which has rights to carry out dredging operations to recover tin waste from the bed of St Ives bay, is something which, it is fair to say, the Government were keen that the company should explore. I am glad to see my hon. Friend the Minister nodding his head.

That has involved a tremendous effort on the part of Geevor. Geevor's executives have worked night and day in drawing up the revised package, including the hoped for deal with Marine Mining because part of that deal would be that the mill at Geevor would be used to process that tin from Marine Mining.

Therefore, the utmost has been done to try to meet the suggestions put down by the Government for the revised application. It is no exaggeration to say that the issue of whether Geevor will survive will depend on the decision taken, probably in the next week, by the Minister and, presumably, some of his colleagues and those who advise them.

I do not minimise for one minute the difficulties of the decision that they face. I do not go along with those who simply suggest that all the Government have to do is to write a blank cheque to the Cornish tin industry. That would be nice if it happened. but we know that it will not happen and I believe that the Government are right in setting down the guidelines that they have—that they will consider viable projects to enable the industry to stand on its own feet once the price of tin recovers.

The difficulty is that no one can say when the price of tin will reach a reasonable stable level, or, indeed, what that level will be. Therefore, I appreciate fully the difficulties which the Government, and the Minister in particular, face in considering the application. But my earnest plea to the Minister is that he should consider that application with flexibility, with urgency, because it is important to bring the uncertainty to an end, and with sympathy.

I end by quoting the concluding paragraph of the report by the Select Committee on Trade and Industry which carried out a deep investigation into the crisis. That Committee concluded its report by saying:

"It is of supreme importance that the Government should begin negotiations with the industry and conclude them without delay. We believe that the Cornish tin industry is worth saving."

That is the view of Cornwall and of a lot of people way beyond Cornwall.

I have not checked with the House of Commons computer, but if the hon. Member for St. Ives (Mr. Harris) has raised this issue 14 times my number must be similar.

I want to protest that the only way in which we have been able to raise the issue on the Floor of the House is by using our ingenuity as Back Benchers, through Adjournment debates and such like. Here is a major financial collapse and an industry in massive difficulty, yet not one second of time has been given in the normal manner on the Floor of the House to discuss that. In an odd way, that reflects the disadvantage that Cornwall feels it has—that, as a result of its remoteness, Britain's real establishment is not that interested.

Will the hon. Gentleman accept that every time anybody has asked to come to see me for a meeting on this matter, I have always acceded to that request immediately?

I would not quibble with that. I have said before that the Minister is more than willing to have meetings. I have sometimes wondered how much he studied the issue between meetings, but he is undoubtedly willing to have them.

I want to set the problems of Geevor in the context of Cornwall's economy. Cornwall's economy is flat on its back. For a long time, we had the dubious distinction of having the lowest wage structure of any county in Great Britain. But on top of that western Cornwall has 25 per cent. male unemployment, and that was so before the crisis started. Answers to questions that I have asked show that a full 10 per cent. less of Cornwall's female population is in work than anywhere else in the country. I know that the unemployment figures are much the same but now only a person who has never managed to find a job cannot be unemployed under the present scheme.

For six or eight months of the year the main income of a large number of towns comes from state benefits in one form or another. That is the background of our economy. Therefore, one can understand why the loss of an industry which has put £50 million into the county's economy and provides between 2,000 and 2,500 primary jobs is not greeted enthusiastically by the county.

Hard rock mining represents about one third of Cornwall's mining, and it is obviously in some difficulty. It is worth remembering just how much the Government get out of the other two-thirds of Cornwall's mining—china clay. The ECLP company last year declared a profit of £75 million. I recognise that not all that comes from Cornwall, but between £40 million and £45 million does. The Government's take on that has been substantial. All that Cornwall is really asking the Minister at this moment is to put back into Cornwall what came from Cornwall and to put back into Cornish mining what came from Cornish mining. That is what the county is asking for and what the hon. Member for St. Ives has just argued for so articulately.

When we meet the Minister or exchange letters and read whatever information somebody else has obtained, the question that is constantly raised is viability. I have no great complaint about that, but in this particular case viability is even more difficult than it is in some other circumstances. The mines can make a fair guess about sterling costs per tonne of tin. They never quite know what the ore quality will be 3 yd in front of the drill, but they can make a fair guess. They have been in the business for a long time and they are not foolish. Secondly, they must guess what the sterling exchange rate will be over the next couple of years. If anyone thinks that that is difficult, I must tell them that that is the last easy calculation that can be made because from there on the calculations are impossible.

In January last year, tin was exchanging hands freely at £10,000 a tonne. At this moment, it would be difficult to get £3,500. That is the extent of the fall. There cannot be 5 per cent. of mines in the world that are making a profit with a price of £3,500 a tonne. Therefore, anyone who knows anything about economics can confidently predict that international tin prices must rise. That begs two questions—rise to what and how long will that take? One calculation is how much tin the world uses and at what cost the world can produce it. The marginal price is about £6,500 a tonne. No one has any idea of whether that price will be obtained in six months—I fear not—two years or even longer, but in the long run it must get back to its marginal production costs.

The Minister has said at several meetings that we cannot have a subsidy for tin because the EEC will not allow that. I am as pro-Europe as the Minister—perhaps more — but assertions front Ministers about what the EEC will or will not allow have taken a severe dive in popularity in Cornwall. We were told that a large swathe of Cornwall could not have development area status because the EEC would not allow more than 35 per cent. of the population within that designation. However, we now know that that is not true.

I can persuade my Cornish miners to accept no subsidy from the Government—and that is a generous offer that must make any Conservative Government prick up their ears—if he can persuade the EEC not to allow any subsidised tin into the Community. The companies could then take a deep breath and somehow finance themselves through what would, I believe, be a short-term crisis.

Sometimes the Government are accused of knowing the price of everything but the value of nothing. I am not absolutely sure that that is true, but it is a rather nice line of rhetoric. The Government face a difficult decision—whether to save the Cornish tin industry. I believe that the arguments for doing so are overwhelming. When the Minister makes his decision in the next few days, I ask him to raise his sights a little above the absolute short-term figures on paper, which are probably wrong anyway because there are so many unknown quantities. He must decide whether he wants to give a traditional industry in one of the remoter parts of this country a chance to survive. I have no doubt that he should do so. The Cornish people want him to do so and subsequent generations will thank him for doing so. Of course, the Minister has the power simply to switch off the industry and to end hundreds of years of history. I cannot believe that he wishes to be remembered for that.

Like most hon. Members, I am sad that we have to debate this matter yet again because we had all hoped that, by now, there would have been some positive action. I must emphasise that when considering the cost of providing support is important to balance that with the cost to the Government of not providing it, and it is even more important to consider the cost to the subregion of not providing it.

We have already heard of the 1,300 jobs that are directly involved, but they are only a fraction of the jobs that will be lost if the industry is abandoned. Indeed, almost twice that number could be lost in the secondary effect of the decline of the tin industry. If the Government allow the industry to disappear, that may cost the Exchequer at least £18 million, and possibly more than £20 million a year as a result of the unemployment that will flow. Over a five-year period — the same period for which certain evaluations have been discussed at a commercial level—the Government will incur a cost of about £100 million for doing nothing and for keeping the people in Cornwall doing nothing.

As we have said before, there is another aspect to the issue at a time of oil surplus, decline and manufacturing deficit. We must remember that the tin industry has, year in and year out, made a positive contribution through import substitution—although I accept that that is not the major case. In terms of national accounting, it is small figures, but at least it is positive figures. Far more important must be the localised effect on the community. Local authorities have pointed out that those working in the industry spend £18 million a year of their wages in their communities, helping to generate demand for other people's produce and thereby maintain employment. The mines also contribute £8 million of contract work into the communities—and those are only direct contributions. If we remember the number of jobs outside the industry that will be lost, we can understand the downward spiral into which that part of Cornwall could be thrust. However, bad as that multiplier effect may be, even worse is the loss of opportunity and hope for an area and its people.

Throughout our debates on the future of the industry, hon. Members have emphasised that one cannot judge by ability in an extractive industry on the same basis that one judges by ability in a manufacturing industry. As the hon. Member for Truro (Mr. Penhaligon) said, what is a fair price as against the current market price? With everyone offloading tin, it is being sold at an enormous loss, so the industry's viability in the short term is an utterly improper yeardstick for the Government to use.

Cornwall is ill-fitted to deal with the aftermath of allowing the industry to disappear. Like my part of the country, Wales, and like Scotland and the north, Cornwall has suffered a massive cut in regional aid. It is down to about one third of what it was when the Government took office. Like parts of west Wales, Cornwall must deal with the problem of remoteness. Most of our assisted areas are peripheral in the European context, but west Wales and Cornwall are the most peripheral of all. They must overcome the gravest difficulties of communications. They have the greatest cost disadvantage for which they must somehow compensate would-be investors to persuade them into the area.

We all know that the reality is that if the industry disappears, under the present regional aid regime there is no chance of any new industries moving into the area. There simply would not be the incentives, even if the Government were operating a growth economy, which they are not. Cornwall is left absolutely defenceless against the impact—

I wish to set the record straight on that point. I am sure that the right hon. Gentleman will agree that Penwith, where Geevor is situated, has had its status increased under the redrawing of the regional map. It has gone up to the top tier, and I am sure that the right hon. Gentleman will wish to bear that in mind.

When I set up the special development areas in the 1960s the top tier received 25 per cent. investment grants. Now, the top tier has been abolished and the highest grant is 15 per cent. All that the hon. Gentleman is saying is that something was given but the top was lopped off and it is now worth only a fraction of what it used to be worth. Clearly, that was more of a cosmetic sop than a practical gesture. When the matter was debated I have no doubt that the hon. Gentleman went into the Division Lobby against the Government to protect his locality.

Communities will go into decline. They are already under pressure. Decline in this sense is selective. Decline means the loss of skilled workers and of the young. Those who can get out, will do so in desperation. If we allow the industry in Cornwall to decline further the young will be even more under pressure to leave their communities. They will leave behind gradually aging populations with heavy social costs.

Even for those who stay there will be no hope. For 50-year olds there will certainly be no hope. For 40-year olds there will be little or no hope and even for 30-year olds there will be little hope if the industry is allowed to disappear. Such people do not have the option of getting on their bike, or even on the high-speed train. Many of them are inevitably rooted because of home ownership. They cannot contemplate the costs and upheaval of selling and moving elsewhere. Those who do not own their own homes know that if they try to move away there is little or no hope of finding rented accommodation, particularly in the public sector now that that is so diminished.

We are not dealing only with the problem of a couple of mines, important as they are in terms of their historic significance and their direct link with Cornwall's character. We are talking about the survival and the viability of communities.

Unless the Government act quickly Cornwall will face a decade of despair with no hope for those who are thrown out of their jobs. The Minister will express his support for the area and his concern. We will be taken trip by trip on each of the journeys that he has made to Cornwall. We do not doubt that he likes the communities or that he has been to Cornwall. However, much as we like the Minister as a colleague, bland reassurance is no substitute for a sense of urgency. Quick and positive action is needed above all.

I am delighted that my hon. Friend the Member for St. Ives (Mr. Harris) has managed to draw our attention yet again to an important issue for him, his constituency and for Cornwall. It is also an important national and international matter which has not only grabbed the headlines but captured the imaginations of many people. If this were the 34th rather than the 14th occasion on which he had raised the matter I should have been happy to respond.

Of course, I agree with my hon. Friend and with the right hon. Member for Swansea, West (Mr. Williams) that the issue is not just about tin, but about the regional implications of tin. As the right hon. Gentleman was kind enough to say, I know Cornwall well and have been there. Unlike some hon. Members, I knew about tin mines well before the current crisis. I apologise to the right hon. Member for Swansea, West for reminding the House about that.

The right hon. Gentleman, my hon. Friend the Member for St. Ives and the hon. Member for Truro (Mr. Penhaligon) told us about the high levels of unemployment in Cornwall. They are very high. In Penzance and St. Ives unemployment is 21·2 per cent. In Redruth and Camborne it is 22·2 per cent. Relatively, in Truro the level is a little lower, at 12·2 per cent. I accept the serious regional implications.

Tin mining in Cornwall is not a new phenomenon. The industry has managed to survive through good and bad times for about 2,000 years. The current crisis started in the latter part of October last year when the genuine uncertainty began. Between then and early March negotiations took place in an attempt to come to an agreement with all the parties, including the international sector, in an attempt to resolve the crisis. As my hon. Friend, the Member for St. Ives said, if agreement had been reached the current price of under £4,000 per tonne would have been higher. It is impossible to say by how much. If it had been higher it would have been in the interests of the Cornish tin mines.

The £50 million figure which has been bandied about by several hon. Members was not for the London Metal Exchange, but to restore an orderly market in tin. That would have been in the interests of the Cornish tin mines.

The hon. Member for Truro said that it would be difficult to decide at what price tin would be trading in the years ahead. It will be difficult. It would be difficult to decide at what price any commodity will be trading in five years. Let us take, for example, a hotel room in St. Ives. The price of that room will vary from season to season and from summer to winter. To have a stab at reckoning what that price will be in five years' time would be difficult, just as difficult as would be to guess the precise price of tin.

The right hon. Member for Swansea, West talked about uncertainty. I accept that the uncertainty has continued for a long time and that that in itself is debilitating. The right hon. Gentleman was a distinguished Minister in the Department of Trade and Industry, so he knows that one cannot approve an application which has not been received. I make no complaint about the time at which the applications were received because that depended on the outcome of negotiations involving the International Tin Council. The first application, from Geevor, was received on 9 April. Like my hon. Friend, I pay tribute to Mr. Wallis and Mr. Gilbert and all their employees for the enormous amount of work which went into their applications.

The RTZ application was received on 9 May. We could start to operate only after those applications were received. I am sure that all hon. Members who have been closely involved will accept the importance of my Department's role since the applications were received—and prior to that. My Department could not have done more work than it did both before the applications were received and since.

Everyone understands the urgency of the matter, but can the Minister, before the House goes into Recess, tell us clearly when he expects to make a decision on Geevor and RTZ? We must have a firm timetable.

If the right hon. Gentleman had been a member of the delegation that I saw the other day, he would have heard what I had to say on that matter. I shall come back to it later.

Let me underline the efforts that are being made to process the applications. The second application for Geevor will be received over the holiday weekend and arrangements have been made for my officials to look at that application during that weekend. The test will be viability and I was glad that both my hon. Friend the Member for St. Ives and the hon. Member for Truro agreed that viability should be the test.

In response to the right hon. Member for Plymouth Devonport (Dr. Owen), I remind hon. Members that I told the recent delegation of Cornwall Members and representatives of Cornish town and district councils that I intend to do everything in my power to respond to the Geevor application by 1 or 2 June. I do not want to be forced into a rigid position, because if I cannot respond by then there will be problems about the pumps, care and maintenance and so on.

The chairman of Geevor referred, in a letter to me yesterday, to the generosity of the Cornish town councils and the Government and the £40,000 that was made avalable to ensure that there was time for the second Geevor application to be made and for the Department to process it.

I do not think that the right hon. Member for Devonport would want me to give a precise date on the RTZ application. I should prefer not to do so, because if I am tied to a specific date, proper consideration may not be given to the application. Hon. Members would not appreciate that. They will want us to give proper consideration to the application.

We all love to visit Cornwall; millions of people take their holidays there. However, the transition from traditional manufacturing and mining processes to more modern methods of production will be very painful for Cornwall. The Government have done a lot for the area, but unemployment remains high. It is with that consideration in mind, and having regard to the important test of viability, about which there is a consensus in the House, that we shall be reviewing the applications as quickly as possible.

I wish to discuss the safety of nuclear power stations. There has been considerable debate—much of it well informed—over the past few months about the plans of NIREX to find a series of sites for the dumping of nuclear waste, which I believe to be the consequence of the nuclear industry; the debate is rather short-sighted, because we should be discussing the causes of nuclear waste rather than the places where it can be dumped.

There has also been considerable discussion of the Chernobyl disaster and the atmosphere that it has created in this country. Initially, the disaster was misunderstood. It was dismissed as something to do with a peculiarly Soviet design of power station, but it became clear subsequently that a similar disaster could happen in many other places throughout the world.

Earlier this week we heard about the accident that affected a number of workers at the nuclear power plant at Cap de la Hague which is about the same distance from London as Chernobyl is from Kiev and is probably closer to London than some of our own nuclear power stations.

In recent years there have been regular statements to the House about nuclear discharges from Sellafield and the safety of that plant. A few years ago we witnessed the tragedy of Three Mile Island and the near-disaster there.

All those events have changed the atmosphere of the discussion of nuclear power and the safety of nuclear power stations. For the first time, many people have understood the indivisible link between nuclear power stations and the construction of nuclear missiles. The plutonium that is required for nuclear warheads cannot be manufactured except in nuclear fission reactors. That was the original basis for the construction of a number of nuclear power stations in this country, particularly Calder Hall.

Over the past few weeks there has been much more media coverage of the problems and safety of nuclear power. Those who complacently talk about the safety of nuclear power stations and say that British nuclear power stations are the safest in the world should examine the record and the changing technology of the past 20 years.

Since the Windscale disaster in 1957, there have been continual changes in the safety procedures, but the technology is always behind the ability to pollute and the ability to create nuclear waste. The television film last Saturday about the disaster at Idaho Falls in 1961, an accurate reconstruction of what happened, showed that technology was far behind the ability to pollute the atmosphere.

Workers were sent in to clean up the plant and were not adequately briefed, protected or prepared. A number of them were army personnel, and when the medical community at Idaho Falls wished to trace them, the army denied it information about their whereabouts. Many people in the United States may be suffering long-term genetic cancers, as a result of the Idaho Falls accident, and they may not even know that they are in danger. People in other parts of the world have had the same experience.

The nuclear industry, which is supposed to be entirely safe, has had 151 reported accidents in 14 countries since 1971. Every time an accident happens we are told that the British industry is the safest in the world and nuclear power is the safest form of power generation. Comparisons are made with deaths in the coal mines.

Nuclear power represents the end of a long chain which starts with the exploitation of workers in Namibia, the denial of aboriginal land rights in Australia and the activities of the major mining companies that take uranium from the earth. The chain ends with nuclear power stations surrounded by the tightest security and with enormous implicit dangers to the people of this country and of the northern hemisphere. There are few nuclear power stations in the southern hemisphere, and the fact that there is little interchange of air between the hemispheres means that the dangers from Chernobyl and other such places tend to affect mainly the northern hemisphere. It is interesting to examine the production of electricity by fuel type. Electricity produced by nuclear power in United Kingdom has increased from 28 terawatt hours in 1973 to 49.9 TWh in 1983 and it is planned to rise to 126 TWh by the year 2000. The production from solid fuels, mainly coal, has gone up from 174.6 TWh in 1973 to 194.7 TWh in 1983 and is planned to be 193 TWh by the year 2000. Already, 20 per cent. of our electricity is generated by nuclear power but only 4 per cent. of our total energy needs are met by nuclear power, causing enormous danger to the British people in the process.

France is often compared with Britain as a country obsessed with nuclear power, which is true. According to equivalent data, in 1973 the French nuclear industry generated 14.7 TWh, by 1983 it had increased to 144.3 TWh. by 1984 it had increased to 191.5 TWh, by 1990 it is planned to increase to 274.9 TWh and by the year 2000 it is expected to be 384.6 TWh—enormous increases by any measurement.

The increase in nuclear power generation is largely a western European phenomenon. It goes hand in hand with the attempt to end Britain's coal production and, even more so, to stop the use of coal reserves in France. The Department of Energy should question the EEC on this because the EEC's statistics explain coal production in terms of productive capacity, not in terms of total reserves. Every time a mine is closed, its reserves are denied as being available for use. That is yet another example of the propaganda that nuclear power is the only way forward for Britain and for Western Europe.

A Commission document on new Community energy objectives, which was published on 28 May 1985, listed several objectives, including:

"to maintain, and if possible increase, the market share of solid fuels;

not more than 10 per cent. of electricity to be generated from oil and gas;

approximately 40 per cent. of electricity to be generated from nuclear power;

a tripling in new and renewable energy production by the end of the century."

Forty per cent. of electricity generated by nuclear power will represent for western Europe a massive increase in generating capacity from nuclear power. Only France, Belgium and West Germany have reached that level.

I shall compare production of nuclear power in western Europe with production in other countries. The 1985 "BP Statistical Review of World Energy" shows, giving million tonnes oil equivalent figures, that in 1974 in the United States nuclear energy produced 28·8 MTOE, by 1978 it had increased to 75 MTOE and by 1984 it had increased to 89·4 MTOE. It is true that capacity has doubled since 1975, but it is interesting that the planned growth was much lower than in western Europe, because of the effects of Three Mile Island and campaigning by people in the United States who realised the dangers of nuclear power. We, too, should learn from those lessons.

Looking at the centrally planned economies, we find that China does not produce any nuclear power and that the USSR has increased production from 4·5 MTOE in 1974 to 12·5 MTOE in 1979, to 20·5 MTOE in 1982 and to 25 MTOE in 1984. Unfortunately, the Soviet Union is now planning a massive increase in nuclear power generation. I believe that Britain, France and the Soviet Union are wrong to increase nuclear power generation. They are planning that massive increase because they believe that it provides them with cheap unit cost electricity.

On the face of it, nulcear power is capable of providing cheap electricity. Unit costs can never calculate the backward and forward chain effects of having nuclear power. They cannot meausure the disastrous effects on the lives of people in Namibia, Western Australia or anywhere that uranium is produced, nor can they measure the dangers to people living in Britain or elsewhere in western Europe when a nuclear disaster of the Chernobyl type occurs. Accountants cannot measure death, long-term pollution or the amount of land that will be taken up through the building of nuclear disposal sites as we continually expand the nuclear industry.

My hon. Friend has said that nuclear energy provides only 4 per cent. of our total energy requirements. I understand that we are capable of producing twice as much electricity as we need. Is not the production of nuclear energy a fairly good cover, not only in Britain but in America and Russia, for the production of plutonium for nuclear weapons? That is really what it is about.

My hon. Friend is correct. That is a very valuable point. The complex of power stations around Chernobyl in the Ukraine is dedicated to the production of plutonium. A large part of the production of the British nuclear industry is also involved in plutonium production. That plutonium is stockpiled at Aldermaston, then exported to the United States and then re-exported to Britain in the form of cruise and Trident submarine missiles. There is an inextricable link between the production of civil nuclear power and the warheads that result from it.

The debates in the past few weeks have convinced more people than ever before that the nuclear industry is essentially dangerous. We are dealing with technology that cannot adequately deal with the dangers of nuclear power. We are dealing with a problem that cannot be resolved because there is no known method of providing long-term safe disposal of nuclear waste, as was shown by the debate a few clays ago on the NIREX sites.

If nuclear waste is to be continually dumped, it must be dumped in places from which it can be retrieved. Obviously, there must be security around those sites. Do we want Britain to be riddled with razor wire fences around nuclear sites where dumping will take place year after year? The half-life of some of the intermediate and high-level radioactive waste is much longer than the technology that is designed to protect us from that waste. We must seriously take account of that fact. There are a number of nuclear power stations in Britain — from Hartlepool in the north-east to the Sizewell sites in Essex and Dungeness on the south coast—and an enormous complex of nuclear power stations around the Severn estuary, including the Hinkley and Oldbury power stations. People are now thinking twice about all those areas, because they realise that the Chernobyl disaster occurred only 84 miles from Kiev, which is only slightly more than the distance between London and the proposed Sizewell nuclear reactor site. Many French nuclear power stations are closer to London than British power stations are.

On 15 June 1985, a conference was held in Liverpool on pollution and militarisation of the Irish sea. A day conference, called "Irish Sea—Nuclear Cesspool", listed nuclear installations near the Irish sea—Wylfa nuclear power station, Capenhurst fuel enrichment plant, Springfields fuel manufacturing plant, Heysham nuclear power station, the Windscale reprocessing plant and the Chapel cross nuclear power station.

All those installations discharge liquid radioactive wastes of varying degrees into the Irish sea, making it the most radioactive sea in the world. The figures in the report are taken from the 1984 Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food report, which gives an analysis of samples taken in 1982. It considers the emissions from those power stations and the half-life of the waste borne into the Irish sea, which varies from eight days to years and hundreds of years.

The conference did not receive much publicity. Those who question the basis of the nuclear industry always find it hard to get any publicity. However, I hope that that will now change. The conference sought to examine the fallout of waste into the Irish sea and the conclusions that could be drawn from it. In a preliminary statement, Mrs. Susan Schafer said:

"Evidence of child leukæmia in Cumbria, and Northern Ireland is dismissed as 'unproven', despite the results of the accident of 1957 at Windscale which are still being assessed. No other explanation of the exceptionally high proportion of Down's Syndrome babies born to mothers who had lived in Dundalk and Maryport at the time of the fire has been offered. As well as leukæmia and Down's Syndrome, there is the high incidence of Hodgkin's disease in the Isle of Man.

It emerges from the work of Dr. Bertell and others that what is wanted is a comprehensive survey of all the actual and possible health hazards that arise from three generations of abnormally high radiation exposure on the Irish Sea coast."

In relation to the Clean Seas Campaign, a Dublin-based organisation, a Whitehaven fisherman said:

"They sort the fish into three boxes at Whitehaven. The ones with tumours, scabs and diseases are taken away by the nuclear people. The dodgy ones are thrown back and we sell the others."

Although emissions from Sellafield have been reduced and although the nuclear industry recognises that pollution of the Irish sea poses a serious problem, that pollution has already occurred and the long-term damage has already been done. There will still be discharges into the Irish sea and so dangers will still arise.

I shall quote from a glossy piece of information put out by the information services branch of the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority entitled, "Nuclear—Safe Power". It says:

"In Britain before a nuclear power station can be licensed the owners must show that it is safe. How safe is safe? One design target is that the chances of a sequence … occurring and releasing uncontrolled radiation to the environment must be less than one in a million for each year the reactor is in operation. Put another way, if all Britain's electricity came from nuclear power stations such an accident would be expected less often than once every 10,000 years. To achieve these standards, all conceivable occurrances, including earthquakes and crashing aircraft, are considered in the design of a reactor. The designer also assumes that equipment will fail and that operators will make mistakes. Protective systems are therefore duplicated or triplicated. … Reactors normally run smoothly for months at a time. A Magnox reactor at Sizewell ran for 653 days before it was shut down for the regular biennial check. Other stations have similarly impressive records."

I am sure that those who design and operate nuclear power stations have safety very much in mind. But do we have the technology to protect us from the sort of accident that happened at Chernobyl? Estimates have been put together based on the Department of the Environment bulletin, which on 9 May 1986 listed dose averages across the country. It is not clear how they were compiled, except for the comment that the data refer to the period 2 to 8 May.

Aggregation of the data presented gives a total average dose of 0·0723 mSv, assuming the radiation hazard due to radioactive milk is calculated as three sevenths of the peak radiation hazard during the seven days for which the data are presented.

Risk estimates for cancer and other hazards due to various authors can therefore be calculated. Using the figures of the International Commission on Radiological Protection, it is likely that there will be more than 100 fatal cancers as a result of the fallout. There will be many more non-fatal cancers, and total effects may go well over the 200 mark. Using the figures put together by Dr. Gofman in a book that he prepared some years ago, the total is much higher and the danger is much greater.

The Government must come clean about what the danger from the Chernobyl disaster is. I hope that they will monitor the situation carefully and publish all the figures. Using the Department of the Environment's data for radiation risks to the United Kingdom population from the Chernobyl disaster for 2 to 8 May, it can be stated that between 100 and 1,700 people will suffer from long-term cancers. Those figures are not designed to alarm people. They are given because I believe that it is important to understand just how dangerous one accident at one power station a long way away was to the people of this country.

As a result of the Chernobyl disaster, there was a high degree of fallout. The weekly science magazine Nature is well respected. The edition that came out yesterday reported on the actions that had been taken by various Western European Governments following the Chernobyl incident. The Austrian Government's decision has been to dismantle the only nuclear power plant that it has. The plant has never been in operation, but it has been decided to abandon it altogether. The Netherlands has decided not to expand its nuclear industry, and Sweden may bring forward its 2010 deadline for the closure of its nuclear power stations. It is possible that other actions may include the Long Island Lighting Co. in the United States not being given a licence to operate a new nuclear plant, because of the lack of any convincing plan to evacuate local inhabitants in the event of a disaster.

The safety of nuclear power stations is vital. The doses that people in the Soviet Union received from the disaster at Chernobyl were considerably higher than those that people received here. The doses received in Poland and Sweden were also considerably higher than those received here. However, it is not good enough simply to say that the Soviet Union had a different type of nuclear power station and that an accident could not happen here. Sizewell is 84 miles from London, which is the same distance as separates Kiev from Chernobyl.

We need to know what inquiry the Government will mount into the safety of the nuclear industry as a whole and the long-term health damage to our people as a result of a continuing nuclear power programme, and about the link that exists with the nuclear weapons industry. Without that information or inquiry, there will be a continuing campaign by many people in this country who are frightened and worried about the implications of nuclear power. Many people in the United States are turning their backs on it. Indeed, there is opposition to nuclear power development in the Soviet Union. Moreover, there is opposition to it throughout Western Europe.

It is time that the Government recognised that nuclear power is inherently dangerous. They should also recognise that we must develop our basic fuel reserves of coal, oil and gas, as well as alternative energy sources. But the Department of Energy chooses to spend much more on research into developing nuclear power than on developing alternative energy sources. Indeed, its booklet on alternative energy sources is about half an inch thick and seems to represent the sum total of the Department's interest in the subject.

A document produced by the Nuclear Electricity Information Group asks whether there could be an accident like Chernobyl in Britain. It says:

"Not an accident like Chernobyl, because we do not have that type of nuclear reactor. A British team studied the Chernobyl design in 1976 when our own nuclear programme was being reappraised … But if you mean, could there be a major accident in a British nuclear power station, the answer must be `yes' although the chance of an accident on the scale of Chernobyl is so small it might happen once in a million years. Nuclear engineers continually assess and re-assess the chances of accidents, taking the most remote events and assuming they happen together."

I just do not believe that the nuclear industry is anything like as safe as those who run it and who stand to make a great deal of money out of the development of nuclear power stations seem to believe. It has a fundamentally corrupting influence on us. I read the first English edition of Pravda on the Chernobyl nuclear power station. It chronicles the events and says that five large farms and 30,000 people had been evacuated from the area immediately around the Chernobyl plant, and describes the events that took place. That could well happen in the United Kingdom unless we do something now about nuclear power stations.

In the New Scientist of 15 May 1986 an article entitled:

"The unanswered questions of Chernobyl"

states:

"It is still not clear exactly what went wrong at reactor number four of the Chernobyl nuclear power station in the Ukraine late last month. The information that the three experts from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) have brought back from their trip to the Soviet Union last week has posed as many questions as it has answered.

The accident happened at 0123 hours … on Saturday 26 April. The reactor was in the process of being shut down for routine maintenance at the time, and was running at around 7 per cent. of its maximum output of 1000 megawatts.

The core of the reactor exploded without warning, ripping open the top of the reactor vault. Morris Rosen, director of the IAEA's Division of Nuclear Safety and one of the three to visit the stricken reactor, said this week: 'The initiation was rapid. There were no precursors to the explosion recorded in the data that have been recovered from the control room.'"

It has since become clear that the reactor was running at less than 7 per cent. of maximum output when the disaster occurred. Those who continually criticise Soviet technology and say that such an accident could not happen here, should remember that the Soviet Union is technically advanced. Moreover, court action is at present being considered against the manufacturers of the sensors that should have shown the approach of the disaster. Those sensors were manufactured not in the Soviet Union but in France, which is supposed to be advanced in technological matters.

The nuclear power industry is fundamentally dangerous to our people. The problem of waste disposal can never go away. The debate on NIREX earlier this week is the start of debates that we shall have year in, year out, so long as we continue this lunatic, headlong rush towards developing a nuclear economy.

I am grateful to the hon. Member for Islington, North (Mr. Corbyn) for raising this important issue, in which he takes great interest. It has, understandably, raised deep anxiety in the United Kingdom and elsewhere in the wake of the tragic accident at Chernobyl. That has led to calls for closer international co-operation in the IAEA framework, including the establishment of an international mechanism for early warning and mutual assistance in the event of any future accidents. We fully support those objectives, and the United Kingdom is playing its full part in international discussions and actions.

The United Kingdom already has a formal agreement with France for the exchange of information in the event of an accident at a nuclear installation. The relevant parts of our civil nuclear emergency plans would be implemented in the event of any risk of significant radioactivity reaching this country from France or elsewhere.

At the request of the Government of the Federal Republic of Germany, an emergency meeting of the board of governors of the IAEA was held in Vienna on Wednesday to discuss the Chernobyl accident, its consequences, and the measures initiated as a result, as well as further measures which the agency may take for improving international co-operation on the safety of nuclear installations. There was a very full attendance. Throughout the discussion it was clear that there was universal concern at the Chernobyl disaster and its implications for the safe development of nuclear power. all sides of the House share that concern, and I repeat our expressions of sympathy for those who suffered as a result of the accident, especially those who are gravely ill and the families of those who have died.

The IAEA has provided an important channel of information about the course of events at Chernobyl. Dr. Blix, the agency's director-general, and some of his senior colleagues flew to Moscow at the beginning of the month to obtain a report. The IAEA has now agreed to hold a post-accident review meeting with experts from different countries. The soviet authorities have agreed to provide a full account.

There were many constructive, practical suggestions on possible additional measures to improve co-operation on nuclear safety. These measures need to be carried forward urgently. With the full support of the United Kingdom, an outline programme was drawn up. It has two main elements. The first is the establishment of expert groups to draft two binding international conventions, one on reporting and exchange of information on nuclear accidents with possible transboundary effects. There was general agreement on the need for this convention, to which the United Kingdom attaches the highest priority, and which, the House will remember, was called for by the Tokyo summit. The second convention is to be on co-ordinated emergency response and assistance in the event of nuclear accidents which could have transboundary effects.

All the board members confirmed that, even before new conventions on the exchange of information and mutual assistance came into force, their Governments would inform potentially affected countries, the IAEA and other appropriate international organisations, such as the World Health Organisation, immediately in the event of a significant release of radioactivity within their territory.

The second element of the programme will be a conference of governmental representatives to review the full range of nuclear safety issues, in the light of the Chernobyl disaster. An expert group was established to consider, over the long-term, additional measures to improve co-operation on nuclear safety, including nuclear safety standard.

The agency's director-general has been asked to prepare detailed proposals to implement this outline programme. His proposals will be further discussed at the next regular meeting of the board of governors which begins on 10 June.

Detailed information on the causes of the accident and subsequent events is still awaited, although from a summary description by the IAEA experts who visited Chernobyl and from statements made by the Russians themselves, the accident appears to have been caused by a sudden surge in power which led to an explosion in the core, and was not the consequence of an outside event.

The nuclear industry in this country will obviously wish to learn everything it can from this accident. The full presentation on the causes of the accident which the Soviet Union expects to give within three months will naturally be of the greatest public interest throughout the world. It is important to understand exactly what caused this horrifying event. As has already been noted, the Chernobyl reactor is of a different design to any operating in this country, and would not have been licensed here.

We have in this country a sound system of nuclear safety licensing in which the onus is on the electricity utilities to put safety first. That is their prime responsibility as owners of the plant. The licensing authority, the nuclear installations inspectorate, is a wholly independent watchdog which makes sure that those responsibilities are met. We can be proud of the safety institutions we have in this country. They have stood the test of time and they operate well.

In the view of our nuclear experts, the Chernobyl reactor design suffers some inherent flaws. I understand that the graphite moderator runs very hot at over 700 deg C—far higher than is the case in our own reactors. At such temperatures there is a risk of a graphite fire if air gains access. All reactor systems are designed in one way or another to deal with changes in the conditions of coolant. In the Chernobyl reactor, if steam pockets form in the coolant, fuel element activity levels rapidly increase, making control more difficult.

There are particular safety considerations for a pressure tube reactor. More than a decade ago consideration was given to building a pressure tube reactor called the steam generating heavy water reactor in the United Kingdom. It would have been moderated, not by graphite, but by heavy water. British technical experts decided that it could meet the British safety standards only at such great expense that it was impossible to make an economic reactor of this type which also met our safety rules. The project was abandoned.

A major issue that has been raised is containment. In the accident at Three-Mile Island, there was a partial core meltdown, but there was no significant harm to the public because virtually all the radioactivity was retained inside the containment building when the primary pressure containment was breached. The Chernobyl reactor accident, on the other hand, has led to a large release of radioactivity. People, therefore, naturally ask what containment there is on British Magnox and advanced gas-cooled reactors. I am advised by the CEGB that all nuclear fuel in British civil reactors is enclosed in sealed cans, referred to as fuel cladding, which forms the first barrier against the escape of radioactivity in any reactor. The fuel, together with the other components of the reactor core and the primary coolant, whether it be water or gas, are enclosed within a primary pressure circuit, which "contains" the pressure of the system. In practice, however, this barrier cannot be complete since there must be pipes penetrating this barrier, for example to get the coolant and control rods in and out.

The golden rule of safety is that we must assume the worst — that anything which can go wrong will go wrong — and that there could be a complete failure of the pipes. In that event there is a need to ensure that no harm comes to employees or to the public. In the case of water-cooled reactors, steam would escape from any breach of the primary pressure circuit. That steam would be radioactive, because waterborne corrosion products are irradiated in a reactor core. It must therefore be contained so that the radioactivity is not released into the environment. For this reason, in this country a water-cooled reactor would be required to have a third barrier in the form of a containment building, or secondary containment.

Gas-cooled reactors behave differently when their pressure circuits are breached. Carbon dioxide cooling gas is relatively free of radioactivity, because radioactive corrosion products are not readily transported by the gas and great care is taken to ensure that no damaged fuel remains in the reactor. The environment of the fuel elements would change only relatively slowly and there are numerous devices to ensure that the coolant would be kept circulating past the fuel. In those circumstances, I am advised that leakage of radioactivity from the fuel, if any, into the coolant would be small. There would not, therefore, be the same danger in releasing carbon dioxide gas into the atmosphere as from steam from a water-cooled reactor.

Since radioactive pollution is no respecter of national borders, are the Government satisfied that the radioactive leak at Chernobyl has been completely contained?

I do not think that our information is sufficiently complete for me to be able to say that with any confidence.

There have also been allegations that the older Magnox stations are operating beyond their original 20-year design life. The operation of all nuclear power stations in this country has to be licensed by the nuclear installations inspectorate. That is a fully independent expert body, which is part of the Health and Safety Executive. Nuclear reactors are shut down for routine maintenance examination every two years and they cannot start up again without consent from the NII. Therefore, they are subjected to a continuous process of review and reassessment as part of the very high standards of safety applied to nuclear plants in this country. The NII would certainly not tolerate a situation in which nuclear stations were operating beyond their design parameters. The so-called 20-year life of Magnox stations was, in fact, merely the period over which the original cost of building the stations was amortised. The operators were, however, requested some time ago by the NII to carry out major in-depth reviews of the longer-term safety of the Magnox reactors. So far, neither this work, which is still going on, nor the regular supervision of the stations by the NII, has revealed any reason to suggest that Magnox stations cannot continue to operate safely. The NII will continue to monitor the progress of the reviews, and has announced that it will publish its conclusions at the end of each review.

If the reviews indicate, when they are published, that Magnox stations are unlikely to be able to operate safely beyond the recommended initial construction period, will the Government be prepared to close down those stations?

The Government will certainly follow any NII recommendations that are made as a result of the review.

In this country, nuclear facilities and materials in transit are subject to uniformly high standards of physical protection.

At the design and construction stage, nuclear plant operators are required to consider all security risks attached to their proposed operations and to take advice from the security authorities. The average amount of radiation received by the United Kingdom population from discharges of nuclear waste has been estimated by the NRPB to be one tenth of 1 per cent. of the radiation we receive from all sources.

Stress was laid by the hon. Gentleman on the future potential of renewable sources of energy. The Department is supporting a major research and development programme to develop and promote renewable energy technologies which have the potential to make an economic contribution to this country's energy supplies. In the 12 years since the inception of the programme, over £90 million has been invested by the Government in research, development and demonstration activities in renewable energy field—a very substantial increase on the sum invested by our predecessors. The Department is advised on the content, application and amount of the research programme by the independent Advisory Committee on Research and Development under the chairmanship of Sir Sam Edwards. Current advice is that the application and amount of the funding is appropriate.

I believe that our response to Chernobyl must be one of continuing care and vigilance. It wold be folly to turn our backs on a source of energy whicy has provided a valuable element of diversity and security to the country's energy supplies and is emerging as the prime source to meet the needs of the world in the 21st century. It is already an important component of the energy supplies of western Europe; 65 per cent. in France, 55 per cent. in Belgium and 25 per cent. in Germany.

The growth in energy demand in the next century will depend on a number of factors: among other things, economic growth, world population and energy prices. We in the developed world currently consume over three quarters of the world's annual energy, although we have only a quarter of the population. By contrast, three quarters of the world's population in the less developed world consume less than a quarter of its energy. In the 21st century world energy requirements will almost certainly increase dramatically. At the beginning of this century, the world's population was about 1 billion. It is currently about 4·7 billion and it is growing at close to 1·7 per cent. a year. By 2025, the world's population will exceed 8 billion. The population of the less developed world, which uses a fraction of our energy per capita, is likely to have doubled. World economic growth at similar or faster rates would put even greater pressure on energy supplies. How are we to meet an increasing need for energy from an increasing population? The situation is already urgent—we have seen the devastating effects of deforestation in several areas of the world. Increasing demand will intensify the pressure on available supplies. Yet demand must be met cheaply if the less-developed world is to have any chance of establishing its industrial base and if the poverty and degradation which is daily before us is to be alleviated. Increased economic activity — leading to better health, education and so on—cannot be achieved without cheap energy.

Each country will judge how best to satisfy its energy needs in the light of its own particular circumstances. For some, a major step forward in living standards would be obtained through the introduction of simple methods, such as stoves burning dung with improved efficiency.

At present, nuclear power is used for the generation of base load electricity. It cannot supply all the energy, needs met by oil and gas. It can, however, reduce the pressure on hydrocarbon reserves and help the transition to using fossil fuels more for purposes for which there is no convenient alternative, such as petrochemical production and transport.

To establish new industrial bases throughout the world, large reliable supplies of electricity would be required. It would not be responsible for the developed nations to turn their back on nuclear power and pre-empt all the world's diminishing resources of fossil fuels.

Looking to the future, this Government decided that there should be the fullest possible inquiry at Sizewell. that inquiry took more than two years to complete. The inquiry report, written by the distinguished inspector, has so far taken 16 months to write and has still not been completed. We can complain about the frustrations that such democratic processes bring, but they have been accompanied in this country by a remarkable record of safety and care which should be a cause of confidence in the future use of nuclear energy, to our environmental and economic advantage. We shall consider that report when we receive it.

With skilled and dynamic leadership, Britain's nuclear industry is providing over 100,000 jobs, making a considerable contribution to our balance of trade, reducing the nation's energy costs and using and developing the scientific and engineering skills of the British people. We benefit from the use of radioactive materials in medicine, university research and industry, as well as from the generation of electricity. For those of us with a deep desire to improve Britain's economic performance and eradicate unemployment, using forms of energy that safely provide our industries with low-cost electricity must be the right policy.

Despite domestic tensions and the international rhetoric of division, famine over the past three years has broken down barriers between East and West in an attempt to unite the generosity of the developed world to relieve the poverty of the mass of the people of Africa. Witness the Polish helicopter crews working alongside the Hercules team from RAF Lyneham in the Ethiopian airlift. Witness the response to the outstanding work undertaken by Bob Geldof and his team as the marathon runner Khuliya globe-trots from capital to capital.

It is fitting that the torch that Bob Geldof carries was lit from the embers of a dying fire in a refugee camp outside Omdurman — not a camp for families from another country who gather under the conditions of assistance provided by the United Nations but a camp of Sudanese migrants whose plight has been no less severe in their trek from the arid heartlands of their country—geographically a country compatible in size to Western Europe. Yet any assessment of the famine which, at its most acute, affected at least 30 million people, claiming several million lives, renews the deep anxieties among those of us who have a special interest in this subject. Unless the Western world can establish with the emergent nations of Africa a new recognition of participation towards common goals for development, I predict that the famine of 1984–85 will pale into insignificance compared to the much greater disasters the world will witness before the turn of the century.

In the 15 years since 1970, Africa has moved from a position of self-sufficiency in food to the current massive deficit that it now faces. During the same period food imports rose sevenfold from 1·9 billion dollars to 12·4 billon dollars. The root cause of such appalling deterioration are the policies of many African Governments. Unrealistic pricing policies discriminate against farmers while the urban population, exercising direct influence over the political elite, seek prestige projects, and a means of satisfying the consumer market, usually backed up by unrealistic exchange rate policies. Government investment that is much required in the areas of infrastructure, irrigation, training and regional agricultural projects finds its home in what Robert McNamara has called "an over-protected and inefficient industrial sector".

Too often the Western-oriented development of Africa's cities has taken precedence over the 80 per cent. of Africa's population, the rural poor, whose need for good prices for the food they produce and for skilled assistance in developing their local skills and pastoral systems have been low on the list of priorities. Equally, western producers have too often sought outlets for highly sophisticated agricultural equipment from stock rather than appropriate technology for the recipients. As Robert McNamara said in the Sir John Crawford memorial lecture:

"The destruction of Africa's ability to feed itself need not have occurred. The fact is that agriculture, which accounted for a third of the continent's gross national product (GNP) in 1982, has been discriminated against for decades."

The key importance of agriculture in sub-Saharan Africa must not be underestimated. It is a labour-intensive sector in which most of these countries can enjoy a comparative advantage, particularly relative to industry. A vigorous growth in agricultural production and exports is an absolutely essential condition for the creation of significant employment and earning opportunities for the rising rural core.

The average African who depends critically on agriculture for a living is poorer today than he was in 1970. If the problems of agriculture are not addressed more effectively, he will be poorer in 1990 than he was at the time his country became independent. What is even more ominous is that the disastrous famines that are currently restricted to years of drought and to only a few countries will become everyday occurrences affecting a majority of the sub-Saharan nations.

Such problems are intensified by a population problem that needs close attention by all those anxious about the future of sub-Saharan Africa. Of Africa's population of 453 million, 363 million are from sub-Saharan countries. In those countries, there is the highest population growth rate in the world, of 3·2 per cent. If that continues in sub-Saharan Africa, that 363 million will double in 22 years, quadruple in 44 years and will rise eightfold in 66 years. Through an educational process, we need to break down barriers and assist Governments to recognise the importance of breaking down such barriers in countries where populations have a culture and a tradition which mitigates against smaller families. For many family heads, daughters are currency. High premiums are placed on fertility. Even the best possible predicted average rate of growth of 2·5 per cent. will come well below the number of mouths that will need to be fed. That will inevitably mean high levels of malnutrition in future, and the incidence of famine will be inevitably increased. Of course, there is the additional burden on social services, on primary health care and on education. It is interesting to note that in China there is a 70 per cent. use of contraception and in India there is a 30 per cent. awareness of its importance and use and less than 5 per cent. in sub-Saharan Africa.

The 1984–85 Kilimanjaro plan for action which included 36 African countries went a long way towards recognising the importance of making family planning services available to all couples and individuals and backed the concept of non-governmental organisations assisting in the distribution of contraceptive supplies. The consequences of high population growth are only too clear. Greater strains are placed on the socio-economic structure, cities are ringed with slums and, unfortunately, the effects of high population growth entrench illiteracy, malnourishment and ill-health, encouraging environmental mismanagement and land exploitation. It is on land exploitation that anyone assessing the problems of Africa must concentrate. There has been far too much over-grazing, destruction of woodlands and land clearance. Vast amounts of international relief aid have rightly been spent in attempts to alleviate the immediate short-term needs of rural populations by providing emergency assistance. The importance of such aid is recognised by all hon. Members but if the regions affected are to retain even a small degree of self-sufficiency, a much more fundamental long-term approach to the conservation and rehabilitation of the rural environment is required. If self-sufficiency is not a target, the amount of relief aid required will increase as the size of artificially supported populations increases in and around urban areas.

A major difficulty facing sub-Saharan Africa apart from south-east Asia, China or India is that the whole region comprises one of the most sensitive and delicately balanced ecological systems in the world, whose natural resilience to the extremely arid climate has been seriously impaired by man. A proper understanding of the region's natural environment and the inter-dependency of its separate components must be a prerequisite to a coherent strategy for the sustainable management of its resources.

An overriding issue is the way in which the natural resources of the region are managed. The unrealiable and erratic rainfall in the region is one of the main constraints on plant production. Others are the inherent poor fertility of the soil, low livestock productivity, the high incidence of attack by pests and diseases and the susceptibility of stressed plants and animals to such attacks. Traditional rural settlements and lifestyles suffer constraints for carrying capacity imposed by the harsh realities of the immediate environment and the poor reliability of water resources. Until recently, they appeared to be self-sustaining and in some ways able to cope with drought. In the recent past, planning strategies appear to have been based on the assumption of maximum availability of natural resources. By contrast, the more traditional systems seem able to have retained their viability when resources were at a minimum and could respond when more favourable conditions arose. Traditional systems are not now working as effectively as in the past. New systems, whether Government or private, are not effective replacements. Traditional cropping systems that revolve around the long-term cycle of cultivation, fallow and natural regrowth, are collapsing. Pressures on growing by decreasingly nomadic populations have extended the cultivation period by several years and shortened the fallow season. The soil then becomes too impoverished to recover. Over-grazing during fallow periods prevents tree seedlings from becoming established. The pressures of growing numbers on marginal land leads to deforestation. Africa is losing 2·7 million hectares of forest each year, a land area equivalent to the size of Czechoslovakia.

The clear picture that emerges is one in which it is, first and foremost, the responsibility of the 19 countries that constitute sub-Saharan Africa to implement national policies to tackle environmental rehabilitation, population control and make agricultural policies priorities for development. They need the assistance and expertise of the West, of the international lending agencies, of the World Bank and of donor Governments throughout western Europe. They also need the growing expertise in such bodies as the European development fund. When he was writing about Africa, Geldof recognised this and said:

"In the 20th century, famine can no longer be regarded as a natural phenomenon; it is the mismanagement of drought and it is no coincidence that the five African governments, which have suffered most from famine over the past twelve months — Ethiopia, Sudan, Chad, Angola and Mozambique—also happen to be the five African countries engaged in the most bitter civil wars.

Ethiopia, the country whose starving millions aroused the conscience of the world, spent an estimated 47% of its total annual income in 1984 on arms. … Sudan is the biggest country on the continent and it is sadly appropriate that its mess is a microcosm of the mess of all Africa … If ever there was proof that famine is an act of man rather than An Act of God it is there in the Sudan … On the good side, the British left Sudan with one of the best railway systems in Africa. Yet in the 30 years since independence—more than half of them under Nimeiry—there was little maintenance and no real investment in the railway … Nimeiry's neglect of the railway system, which subsequently became one of the most corrupt and inefficient bodies in Africa, was to prove a crucial element in the failure of the famine relief effort".

Ethiopia has the highest population in the low income countries of sub-Saharan Africa. In 1980 it stood at 37.7 million. By 2025 it is estimated that it will reach 105.8 million. One policy related to population patterns arid movements that has come in for special consideration is the resettlement programme. One of the most important papers written about this subject, produced by Mr. Constable for the FAO in Rome, in December 1984 was the "Ethiopian Highlands Reclamation Study". Extrapolating the statistics for soil erosion against current population patterns, Constable concluded that 10 million more people will, by the year 2010, be unable to cultivate the land that they now farm. His important findings confirm the essential soundness of the agronomical reasons for such a programme. The emphasis on directing the programme in areas of high soil erosion and over-population—Wallo, 60 per cent., Tigré 16 per cent. and Shoa 24 per cent., with no movement from Eritrea—confirm the view that the movement of the resettlers has not been motivated primarily for political reasons, aimed at denuding the rebel areas of Eritrea in particular.

An assessment of the movement from the provinces of Wallo, Tigré and Shoa reflect the fact that these are areas that will never sustain the current, Jet alone the anticipated, levels of population predicted for them. Self-sufficiency of these areas is not a viable proposition. The resettlement programme is not new. It was initiated in 1973 on the basis of the Brown report. Sites were identified and early resettlement from overpopulated and ecologically eroded sites to more fertile areas in the south-west of Ethiopia took place.

The first phase of the project came in 1974 under Emperor Haile Selassie, and a slow and relatively insignificant number of people moved in 1979. A third and major phase, involving 600,000 people began in December 1984. An accelerated programme of resettlement took place under the glare of approbation from both western donors and the aid community. During the third and by far the largest phase of relief, the relief rehabilitation committee aimed to resettle 1·2 million people.

Medicins Sans Frontieres was expelled from Ethiopia after claiming that as many as 100,000 deaths resulted from the resettlement. The European Parliament has called for investigations into the conditions under which the resettlement programme was implemented. The European Commission has pledged that the European development fund will not be used to support resettlement.

Concern, which is a major voluntary organisation in Ethiopia, has been working hard on the programme. It has received first-hand experience of the appalling conditions in the transit camps. Divided families and coercion has been documented, but international assistance has been increasingly forthcoming — for example, an Austrian non-governmental organisation is operating in Illubabor near Gambella, the Dutch, Italian and Canadian Governments have all pledged financial support. Strong advocacy was made by Concern of the need to influence the Government from within rather than outside the project. Meanwhile, REST remains implacably opposed to the programme, citing examples of refugees in camps. Evidence is available that up to 1,200 of the 600,000 may have left the camps for refugee sites in the Sudan.

Nevertheless, the conditions of the journey south for those resettled last year and before have been inhumane. When I went last year to visit Ethiopia, it was clear that in overcrowded and unpressurised cargo holds in Soviet planes, the new settlers were flown to Addis to be decanted into buses to continue the journey westwards. RAF Hercules crews armed with brooms, swept water polluted with cholera, known as 001, away from their supplies on the airstrip as the hosed effluent from the holds ran down the camber of the airstrip towards them. Lack of food and medical care awaited many travellers on arrival, and the prohibition of international agency doctors and nurses from travelling with the settlers was wrong.

However, the programme, due to a considerable amount of international opposition, was temporarily brought to a halt on 31 December 1985. It was due to a considerable amount of representation, made by Kurt Hansen the United Nations co-ordinator for relief in December to the Government, that a moratorium was placed on any further movement as from 1 January.

Both my hon. Friend the Member for Broxtowe (Mr. Lester), whom I am glad to see in the Chamber, and I believed that it was important to report to the House our assessment of the situation. To that end, we have recently visited resettlement areas and we had discussions in Addis Abbaba with a wide cross-section of experts and representatives from the voluntary sector. Our initial findings have been reported to the all-party parliamentary group on overseas development.

The theory of resettlement is one that we would support. Its implementation in the phase to 31 December deserves no support. That phase was flawed by a wide range of problems, including violation of human rights, and rightly brought no backing from western donors. However, subject to substantial reform, the Ethiopian Government accepting new conditions, and effective international monitoring, the Western aid donors should assist the new programme through non-governmental organisations.

Many people are in desperate need of help at both ends of the programme. However, the criteria necessary for any such involvement by the west should include recognition of the suitability of land for human and animal use, sufficient rainfall to support development, adequate soil and land conditions, accessibility and sufficient land for effective land use planning. More important for the population concerned, there should be demonstrable and verifiable limits for heads of families favouring resettlement and from the local communities to allow families to travel with their dependants, thus avoiding split families.

Such a resettlement programme should be accompanied by the rehabilitation of lands deserted, including reforestation work, land reclamation, control of cattle sites, planting of suitable crops and extension and development services to revitalise once over-populated and eroded habitats. This is particularly relevant in the case of Ethiopia, where substantial overpopulation exists in the areas where the resettlement is targeted.

Additionally, we propose that the International Red Cross be permitted to undertake a full tracing exercise to reunite separated families, as well as a programme for orphans, and that charities should be allowed to assist in the resettlement programme, encouraged to establish primary health care units, educational services and, above all, assistance to those in transit.

Therefore, we support the view taken by The Economist in its 8 February edition this year—

"The aid agencies working in Ethiopia, swallowing their distaste, should try to get into the 77 resettlement sites in order to make life a bit easier for the people there. This humanitarian aid should continue, where it prevents things getting even worse for the victims of Colonel Mengistu's experiments. But the money the Colonel gets for his grander plans, he should be told, will stop unless he stops his forced removals."

The same cannot be said for villagisation. That is an experiment in the blatant collectivisation of farmers and families in traditional areas to square-built village camps. This collectivisation along Soviet lines frightens the Ehiopian people and destabilises the historic patterns of agricultural patterns and rural life. It is undertaken under strict party control in every aspect and it has gone nationwide, in the Hararge experiment. The programme deserves no support. Rather it deserves the outright condemnation of the western world.

Ecological degradation is reinforcing the depletion of woods and land cleared of vegetation. Soil erosion accelerates. Rain runs off, rather than seeps into, the ground. Less water is retained, less evaporates, fewer clouds are recharged and rainfall diminishes. We need action to promote conservation and to promote new farming practices and policies, better terrace designing and more research into drought-tolerant trees.

On the financial side, we must look for a lead role from the World Bank, to ensure that the donor agencies are co-ordinated, to ensure swifter implementation of project cycles, policy dialogue rather than policy monologue, to fight against famine fatigue and to work towards famine relief alongside long-term development programmes.

Politics is the ordering of priorities. It is therefore remarkable that the outstanding ability of Band Aid worldwide to raise £60 million is equivalent to the Europen Community's five-month cost of destroying surplus fish, fruit and vegetables, its four-week cost of storing surplus Community production in public intervention and less than one week's expenditure on export refunds. That is a common agricultural policy which, in its own right, does substantial damage to the development of indigenous Third world agriculture.

It is a great pleasure to be able to support my hon. Friend the Member for Lewisham, East (Mr. Moynihan). He and I have shared experiences in Africa which it is important for us now to share with our colleagues, although we would prefer that a few more were present to hear us talking about them.

In the David Davies memorial debate on international affairs, Maurice Strong said:

"No analysis of Africa's crisis can begin to convey the immeasurable human costs it has imposed on Africa's people—the tragedy of those who lost the desperate struggle for survival and the untold sufferings of those for whom the struggle continues. About 70 per cent. of the total African population, and close to 90 per cent. in some of the poorer countries, is either destitute or below the poverty line."

It is an almost unimaginable statistic that, even in normal times, the lives of some 4 million African children are claimed by starvation each year. I welcome the report entitled, "Within Human Reach" produced by UNICEF, which showed how we could start to solve some of those problems.

The debate is timely. We have the Race Against Time over the weekend when those who feel strongly will be mobilised. My hon. Friend the Minister for Lewisham, East is young and fit and I am sure that he will be running. I shall be waving them on. I hope to make a contribution to that marvellous effort. The Race Against Time shows that there is far wider interest in the problem than some politicians realise.

I should like to mention two other voluntary organisations which do remarkable work but do not get the publicity of Sport-Aid or Band-Aid, valuable though they are. Water-Aid, pioneered by the Thames water authority, enables people paying their water rates to contribute. People who recognise the importance of water in their lives can contribute through the technical skills of our water engineers to help Africa find water. Engineers fpr Disaster Relief comprises engineers who have put their name on a register. When there is a crisis which requires engineering skills, they go whenever and wherever necessary'. When I was in a camp at Umbala in western Dafur, I was taken round at 5.30 am by an engineer from Humberside. He showed me the roads and drains that he had provided for the camp, which were vital as they stopped 20,000 people from getting diseases such as cholera. There is a great deal of voluntary effort which should be recognised.

None of that detracts from the basic responsibility of Governments and international agencies to provide substantial support to meet the crisis. This weekend, John Denver will lead a run in Nottingham involving, I hope, hundreds of thousands of people who will raise money for Sport-Aid. I read in my newspaper that, on the same day, the United States Congress is likely to cut all aid to Africa except Egypt. That is a terrible irony.

I hope that we will take the lead at the UN conference in mobilising world opinion to support international agencies, especially UN agencies, in their valuable work. As we assume the presidency of the European Commission, I hope that we shall take the lead with an early initiative to link the skills and resources of the 12 to reach into Africa on long-term developmental issues. I hope that we shall make an early initiative an important part of our presidency.

My hon. Friend talked about resettlement. I have the constant vision of the destitution of 250,000 people living around Port Sudan in accommodation which cannot be called accomodation, with no water supply and only such medical supplies as can be provided by Sudan Aid and dedicated volunteers. They have no hope for their future, no idea of what can be done and no hope for their children. Those people nevertheless reach out in every possible way to make the best of their lives.

I should like to leave the House with the vision of parents working with scraps of timber and other bits of material, some provided through voluntary agencies, trying to put together a school so that their children might get something of an education.

This is an extremely important subject and I welcome the opportunity to take part in the debate.

The House is grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Lewisham, East (Mr. Moynihan) for introducing this debate. He showed his great knowledge and commitment to the subject. The same is true for my hon. Friend the Member for Broxtowe (Mr. Lester). My hon. Friends have contributed enormously to our understanding of Africa 's problems. The House and others should be grateful to them for what they have done.

This is a timely debate. We have the great Sport Aid activity over the weekend. My right hon. Friend the Prime Minister will meet the Sudanese athlete, Omar Khalifa, as part of Sport Aid's series of fund-raising events for African relief. The Race Against Time is a kind of prelude to next week's special session of the United Nations on Africa's economic problems. I welcome this opportunity to say something about our actions and policies.

My hon. Friend the Member for Lewisham, East rightly stressed the need for wise policies to tackle the problems of agriculture and population. We have to face the fact that, in the two decades before the drought smote east Africa, total food production increased but per capita food production fell by perhaps 20 per cent. A growing number of Africans are therefore seriously under-nourished.

My hon. Friend the Member for Broxtowe spoke movingly about the plight of African people. Governments have all too often followed policies which have inhibited and discouraged farmers through resettlement, ill-judged villagisation or unrealistic pricing and over-controlled marketing of agricultural produce.

There is also the problem of population growth. Having more mouths to feed puts ever increasing pressure on agriculture and other sectors, and per capita incomes must dwindle. Some African countries have population growth rates of 4 per cent. a year, so that the population doubles every 17 or 18 years. There is large-scale migration from rural to urban areas. Governments therefore come under inescapable pressure to ensure supplies of low-priced food in the towns and are therefore rather reluctant to implement proper food production and pricing policies. The Government have substantially increased aid to population-related activities in recent years, from £1 million in 1977 to £12 million a year now. That is a great improvement.

There are also problems of soil erosion, deforestation and the advance of the desert, partly as a result of climatic change but magnified by the pressure of growing population on marginal land which is often poorly farmed. Meanwhile, nomads are pushed into land that cannot support their animals, and this leads to deforestation as bushes and trees are cut down for firewood or to create farmland. They are significant factors in what is happening.

As my hon. Friends said, the crisis in Africa has deeply affected people throughout the world, awakening a new public awareness of the problems facing that continent and awakening a great desire to help to overcome them. I add my tribute to Band Aid and the other voluntary agencies for the immense work that they have undertaken. I also pay tribute to the ordinary citizens of Britain who have given on such an unprecedented scale. I understand that Band Aid and Live Aid have so far spent £26 million on famine relief. That is a notable achievement alongside that of the other voluntary arganisations.

The British Government's contribution to famine relief has been substantial—about £190 million through the bilateral programme and our share of European Community expenditure in the past two years. We responded swiftly to the urgent need for assistance to help the victims of famine in Ethiopia, Sudan and other drought-affected countries in Africa. Much of this aid, both bilateral and through the European Community, has been given in close co-operation with international agencies and voluntary organisations. In 1984, the Government allocated bilaterally and through the European Community, £81·4 million for drought relief in Africa. In 1985, this fugure rose to £96·5 million. In the first three months of 1986, we committed a further £27 million. We are ready to continue provide assistance towards famine relief where it is needed.

At the same time, the European Community has played an increasingly effective role. It was slow to get its emergency procedures going, and I pressed hard for improvement. But once under way it has delivered substantial quantities of grain and other supplies and worked hard in the difficult area of transport, providing among other things a notable and insufficiently noticed airlift operation in the Sudan last summer which did good work.

On this year's food aid requirements, as the House knows, most of the countries in Africa which suffered drought and famine in 1985 have had a much improved harvest. Many of them have produced surpluses of grain. However, some substantial needs for emergency food aid persist, notably in Ethiopia and Mozambique; and other countries, notably Sudan, need external assistance to deliver surpluses from one part of their territory to another.

In 1986, the British Government are delivering 37,000 tonnes of wheat to Ethiopia, in close co-operation with the world food programme. This includes 6,500 tonnes due to be loaded in Hull next month. In Mozambique the world food programme is completing delivery of 14,500 tonnes of maize which the Government have purchased in Zimbabwe. We shall continue to watch needs as they arise. The Community is providing substantial quantities of products.

As I have said before in the House, food aid is a double-edged weapon. Even in an exceptional year like 1985, only about 10 per cent. of Community food aid expenditure went to help victims of famine. During the British Presidency of the Community in the second half of 1986, we intend to work hard for reforms in the EC food aid programme designed to make it more responsive to the needs of developing countries. It is not easy to use food aid to promote agricultural and economic development; but it can be done. Next week's meeting of the governing body of the World Food Programme in Rome will be asked to approve the allocation of a further $76 million during the next three years to food for work projects in Ethiopia designed to rehabilitate forest, grazing and agricultural lands devastated by drought. This work will be based on the experience accumulated in similar schemes in recent years. A world food programme evaluation concludes that in general they have gone relatively well. But there is no doubt that the sheer size of the conservation problem, especially the need to control the grazing of livestock and the implications for the water table, still needs much attention.

Rehabilitation work after the 1985 famine has also been a special focus of attention by the European Community. The Development Council of November 1985 approved proposals to spend about £70 million from the European development funds in rehabilitation work in the eight countries most seriously affected by famine. Nearly all of this has been committed to specific projects; this, too, will be discussed at next November's Development Council.

In the longer term, the third Lomé Convention, which came into force on 1 May, will provide greatly increased aid resources during the next five years for the African, Caribbean and Pacific countries.

As my hon. Friend the Member for Lewisham, East said, Ethiopia and Sudan present us with special difficulties. There is a self-evident need for assistance to victims of famine in Ethiopia. We have given food, vehicles, spare parts and equipment to improve port handling facilities and we have helped in many other ways. We are also helping in Ethiopia by paying for some of the monitors working under the world food programme.

We are also concerned with rehabilitation after the famine. I informed the House last November that we had allocated £3 million to help with such rehabilitation in Ethiopia. Some of this has been spent on seeds and hand tools. An ODA team is in Ethiopia at the moment identifying other uses for these aid funds. They are talking with the Ethiopians about how we can best help.

However, although we provide our share of Community long-term development assistance, we do not feel able to offer the Ethiopians any bilateral assistance with longer-term development, apart from some technical cooperation. This is partly because of the factors mentioned by my hon. Friend the Member for Lewisham, East—the programmes of resettlement and villagisation, which continue to cause us great anxiety. Under the recent resettlement programme, about 600,000 people have been moved, we believe, from the northern provinces of Ethiopia to the south and west of the country. There have been many reports of force being used and families being split up.

On several occasions I have expressed our concern to the Ethiopian Government and did so to the United Nations Co-ordinator in Addis Ababa, Mr. Michael Priestly, when he called on me in London earlier this year. Those expressions of concern by Britain and several other countries have been an important factor behind recent statements by the Ethiopian authorities that the resettlement programme has been brought temporarily to a halt.

I recognise that the longer-term effects of population growth and the degradation of the environment may make it necessary for some people to be moved from one part of the country to another. But such moves need to be well prepared. They need to be carried out with proper consideration and respect for all the people concerned. Above all, resettlement must be on a voluntary basis.

It is important to make sure that there will be sufficient land with adequate rainfull in the chosen resettlement areas. Transport must be adequate. I have seen for myself Ethiopians being herded for resettlement on to Russian Antonovs and have heard of the horrifying conditions experienced by some of those who have made those journeys. It is important that families should be kept together. All those matters must concern us.

However, the villagisation programme causes us even greater concern. Last month the Ethiopian Government released figures showing that nearly 3 million people have already been relocated. Villagisation involves the relocation of a scattered rural population in newly constructed villages, usually located close to existing roads. The reasons given for the policy are that the move will facilitate rural development and the provision of social services.

However, there are clear dangers that any benefits gained will be more than offset by the losses to production caused by the time and effort involved in covering the distances between the new villages and the farm lands. We understand that in some areas people have been moved at particularly inappropriate times in the farming calendar and harvest yields reduced in consequence.

There is also the fear among many that the speed with which this exercise has been carried out, and the life style forced on people in the new villages, means that its purpose is to give the Ethiopian Government the means to exercise a tighter control over the rural population. Thousands of people have fled, some to refugee camps in Somalia. Many of these refugees allege that corruption has been used in implementing the villagisation programme, homes have been burnt and livestock confiscated.

Both those policies, but especially villagisation, cause us serious problems when it comes to considering what we can do in the longer term in Ethiopia, substantial though our shorter-term contribution unquestionably has been and is today.

There are also daunting problems in the Sudan. Much of western Sudan suffered further drought in 1985, and a major relief effort is now taking place. Much of the south is affected by renewed civil war. Sudan's economic and financial difficulties are immense, including external debts exceeding $9 billion. The task of longer-term development, in what is the largest country in Africa, remains a complex and formidable one.

We are concentrating our support for the relief effort this year on the distribution of food supplies in the remote region of Darfur in western Sudan. Logistical problems there were had last year. We have provided £6 million for the distribution of food in the west, which is being undertaken on our behalf by the Save the Children Fund. It is too early to judge whether all the targets have been met, but it is working hard and recent reports have been encouraging.

The Sudan also needs a great deal of longer-term development and there we are actively involved. As my hon. Friends will know, our emphasis nowadays is particularly on rural development projects of exactly the kind that are needed to deal with the situation there. My hon. Friends have seen some of the projects and I hope that they will agree that what we are doing is extremely worth while.

In the background, we must hope that Sudan's return to democracy, which we welcome, will lead to some solution of Sudan's enormous problems, especially the problem of the south, because at the moment it is making development in that part of the country difficult.

Let me deal in the remaining minutes with the special session of the United Nations General Assembly. My right hon. and learned Friend the Foreign Secretary and I will both be attending that special session. At the Tokyo summit we joined with our partners in recognising that the needs of Africa should be accorded high priority. That is reflected in the care with which we are preparing for the special session. The session will give us a real chance for a detailed analysis of the nature of the long-term problems besetting Africa. A wide convergence of views already exists. My hope is that that will provide the opportunity for agreement at the session on what needs to be done. The United Kingdom Government will certainly be working for a positive outcome.

A major theme emerging from the papers produced by the African countries is the concept of development as a partnership. We welcome this. The African countries, as sovereign states — which, of course, they are — have made it clear that they have the prime responsibility for their own development and perhaps for their own shortcomings. But we on our side must also play our part.

I welcome the fact that in a number of African countries the difficult process of policy reform is getting under way. Difficult political decisions have to be made as we all know. Those who make those difficult decisions, often working in conjunction with the IMF, the World Bank and other donors, can count on our support. The work must be done. The economies of those countries must be strengthened and helped to carry out the structural adjustment that is necessary if they are to get away from the burden of debt.

It will be the commitment of my right hon. and learned Friend the Foreign Secretary and myself to do all that we can to see that the conference in New York is a success and that it justifies the hopes that have been placed on it by so many people across the world.

The few extra minutes taken by my right hon. Friend the Minister for Overseas Development on the important and moving previous debate were willingly donated by lovers of chess as their contribution to Sport Aid.

This debate on the noble sport of chess is the first in the history of Parliament — a surprising fact when one recognises that it is the only game legally able to be played in the Palace of Westminster, and indeed one for which a room and equipment are specifically provided in the midst of the main Chambers of state.

It has been said that chess is a game of kings and pawns, played by kings and pawns alike. Indeed, many right hon. and hon. Members have struggled in a friendly and competitive spirit across the tables next to the Smoking Room. It seems appropriate, therefore, for my annoyingly talented opponent on many occasions late at night while waiting to vote — my hon. Friend the Member for Bristol, North-West (Mr. Stern) — to share the time allocated for my contribution in a spirit of companionship and understanding fostered by this game of chess.

Indeed, about a year ago my hon. Friend and I approached the then Minister with responsibility for sport, my hon. Friend the Member for Sutton and Cheam (Mr. Macfarlane), to ask if he would support a proposal that the world chess finals should be held in the United Kingdom. His reply was that since chess was not a physical sport, it was not covered by his portfolio, and that it was, in fact, the responsibility of the Department of Education and Science. We were referred to the then Under-Secretary of State, my hon. Friend the Member for City of London and Westminster, South (Mr. Brooke), about whom I shall say a few words later. I warmly welcome to the debate his successor, my hon. Friend the Member for Buckingham (Mr. Walden).

Not a physical sport, said the then Sports Minister, and indeed it is not a game that requires physical prowess. In fact, it cuts across physical barriers and can be played by men, women, the old, the young and even the handicapped with total equality. Yet, only a week after the Sports Minister had made that statement, a headline in The Times announced that the then world champion, Anatoly Karpov, had had to retire from the world chess championship as he was physically exhausted. It may not take brute strength to play chess, but the effort and concentration required by the greatest players in a world chess championship match the exertion of any sportsman in the world.

Chess cuts across racial, sexual and cultural barriers; it encourages logical and independent thought; it fosters a disciplined mental approach and, furthermore, schoolchildren and students who play chess have been proven to attain even higher academic standards than they might otherwise have achieved. Chess develops capabilities for pattern recognition and is therefore an excellent training ground for the development of the related areas of computer studies and mathematics. In that respect, chess helps English students to compete with the Japanese and the Americans in this vital technological area.

Chess is an in expensive and easy activity; it requires little space and modest equipment and can even be played on the move, while travelling on trains and planes, between strangers with no linguistic connection. I first learnt the game while working abroad, and it proved to be an absorbing and fascinating diversion, filling the boring evenings away from my family. I wish to pay tribute to my teacher, mentor and friend. Mr. Mervyn Frankel of Jersey, whose patience and good humour have given me a love of chess that will remain with me all my days.

But chess is not just a game; it bears an international significance. As it is the Soviet national sport and is highly popular in the rest of eastern Europe, British excellence at chess is assisting in creating cultural and personal ties with those areas. One might even suggest that it plays its part in assisting detente. Indeed, the importance of chess to the Russian people is perhaps based on the belief that prowess at chess is seen as tangible validation of a nation's or institution's intellectual status. The pride that the Russian people feel at possessing the world champion can clearly be seen, but as with all good chess players they are good losers too.

I wish to deal with the state of chess in Great Britain, and my hon. Friend the Member for Bristol, North-West will deal with the international context.

It is staggering fact that only 15 years ago the United Kingdom had no grand masters, the highest level of chess achievement. Britain was so lowly that we finished in the C-finals of the chess olympics—the third division. Since then, the change has been dramatic. On a patient and ever-growing basis, the improvement in our nation's fortunes has been second to none. England won the team silver medal in the last chess olympics held in 1984 and the English team won the four individual gold medals in the same event. England now has 10 grand masters—Tony Miles, Ray Keene, Michael Stean, John Nunn, Jon Speelman, Jonathan Mestel, Murray Chander, Nigel Short, James Plaskett and Harry Golombek. That is a roll of honour.

In 1985 Nigel Short became the first English player to qualify for the candidates' tournament, which is the play-off for the world individual chess championship. At 20 years of age Nigel has a realistic chance of challenging for the world title itself within the next 10 years. He is already among the world's top 10 players, the other nine of whom are all significantly older than he is. By his pleasant and pleasing manner he is an inspiration to young people and is rapidly becoming a sporting superstar, such is the growing interest in chess.

Indeed, interest in the world at the tensions, the intrigue, the international competitiveness, the skill and the drama of chess must have been recognised by Tim Rice and his colleagues from Abba when they wrote the new musical "Chess". There is no doubt that it will introduce to millons of people who have no direct experience of the game, the thrills and delights of the sport, and perhaps even foster an interest in it.

Britain is second or third in standing in the world and we have been given a unique recognition by the international chess fraternity in being able to hold the first half of the world chess championship later this year.

I shall leave it to my hon. Friend the Member for Bristol, North-West to inform the House of this remarkable honour to Britain. It is the first time that two Soviet grand masters have consented to play for the title outside Moscow, let alone outside the Soviet Union. It is the first time that the world championship finals have been held in a western European capital since 1910, apart from the momentous occasion in Reykjavik. This is also the centenary match which will, when associated with the premier of the musical "Chess", make London the focus of the chess world in August.

It would not be right to finish my contribution without recognising the efforts of those who have brought Britain's chess to its current high standard. The grand masters—the international ambassadors of British chess — and particularly Raymond Keene, OBE — are the driving force behind Britain's position in world chess, and certainly owe their position to their own skills. But the encouragement given by education authorities, particularly in Inner London education authority, and the funding from many private companies and other organisations such as Lloyds Bank, Kleinwort Grieveson, National Westminster Bank, Acorn Computers, the London Docklands Development Corporation, Foreign and Colonial, Duncan Lawrie — who sponsors the English olympic team — Halpern and Woolf and the Department of Education and Science, all help in this valuable activity. Chess publishers such as Batsfords are regarded as the best in the world.

I could not end my contribution without asking the Minister whether he will consider additional funding for further developments in British chess.

The hon. Member has compiled a full list of sponsors. Will he bear in mind that the Reykjavik world championship was saved by Mr. Jim Slater, without whom it would not have taken place?

I willingly recognise that. Indeed, when I visited Reykjavik I was pleased to see that the table upon which the world championship was played, and signed by both Fischer and Spassky was in a place of honour in the national museum. I willingly pay tribute to Mr. Slater for his generosity.

I hope that the Minister will consider additional funding, in spite of the generosity shown by his Department in the past, for further developments in British chess. His predecessor, my hon. Friend the Member for City of London and Westminster, South now Minister of State, Treasury, with my right hon. Friend the Chancellor of the Exchequer, my hon. Friend the Member for Ealing, Acton (Sir G. Young), now the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Environment, the present Minister and Westminster Council all helped to secure the world chess championship here in London, following the passing of the GLC.

I ask that we should increase the contribution to the general running costs of the British Chess Federation, the Scottish Chess Association and the Welsh Chess Union. We should like to see national chess centres and our most ambitious project would be to hold the world chess olympics, which would require a gross budget of £1 million.

I submit that the Department of Education and Science has already seen rewards for its encouragement of chess. It is an investment which is capable of producing high returns. Only last year five young schoolchildren from the Inner London education authority challenged an all-party team of hon. Members. It says a great deal for the ability of our young—and perhaps something about the quality of Members of Parliament—that the 10 and 11-year-olds beat us 3–2. It would not be fair if I did not end with a confession that I was one of those who lost.

rose—

Order. Does the hon. Gentleman have the consent of the hon. Member for Richmond and Barnes (Mr. Hanley) and the Minister to take part in the debate?

Yes, Mr. Deputy Speaker. My hon. Friend the Member for Richmond and Barnes (Mr. Hanley) concluded with a reference to the match between the Tower Hamlets schoolchildren and the House of Commons and I must admit that I was more fortunate in that match, because I drew—with an eight-year-old who gave me the hardest game of my life!

My hon. Friend rightly referred to chess as the Soviet national game. Anyone who visits Moscow, Leningrad or any of the other great cities of the Soviet Union will see the permanent chess boards in the parks, frequently set up under cover, and see passers-by attracted by the magnet of the games being played all the time on every board.

The strides made in this country towards making chess perhaps our most successful widely played sport receive little recognition. We have come far, but we have a long way to go to make this country the international chess centre that it deserves to be, bearing in mind the quality of our players.

In 1983 we hosted the semi-finals of the world chess championship; in 1984 the match between the USSR and the rest of the world took place in docklands; in 1985 we staged the Commonwealth championships; we are now seeing the conclusion of the Kleinwort Grieveson Ltd. United States-United Kingdom chess challenge and in July and August we shall be hosting the first part of the world chess championship.

Without wishing to flatter my hon. Friend the Minister, I feel that it would be wrong to allow the debate to pass without paying a warm tribute to the sterling work done by him and his Department to make sure that the world chess championship can go ahead. The groundwork was done by the GLC, but, because of legal problems, if the chess community had not raised the matter urgently with my hon. Friend and if he had not made it a priority to get action within days, we would have lost the championship. The chess community is delighted that my hon. Friend acted with such speed.

If we are to develop as a world chess centre, further opportunities and problems will be landing on the Minister's desk. The most immediate problem is posed by a proposed new clause to the Finance Bill. The clause rightly introduces taxation on the earnings in the United Kingdom of entertainers, artists and sportsmen., but because of the east European tax systems, we may be uniquely disadvantaged in playing host to most of the world grand masters in international competition. I hope that my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary of State will liaise closely with his Treasury colleagues to ensure that an incidental effect of the clause is not to make this country an unattractive haven for world chess championships, which are so east European dominated, and that he will ensure that the clause provides for an adequate harmonisation of tax provisions throughout the rest of Europe and the Americas so that at least Soviet chess players are not significantly worse off playing in Britain than when they play elsewhere.

There are opportunities as well. One proposal, which may arise following the elections to the chess governing body, the Federation Internationale d'Echecs, is that the centre of administration of world chess should be this country, and the docklands has been discussed. I would not at this stage ask my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary of State to commit either funding or governmental efforts, but I ask him, in view of the inevitable problems that will emerge from such a proposal, to offer ready access through his Department to FIDE, should it decide to come here, to ensure that it is given every co-operation from what is effectively the sponsoring Department of chess.

There are two needs with respect to tournaments. First, it is necessary to restore the Hastings tournament to its traditional place as one of the world's leading tournaments. Secondly, it is necessary to find a replacement tournament for that previously sponsored by the GLC as the annual grand masters' tournament. We require sponsorship. My hon. Friend the Member for Richmond and Barnes referred to a number of sponsorships that have already taken place, including the modest efforts by my firm in sponsoring in two weeks' time the first Halpern and Woolf London open chess tournament. However, more sponsors are needed. I hope that my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary of State will see it as one of his roles as Minister to provide every encouragement to commercial and professional firms and companies to sponsor a sport in which this country is already successful and in which even greater successes are open to us.

One matter that must be considered, especially by the Department of Education and Science, is the fact that the number of grand masters who are coming forward are almost exclusively male. Many years ago, when I was taught chess by my late father, it was accepted that women in chess were inferior. There was a women's world chess championship because it was recognised that the standard of women's chess could not compete with the standard of male chess. All that has changed, but there is a disparity between the sexes, and that can be most easily removed in the schools. I hope that my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary of State will seek to involve all our schools so that opportunities to play chess are available in schools, regardless of sex.

For many years, two of our traditional universities—Oxford and Cambridge — have operated discrimination against chess players by offering only a half blue for chess, whereas a full blue is offered for the more traditional sports. I hope that, if my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary of State has any influence in this regard, he will use it to encourage universities to place chess in its rightful position, as something at which this country is extraordinarily good.

My hon. Friend the Member for Richmond and Barnes (Mr. Hanley) is today making history. Those of us who know him would expect no less of him. I have not been able to check his claim that this is the only debate on chess in the history of the House because, as is so often the case, the truth can only be established at disproportionate cost. According to the more recent memory of the computer, which goes back only five years, my hon. Friend is making recent history at least. On history, we must, of course, remember that in 1972 two ivory chessmen were found in the Soviet Union and could be dated back to the year 200 AD. As the game reached Britain only in 1255, that may account for some of our more recent results. As my hon. Friend pointed out, chess is much more than a handy source of metaphors for East-West relations, and more than a source of income for the talented authors of the highly successful West End musical. Perhaps uniquely, it is at once a highly popular and highly intellectual and demanding game. I almost said sport, but my hon. Friend will be aware of the profound implications of these subtle distinctions.

I repeat the tribute that my hon. Friend the Member for Richmond and Barnes paid to the achievements that are increasingly being made by British chess players in the international arena. The growing strength of our top players has elevated our status throughout the world. I wish the English team every success at the 1986 Olympiad, to be held in November and December this year, and hope that it can once again repeat its achievements of 1984, and take the silver medals—or, still better, beat the Soviet Union into second place. Our achievements in the world individual championships are also considerable, and we are not lacking either in the youth events, where no fewer than four world titles have been gained in the past decade.

I know that the British Chess Federation has played a significant part in enhancing our position within the world of chess. It has encouraged the study and practice of chess in the country, and has promoted national and international tournaments and matches. In addition, it has developed strategies for bringing our successes more to the attention of the public and for meeting increasing demands for BCF services and information from the public and from its own grass roots membership.

As my hon. Friend pointed out—I was afraid that he would stray on to the subject—the Department provides modest support for the BCF through an annual grant from our adult education budget to assist with administrative costs and with the expense of sending British players to international tournaments. Grants have funded the federation on a regular basis since the mid-1970s. In that time, our grant has increased, from an admittedly modest base, by about 115 per cent., which brings it to £35,500 for the current financial year.

Of course, we should like to encourage the BCF to extend its activities by the provision of additional central funds, but I need hardly remind the House of the priorities that face us, particularly in adult education, where unemployment is such a worry. However, we have been able to agree to changes to the basis of funding which allow the BCF to introduce a computerised national grading scheme without an overall increase in funds. The current membership of the federation stands at about 12,000. I am told that an estimated 40,000 play chess on a competitive basis, while market research suggests that there is a total of 2 million to 3 million players in the country as a whole. I believe that that puts it pretty well on the same level as angling. Clearly, we shall wish to encourage the BCF to increase its income from subscriptions by increasing its membership, and I understand that the introduction of the grading scheme represents a significant step in the direction of attracting new members.

I concur with what my hon. Friends the Members for Richmond and Barnes and for Bristol, North-West (Mr. Stern) said about the importance of chess in schools. Chess clearly helps to promote a logical approach to problems, clarity of thought and the ability to formulate strategies under pressure. But I am sure that my hon. Friends will understand that, due to the constitutional relationship between the Department and local education authorities, we can only give our encouragement and blessing to any efforts to develop the game in schools.

I turn briefly to the world chess championships to be held in London and Leningrad during the summer. Naturally, I share my hon. Friends' delight that the difficulties associated with the funding of the event have now been resolved. It would be churlish — and churlishness is one thing that the House never forgives—not to mention that the initiative came from the GLC. However, I would add that one good act does not justify a pantomime.

I am sure that the contest will generate immense public interest, and will attract even more people to the game. Obviously, it will be a great boost to the London tourist trade. More than 6,000 people are likely to attend the tournament during the five weeks of the London leg, with a large overseas contingent expected.

I wish every success to the championship, and congratulate the British chess world, especially the British Chess Federation and its supporters, on giving us the opportunity of being so close at hand to what has the makings of an exciting final.

My hon. Friend the Member for Bristol, North-West raised a series of points. On the question of the tax system—

Order. Mr. Dubs.

First, I declare an interest as I am sponsored by the Confederation of Health Service Employees, which represents many workers in the National Health Service. However, I would wish to put my case whether or not I was sponsored by COHSE, because it is of interest and concern to all people who believe in the NHS and want it to have a successful future

Like all those involved in the NHS, I believe that it is highly desirable that it should be run efficiently and that maximum resources should go into the care of patients, while NHS workers at all levels are assured adequate pay and proper working conditions.

The Rayner scrutiny, which gives rise to the debate, dealt with NHS accommodation. My purpose is to examine that review and various problems that have risen as a result of it. It was published in August 1984 and was implemented, in a sense, by a DHSS circular last year called,

"NHS Residential Accommodation for Staff."

The Rayner scrutiny and the circular basically encouraged health authorities to dispose of a large proportion of their residential accommodation for all grades of staff.

According to the scrutiny, at present there are 112,000 units of accommodation, which comprise houses, flats and a large number of bedsitters and places in hostels, occupied as follows: 35,000 units by student nurses, 29,000 by other nurses, 11,000 by junior doctors, and 20,000 by ancillary staff. That makes a total of 95,000 units. Rayner claimed that the balance of 17,000 was unoccupied. However, he did not simply say that those 17,000 units should be occupied or disposed of, but suggested a much more drastic cut. The report suggested that first-year student nurses would occupy 29,000 units, junior doctors 8,000 and other staff 2,000, making a total of 39,000. That suggests that 73,000 units should be disposed of. Rayner made a fairly arbitrary distinction between essential staff—those who are to be given NHS accommodation—and non-essential staff who are to be encouraged or forced to find accommodation elsewhere.

The Rayner figures resulted from a survey based on a sample of a quarter of health authorities, of which only two were considered in detail. There are major doubts about the reliability of the figures, and, therefore, the reliability, of the results, conclusions and recommendations. I understand that there is 95·5 per cent. occupancy of the health authority's accommodation in Wandsworth. Therefore, if the Wandsworth health authority, which I am sure is typical of many health authorities, should get rid of a large proportion of its accommodation that would have devasting consequences, to which I shall refer later.

Rayner should have asked how along the properties had been standing empty, and why? Given that a fair proportion of the property is used by trainee Health Service staff, there is bound to be a certain turnover. Inevitably, therefore, some property will be empty for a short time when staff leave to go elsewhere in the NHS and in turn are replaced by other staff. If that information had been available, it would have been easier to decide whether there was any basis for the change in policy. I regret very much that that information was not available to Rayner.

When the Rayner report and the following circular were published, there was a storm of protest from many people in the Health Service. I have yet to find those who, other than the Minister and Rayner, support this policy change.

Under pressure, the Secretary of State for Social Services gave a guarantee in the House of Commons on 25 March that no district health authority would resort to the courts to force nurses to leave accommodation in which they wished to remain. The Secretary of State's words were:

"I can give that guarantee."—[Official Report, 25 March 1986; Vol. 94, c. 779.]

That is all very well, but there is one other matter to take into account.

Under Crown immunity, the Crown or its agents have immunity from many laws. A few weeks after the assurance of the Secretary of State for Social Services, the West Surrey and North-East Hampshire health authority took court action against a nurse because it wanted to acquire the property in which she was living. The nurse was offered alternative accommodation, but she felt that it was inadequate. In the event, I believe that she is being offered better and more satisfactory accommodation, which she may accept.

However, after its assurance that no court action would be taken, the health authority claimed that Rent Act protection did not provide security of tenure to the nurse and did not even make it necessary for the health authority to use court proceedings to acquire the property. In other words, Crown immunity means that people can be chucked out of their accommodation and that there is no longer the safeguard of the courts having to approve the decision that somebody should be ordered out of their home. That is very odd — the more so as, during the proceedings, the health authority changed the plaintiff. The plaintiff became the Secretary of State for Social Services.

It is extraordinary that a senior Government Minister should have given such an assurance and that later Crown immunity should have been used, which meant that his assurance became virtually meaningless. It has caused enormous consternation. The implication is that Health Service staff have no safeguard and that they can be thrown out of their accommodation, the courts being unable to provide basic protection for them. It makes nonsense of what was said by the Secretary of State.

Towards the end of April the Minister for Health gave an assurance that nobody would be required to move from his or her accommodation without being offered suitable alternative accommodation. That assurance is to be found at column 774 of the Official Report for 29 April 1986. That is an assurance of sorts, but it depends upon what is meant by suitable alternative accommodation.

I have two main concerns. The result of trying to get rid of the bulk of NHS accommodation will have a damaging effect on the effectiveness and efficiency of the NHS. It will also have a detrimental effect on the conditions and the work of the staff. We are not dealing with warehouses or with an accountancy exercise which is what Rayner seems to be doing, but with the homes of many thousands of Health Service workers. The Health Minister and the Secretary of State have engendered a feeling of anxiety and insecurity.

The Minister gave an assurance about alternative property but alternative property may be too far away. It is unsettling for someone to be told that he has to go and that the accommodation found for him is some distance away. In any case, the Health Service may find itself in difficulties because there may not be any alternative accommodation. It is certain that in many areas where there are housing shortages local authorities will not be able to provide alternative accommodation.

No doubt the Health Service would like to negotiate about alternative accommodation, and I understand that the Royal Marsden hospital put in a bid for some property that the council was selling. In my view, the council was wrong to sell it, but in any event the hospital did not make a high enough bid and the property was sold to a private property company. The hospital bid was just a little bit lower than the one placed by the property company. The difficulties are enormous.

Another problem is that alternative accommodation may have high rents. We know that in many areas of London and in many inner city areas the rents are very high and we are dealing with some of the lowest paid workers in Britain. Despite the announcement yesterday about pay rises for nurses and other people, many Health Service workers do not have enough pay to be able to move to alternative accommodation. The Rayner report took note of that because it said that higher pay cannot subsidise housing. The Government did nothing about that because it would have meant pay at quite a higher level.

There is a danger that the Health Service under the new policy would provide accommodation for training staff and certain grades of staff and when the trainees have qualified they will have to find other accommodation. That means that many of them will be living under the threat of homelessness. The policy will exacerbate recruitment to the Health Service because some hospitals get their staff because they can provide homes. When there are no homes, even with high unemployment people cannot accept jobs in those hospitals.

Although assurances were given that there would he proper consultation on all these matters, as far as I can tell there has been no consultation, and the measures that I am talking about were diktats by the Secretary of State and the Minister and were approached in an insensitive manner.

Because of Crown immunity, there are difficulties about getting the Health Service, as the landlord, to carry out decent repairs when such repairs are necessary to the type of accommodation that I am talking about. The Rent Act 1977 scrutiny of which other people have the advantage if they want to see whether their rents are set at a reasonable level, is not available to Health Service tenants. The only people to whom Health Service staff can appeal are people in the Health Service itself. There ought to be some independent method, preferably that which applies to other types of accommodation, which would allow rents to be set in an impartial way. There are health and safety risks in accommodation, especially in hostels and other multiple accommodations in the Health Service, and Crown immunity prevents legislation coming into play as it should.

The issues that I have raised are of major concern to many people in the Health Service and I fear that the Government are making a mistake. I think they hope to save some £170 million, but perhaps the Minister will come up with a different sum. The Government are saying, "We want to save money, and in order to do that we will make a major change to the way in which certain types of Health Service staff can find accommodation." This policy is causing great confusion and is not clear to the health authorities. At the least, a further circular is called for in order to sort matters out.

That is only a minor point. The main point is that the policy is mistaken. It is based on false facts and on a misunderstanding of the serious housing difficulties in the areas adjoining many of our hospitals. The Health Service will be damaged if the Government insist on proceeding with this policy. I hope that they will change their mind.

I am glad that the hon. Member for Battersea (Mr. Dubs) has chosen this subject for his Adjournement debate. I welcome the opportunity that it gives me to set out the Government's policy on NHS residential accommodation, for there has been, as the hon. Gentleman said, unnecessary anxiety about it.

As the hon. Gentleman said, the background to the policy is a Rayner scrutiny undertaken in 1983 as part of the programme that has covered sectors as diverse as ambulance services and arrangements for advertising for staff. These are not crude, cost-cutting exercises. They represent part of the Government's stategy for achieving the best value possible from resurces spent on the NHS. As the House knows, the Government have allocated £18·75 billion to the NHS in the current financial year, more than has ever been allocated by any of their predecessors, but there will never be enough money to meet all the demands on the services. Therefore, there is a duty to ensure that both revenue and capital resources are used as effectively and efficiently as possible. I welcome the hon. Gentleman's comments to that effect.

In the current year, the overall cost improvement programme, of which the Rayner scrutinies form an important part, will release about £150 million in cash, which can then be devoted to other aspects of the service. In addition, there will be productivity gains by better use of available resources.

The senior Health Service officers who undertook the scrutiny into residential accommodation examined the position in about 40 health districts, and their report contains some striking figures. In particular, they found that

"authorities have approximately 112,000 units of accommodation … more than 20,000 houses and flats and more than 70,000 residential places in bedsitter and hostel-type blocks … at any one time nearly a fifth of the total accommodation stock is unoccupied; in individual authorities the vacancy rate ranges from 4 per cent." to 33 per cent.

The hon. Member quoted the example of Wandsworth, which is at the low end of that scale, and may even have been the authority that the officers had in mind when talking about 4 per cent. The report continues:

"few, if any, authorities had a considered policy on accommodation. Rather, the level of the present stock and the categories of staff living in it, are in large measure the result of historical accident and ad hoc decisions."

Anyone who has surveyed this scene will appreciate the force of that remark.

This report showed clearly that residential accommodation represents a valuable and expensive resource which was not being managed effectively or efficiently, quite separately from the scrutiny, there has been longstanding concern about the state of sonic of the property, and the conditions in which some staff have to live.

Following consultation on the scrutiny report, authorities were asked to draw up explicit local plans for the future, within an overall national policy. There are four aims. The first is to ensure that health authorities have sufficient accommodation for junior doctors, student nurses and other professional trainees. Secondly, to enable authorities to provide accommodation for other groups of staff where, for example in inner city areas, the lack of accommodation would make recruitment impossible. Thirdly, to bring staff accommodation up to a reasonable standard, as a priority charge on the proceeds of sales. I accept what the hon. Gentleman said about the poor standard of a significant proportion of the accommodation.

The fourth aim was to sell surplus property to existing tenants at discounts of up to 60 per cent. whenever practicable, the proceeds being used to develop health services. The Department has now studied most district health authority plans, which show that the alarmist stories about substantial reductions in the stock of accommodation available for student nurses and other professional trainees are untrue. Indeed, some authoriies have plans for increases to take account of the rising number of trainees.

The plans also show that, in some cases, even now, nearly three years after the scrutiny report was prepared, a significant proportion of the existing stock is empty. Authorities have been asked to sell any such properties which they regard as surplus to requirements by the end of 1986, unless to do so would jeopardise the later sale of a larger site of which such property forms part. Authorities anticipate proceeds of about £30 million from the sale of residential property during the current financial year. Most will be from the sale of properties that are currently empty. Every penny will stay within the NHS, and will be available to improve the standard of the residential accommodation that is to be retained and to expand health services.

Some property that authorities have identified as surplus is currently occupied. Authorities have been asked, when practicable, to offer such property to the present tenants or licensees on concessionary terms which match those available to council tenants under the right-to-buy scheme. They thus provide for discounts of between 32 and 60 per cent. off market value to occupiers of two or more years' standing. This must be good news for the tenants concerned.

Some authorities are clear that, in future, they will not need to retain all of the accommodation that they now provide for staff other than professional trainees, but the process of rationalising property holdings, which may well involve asking some staff to move, must be carried out with proper regard to the interests of the existing tenants and licensees.

My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State has already guaranteed that nobody will be made homeless as a result of rationalisation. The hon. Gentleman referred to exchanges in the House in which I reaffirmed that clear guarantee. Nobody will be required to move from his or her present accommodation without being offered a suitable alternative place to live. That guarantee has gone a long way to meet the genuine anxiety expressed by some staff about how the policy is to be implemented. The Government recognise that those anxieties flow from the rationalisation policy and from the lack of any well established procedures in the service which cover these matters.

The conditions under which staff occupy NHS accommodation and under which health authorities manage the residential estate requires examination with a view to establishing a code of practice or some similar set of arrangements. My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State has therefore asked the NHS management board to review these matters urgently and to consult health authorities and professional and staff interests. I am sure, from the general tenor of what the hon. Gentleman said, that he will welcome that clear undertaking.

Until the review has been completed and proper arrangements have been established, health authorities are being asked not to implement any part of their plans for rationalising property holdings which involve giving staff notice to quit residential accommodation.

However, if circumstances arise, for example, not paying rent or behaving in a fashion that is wholly unreasonable towards neighbouring tenants — this has nothing to do with the estate rationalisation policy that I have described — which make it necessary for an authority to consider giving staff notice to quit, the authorities are being advised that they must first seek the Department's approval.

The Government's policy is designed to balance the obvious need to manage the residential estate effectively with the need to treat Health Service tenants and licensees reasonably and fairly. We cannot tolerate a position where 20 per cent. of accommodation is permanently empty, which represents about £200 million or £300 million worth of resources tied up pointlessly in empty property. Nor can nurses or other health workers be allowed to become homeless as a result of seeking to rationalise the estate. I hope that the hon. Gentleman agrees that that policy, including the guarantee that has been given to the staff and the review that I have announced today, is sensible and fair.

The hon. Gentleman also mentioned the need for a circular which will update those arrangements for health authorities. Such a circular will be issued during the next week or two. He also mentioned the incident in west Surrey, about which there was much publicity, in the context of the NHS residential estate. The incident had nothing to do with the estate. It is a separate matter.

The property at issue did not form part of the NHS estate. As I understand it, it was leased from another body, which considerably increased the rent that it was demanding. As a result, action was taken, with the individual nurse being offered alternative accommodation. I should be happy to write to the hon. Gentleman about that, because there have been grossly misleading accounts of the incident. That separate incident has been linked, misleadingly, with the general policy. There has been some awful, alarmist publicity. The hon. Gentleman mentioned the clear undertaking about no evictions given by my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State in the House on 25 March. It was extraordinary that, on 4 April—a week or more after that clear statement — a national daily newspaper produced this front page headline:

"Sold out! More than 25,000 nurses are facing the boot from their houses in a shock, Government-backed plan."

There would have been no excuse for producing such an alarmist story before my right hon. Friend gave that clear assurance on 25 March, but it is monstrously irresponsible for the newspaper to feed the anxieties of nurses and other staff who may have read the story and believed h. I appeal for those matters to be dealt with responsibly and sensibly.

The hon. Gentleman also referred to Crown immunity in relation to action over rents and health and safety in this sort of accommodation. He will know that a Bill is going through the House which deals with Crown immunity for food regulations, hospital kitchens and the handling of food. I suspect that, on Report, provided that the Chair gives its permission and calls the appropriate new clause, those matters may well be debated again. Therefore, I shall say nothing further about them today. However, I hope that what I have said will reassure people that the Government's policy on NHS residential accommodation is fair, reasonable and sensible.

I am obliged, Mr. Deputy Speaker, for the fact that the processes of your Office have enabled me to bring forward this afternoon the vexed subject of conditions on the A38 through Bromsgrove and the terms of the Land Compensation Act 1973, following a meeting attended by 300 residents in my constituency last Friday.

This matter relates to the diversion of traffic as a result of the widening of the M5, particularly in a northbound direction, and the imminent opening of the M42 to traffic west as far as the A38. The A38 used to be a trunk road in the care of the Department of Transport. I regret that parts of it have been detrunked following the construction of the Bromsgrove eastern bypass and as a result the Department has shed some responsibility. However, parts of it are stilt very much a trunk road.

That trunk road was never meant to carry the volume and type of traffic that is now routed that way. The scale and duration of the diversion means that northbound traffic on the A38 south of Bromsgrove has doubled—13,500 vehicles in a 16-hour day. The diversion has lasted nine months. I am happy to say that that terminates this week. But that diversion fully justifies a fresh look at the conditions under which compensation can be claimed and traffic management measures are warranted.

I said that the diversion has lasted for nine months, but there is to be no respite because next month the M42 opens as far west as the A38 and the diversion will continue until the northern link of the M42 with the M5 is completed. That is scheduled for 1990 but that date may well slip as the land has not yet been acquired for construction and we know not whether a public inquiry with its protracted procedures and delays, may be required.

Official predictions of the volume of northbound traffic as a result of the opening of the M42 exceed the volume in the current diversion—an additional 5,000 vehicles in a 16-hour day. Many, including the highway authority, believe that the Department's predictions could well prove light because apparently they have not taken account of the construction of the Evesham bypass on the A435 —one of the main routes to the south-which will result in the diversion of traffic to the M42 to enable southbound traffic from the midlands to gain the coast and the ports. Likewise, the predictions take no account of the heavy holiday traffic that has been experienced by anyone who has used the M5.

Therefore, we are not talking of just the past nine months of damage, misery and danger. There is another four to five years of damage, misery and danger in certain prospect. The increase to the south of the M42 will be greater than the increase northbound, although there will be some temporary relief when the M42 southern link opens next year. But residents will still be exposed, like those north of the M42, to diversions when the remaining section of the M5 is widened, and that is already estimated to take a further two years at a time of increasing traffic from the M42.

It is not just a question of the volume of traffic but its speed and composition. We all know what motorway traffic is like—and the A38 has, in effect, become a motorway, but without any of the necessary provision for safety, compensation or traffic management. The residents believe — and I share their view — that several things must be done. First is the issue of safety. Children must be able to get to school, and pensioners must be able to collect their pensions from Post Offices and visit day centres and clubs in safety. A crossing is needed at Lickey End and a pedestrian phase in the traffic lights at Braces lane and Stoke Heath. I have asked for that several times. The speed limit needs extension and enforcement, and again, repeated requests have been made for that at Lackey End and Stoke Heath. Overtaking by heavy vehicles moving at speed makes turning in to or out of a drive a real hazard. Double white lines are needed.

All those measures may not be justified by the Department's criteria on a permanent basis, but five years — the period from 1985 to 1990 — seems a lifetime. Indeed, nine months has been almost a lifetime to the residents. The removal of those measures could be considered later if necessary, when and if the traffic returns to normal volume and composition.

It is not simply a matter of life and death — the quality of life is very much in issue. The noise, especially at night, the vibration and the dirt, make life a misery. Vibration has caused cracks in ceilings and windows and some residents claim that mortar has been dislodged and garden walls damaged. The residents naturally feel entitled to compensation and protection by double glazing, without having recourse to expensive litigation which some of them can ill afford.

Compensation is not available under the terms of the Land Compensation Act because roadworks have not been carried out along the frontage of the properties affected. Only a few houses in the vicinity of the Marlbrook traffic lights could benefit. But this diversion is the result of roadworks—the widening of the M5. The increase in traffic will come from roadworks—the opening cif the M42.

When consultations were held prior to the enactment of the Land Compensation Act, the effects of diversions and traffic management measures were raised as suitable grounds for compensation, but it was decided to omit them initially while the operation of the new provisions was studied. The results are plain for all to see on the A38 through Bromsgrove. Diversions and increases on such a scale and for such periods must surely merit compensation.

The dirt to which I have referred does not affect only the washing on the line and the windowsills in the front rooms. One look at the condition of plant life in the verges causes fears about a health hazard, with particular mention of lead deposits. I believe that we should conduct a pollution survey to dispel the fears.

It is not just a question of life itself or of the quality of life, but of the value of property and the blight which has been induced. The traffic diversions and increases have resulted in a property blight on the area. Families are finding it extremely difficult to move away from the danger and nuisance to which they are exposed. They find it increasingly difficult to move away to take up new jobs. They are also concerned about the diminution in the asset value of their homes, which also has an effect on their ability to move.

The residents are therefore, naturally, seeking compensation for the loss in property value or for some assistance to enable them to move for the purposes that I have described. Many of them work night shifts and need their rest.

I realise that the rating question is outside the Minister's responsibility. There certainly seems to be a case for a reduction in rates, but that of itself will not remove the property blight.

It may seem as though the residents have presented a long catalogue of woes in a whining and complaining manner. That is far from true. Since many of the people involved drive vehicles themselves they accept the need for progress, for motorway construction and for easier access for our goods, and so that people from the Midlands can reach the coast and the ports. However, they feel that the period for which they are required to suffer damage, misery and danger is beyond all reason. They might have survived the past nine months without complaint, but the prospect of another four years of misery appears to them to be unsupportable.

The staff of the county surveyor have always been most helpful in trying to meet the genuine anxieties of my constituents. I am grateful to them and to my hon. Friend the Minister and his staff who have also responded as sympathetically as they are able, but who are apparently tied by bonds that I hope that my hon. Friend will be able to loosen.

My hon. Friend the Member for Bromsgrove (Mr. Miller) is one of the forthright, assiduous hon. Members who leave Ministers in no doubt about the needs of their constituencies and their constituents. I thank my hon. Friend for his kind words about the Department of Transport staff both in London and in the regional office and I am sure that his words about the county surveyor's staff will be much appreciated by them.

In a balanced, though rightly intolerant, speech, my hon. Friend has asked me to review what is going on. It would be unwise of me to say either that there is a prospect of an immediate change in the law or that no further measures might be taken. The purpose of the debate is to ensure that I look for every opportunity to meet the needs of my hon. Friend's constituency. I assure my hon. Friend that I shall do so.

As my hon. Friend said, there is joint responsibility for roads. The county council is responsible for detrunked roads and there are guidelines for safety measures that can be taken for pedestrians. It is vital that those guidelines are kept to, within reason. Road users subconsciously appreciate dangers on the roads and develop a subconscious sense of road craft while formally obeying traffic directions, road signs and so on. If motorists discover inconsistent treatment, whether in pedestrian crossing arrangements, speed limits or other provisions, we shall end up with more accidents, injuries and deaths. There is a point in sticking fairly rigidly to the guidelines and regulations.

I will make sure that as traffic develops, albeit temporarily—I hope that my hon. Friend will forgive me, but even four years is temporary in our terms, though I concede that his constituents would not accept that as a proper use of English—the Department and the county council ensure that justified further measures are not only considered, but, where possible, responded to as sympathetically as is reasonable.

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for his balanced words about the need for roads. I recognise and share his ambition for improvements, not only for the relief of through traffic that they bring for residential communities, but for the economic benefits brought by these improvements to the infrastructure, or what the Prime Minister and I normally call better roads.

I have been reminded that my hon. Friend and my predecessor discussed investment plans for roads in the west midlands some years ago. I am pleased that they are now coming to fruition. Since 1979, there has been increased spending through the trunk road programme, with increased spending of 30 per cent. in real terms on national roads and with expenditure on the programme for renewing older motorways being nearly doubled. The national road programme was almost exactly halved in real terms between 1973 and 1979–80. I sometimes wish that those who call for more infrastructure spending would look at the recent history books and see how well we are doing now compared with the regime of the International Monetary Fund.

In the past six years there has been investment of £4 billion, £3 billion of which has been on new construction. That is a signifcant investment for Britain. My hon. Friend will not need reminding, because of his purpose in raising the debate, that the west midlands has had a considerable share of the growing cake.

In September 1985, the Umberslade section of the M42 was opened—the first new section of the M42 since completion of the Solihull section in 1977. In December 1985, the Water Orton and Kingsbury sections of the M42 were opened. The Lickey End and Alvechurch sections of the M42 will be opened soon. This will amount to 32 miles of motorway opened in the west midlands during the past nine months. We are going on with widening and reconstruction of the older motorways.

My hon. Friend's constituency is both suffering and benefiting from much of the work on the M5 which is under way or is scheduled for further improvements. The M5 is being brought up to dual three-lane standard. We must be aware that the traffic is with us and will continue to grow. Conditions on the A38 will not improve without improvements on the M5 and the M42/M5 junction which are in hand. I do not think that there is any disagreement either in my hon. Friend's constituency or between us that the work is necessary. But as my hon. Friend said, there is genuine dissatisfaction with the arrangements for the interim.

Anyone with any sensitivity would be conscious, as we are, of the tremendous impact of the new road construction on those living nearby. Particular problems are associated with the widening of the M5. It requires diversion of traffic on to the A38 and other local roads during the widening and reconstruction period. I think that my hon. Friend will acknowledge that those difficulties were recognised at an early stage by the west midlands regional office of the Department of Transport which launched a major public-awareness campaign. The intention was to explain the work and the need for diversion and temporary closure. It rightly concentrated on safety during the work both for road users and for the staff of contractors. There was a commitment to minimise disturbance to local residents. I am sorry that it is not possible to divert traffic to places where there are no local residents, but that is one of the facts of life.

Motorway users are encouraged to stay on the M5 until otherwise directed. My hon. Friend pointed out that traffic had to be diverted from the M5 for considerable periods. There has been co-ordinated publicity through national and local media, and we are grateful for the help of the police, local authorities and the motoring and road haulage organisations.

I think that I need not go through a list of the diversions. If my hon. Friend would like some more information so that he can share it with his constituents and road users locally, I shall happily write to him. If I have not managed to deal with some points, either I shall pick up the omission or my hon. Friend might like to remind me next week of them, and we can go further in this continuing discussion.

An intrinsic part of the works has been the extensive improvements carried out along the A38 and other local roads where necessary to cope with the additional traffic diverted from the M5. I doubt whether all of them will become effective without some pushing and prodding from my hon. Friend.

The improvements carried out on the A38 amount to £600,000 of work, and £350,000 has been spent on other local routes. It might help to give the House some examples. My hon. Friend has already mentioned the installation of traffic lights at Marlbrook crossroads and Birmingham road. There is also the improvement of the capacity of the A38 junction and the Lydiate Ash junction. There are improvements at Canal Bridge, Warndon, and right-turn lanes have been marked at various locations. My hon. Friend should not forget either the pelican crossing at the Barley Mow.

The overriding aim has been to minimise delay to traffic and disruption to local residents. Frankly, it is impossible to be totally successful. As my hon. Friend said, the increase in traffic flows while the diversion is in place gives him and his constituents cause for concern about safety. Many of the tragic news headlines during the past week or so emphasise the need to do everything possible to ensure that our vehicles and roads are safe, and to give as much attention as can be justified to individual safety work. I sometimes feel that I have more responsibility in this job than the Home Secretary had in the days of capital punishment. when death sentences could be commuted. The plain truth is that we have what appears to be an acceptable level of violence—which is unacceptable to me — which amounted to 5,209 road deaths last year. That total is unacceptable, even though it is the lowest for about 30 years.

We must ensure that money is spent on things that are likely to produce the greatest return. Instead of talking about road safety improvements after people have been killed, we should anticipate the need and evaluate the work that perhaps should be done. But I can dwell on that when we have another road safety debate, following the excellent debate that took place a year ago.

We are sadly aware of the disturbance experienced by residents living along the A38, who are inconvenienced by the extra traffic. They are suffering in the short term—although I suppose that if one is looking at four years, it is in the medium term—but they will enjoy long-term benefits when all the work on the M5 is complete. Some residents will benefit earlier than that. It depends on the location.

I shall not deal in detail with the extent and scope of the construction works. But from a technical standpoint, there have been remarkably few closures on some of the roads that can provide relief from the diverted traffic. However, I can understand that that may be a matter of opinion, depending on where one lives and which roads one is trying to cross.

I could give my hon. Friend information on the current situation, but given his liaison with the county surveyor and the regional office of the Department of Transport. he will be up to date on most events.

I live there.

Obviously, my hon. Friend has personal experience of the situation, as he works for his constituency and lives there. His experience has, indeed, given force to his remarks. He has rightly summarised the compensation position. I cannot speak about enforcement, just as I cannot speak about temporary rate reductions, but I shall ensure that his remarks are passed on to those who have responsibility for such matters. I hope that he will tell his constituents that I sympathise with them because they live on a busy road. Will he assure them that I understand that they are very inconvenienced by the temporary increased traffic flows? But it was only as a result of representations such as his that the original compensation arrangements came into effect. It would be a brave man who said that they would never change. But I do not want to start defending them. I can assure him that, sadly, they are unlikely to be changed sufficiently quickly to affect financial compensation, other than through the possibility of rate reductions.

I will pay personal attention to this matter and see what I can do as Minister for roads and traffic. No one could have put the case as well as my hon. Friend, and, if there are further improvements, I suspect that they will be the result of his work.

I am grateful for this opportunity to draw to the attention of my hon. Friend the Parliamentary Under-Secretary for the Environment and the House the growing practice of some Left-wing local authorities of importing non-commercial conditions into the tendering and contractual process before contracts can be awarded. Indeed, the practice now has a description of its own in common parlance: contract compliance.

I have the first 30 pages of a questionnaire circulated by Leicester city council to tenderers. They are asked, for example:

"How many of your employees are members of a Trade Union?

State the numbers of (a) Afro-Caribbean, (b) Black Asian, (c) White European or (d) other employees directly employed by you.

Provide a copy of your policy statement with regard to equal opportunities to secure fair treatment of ethnic minorities and women.

Has your organisation ever been involved directly or indirectly with contracts which facilitate the manufacture and location of nuclear installations and weapons in Europe?

Has your organisation ever had any interest directly or indirectly in South Africa?"

Others ask wheter the firm has ever contributed to political funds, and whether any employee, director or owner is a freemason.

Apart from the volume of work which this stuff causes employers who are really there to make a living for themselves and their employees, few employers employ people because they are black, disabled or freemasons. They do not ask and they do not keep records. Indeed, if they did, it would be discrimination and grossly offensive in many cases. Employees are employed to do a job. To enjoin an employer to import non-commercial considerations such as those into his employing policy is discriminatory and offensive.

This abuse continues. The Federation of Civil Engineering Contractors tells me that the St. Helens council tells those on its select tender list that it is raising money for a hospital in North Vietnam, and asks for a contribution. The message is clear: "If you want to work for us, you must pay protection money." One can imagine how far a firm would get if it refused. I have been told of another council which asks tenderers for money for a project in Nicaragua. This is straight protection, and the shades of the Mafia are not far away. Where will it stop if it is not curbed? Indeed, it is the authorities which claim to be prominent in outlawing discrimination on grounds of colour, race or sex which require employers to do just that, and then discriminate against employers who do not hold their political views or finance their projects. It is an abuse and a disgrace.

Nobody objects to councils making sure that their contractors will comply with the law and provide proper employee protection, but to bring social engineering into their policies, at the expense of ratepayers getting the best deal and at the expense of contractors being able to take on labour, must cause concern. These clauses are used as an excuse not to accept the lowest tender or outside contractors but to use in-house departments. I understand that at the Labour party conference in 1982 a resolution was passed that contract compliance should be used positively to discriminate in favour of in-house tenderers.

An additional evil of the system I have described is that the policy works covertly. The policies are stated and the questions are asked, but no one knows whether he has been rejected because he has run foul of them. Some employers just accept the whole thing as a farce and give up. They do so at the expense of the ratepayers and the future employment prospects of others.

This abuse and the need for action was recognised by the Department of the Environment. My right hon. Friend the Member for Wanstead and Woodford (Mr. Jenkin) announced in 1985 when he was Secretary of State for the Environment that legislation would be introduced in the next Session of Parliament to ban contract compliance clauses which went beyond the assessment of the contractor's technical, managerial and financial capacity successfully to carry out the requirements of the contract.

Then along came the case of Wheeler v. Leicester City Council, where it was decided that such clauses could be challenged as an unreasonable discharge of the council's functions. I am afraid that the Department of the Environment saw there an excuse not to introduce contentious legislation. It said that it would now go back on the word of the previous Secretary of State and that legislation would not be introduced. If, however, the law is adequate, why do these abuses continue? Why have the Building Employers Federation and the Federation of Civil Engineering Contractors been pressing for action?

I suggest that that is for several reasons. First, the test of reasonableness is not one upon which anyone is willing regularly to go to law. A contractor goes to law only if he has no other choice. The law ought to be clear enough for him to go about his daily business. In addition, if he goes to law with one council, others of similar political persuasions will find reasons for blackballing him from any of their contracts.

The burden of showing why a contractor has been refused work is virtually impossible to prove. In my view, it is unfair that he should have to go to law on such shifting sands. The council would merely turn round and tell him that it had blackballed his company for a reason different from the one claimed by the employer. And who would be able to prove otherwise in court?

My hon. Friend may say that it would be difficult to frame legislation to cover abuses that would not at the same time prevent councils from concerning themselves with proper matters, such as health and safety requirements. The Government accept that there is abuse. My hon. Friend the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Transport, who spoke in an earlier debate, in a letter dated 14 April to the Federation of Civil Engineering Contractors said that the introduction of non-commercial considerations such as I have described into the contractual process for obtaining goods and services, was to be deplored.

Until the Wheeler case, legislation was proposed by the Department, and although it had not seen the light of day it was clearly intended. Until that case the Department never actually said that it could not be done. In the interests of ratepayers in the areas affected and in the interests of expanding the labour force in areas of high unemployment—and it can be no coincidence that those interests are often the same—I ask my hon. Friend to consider the case that I have put to him, to dig out the original proposals and to implement them. If the will is there it can be done.

My hon. Friend the Member for Newark (Mr. Alexander) has raised a matter which, as I know from the number of letters that I have received on the subject from hon. Members, is of interest to the people those hon. Members represent, to the construction industry and to other industries that have dealings with local authorities.

My hon. Friend wrote to me on 14 May about a civil engineering firm in his constituency which has been excluded from a city council's approved list of contractors. That firm's demand for action by the Government to deal with political discrimination echoes the campaign being waged by the Federation of Civil Engineering Contractors. I was amused to see the notes issued recently by the FCEC to its members on lobbying Members of Parliament. These said:

"a letter from a constituent, particularly if that constituent represents an important local business interest, is always likely to have some effect."

I do not know whether my hon. Friend's constituent is a member of the FCEC, though I suspect that his is, but his letter has certainly had some effect.

I congratulate my hon. Friend on the eloquent manner in which he has brought this matter before us. This is not the first time that the matter has been raised in the House and I should like to take some time and care in answering the points that have been raised.

The combination of self-indulgent arrogance and petty-minded vindictiveness of local authorities which, for example, refuse to allow contractors working at our crucial defence installations even to tender for their work, is almost unbelievably breathtaking. Such actions have no place in the contractual processes of local government, and it is clear that the vast majority of local authorities, irrespective of political colour, share that view. From my experience of working in local authorities I can say that this kind of attitude towards tenders was unheard of and quite beyond the pale even a few years ago. However, few authorities indulge in these amazing and rather unorthodox actions. Nevertheless, they present problems for the contractor, and for the small contractor the problems can be vital. I share my hon. Friend's anxiety and take the view that we must look seriously at this matter.

I am, of course, fully aware of the commitments given by a former Secretary of State, my right hon. Friend the Member for Wanstead and Woodford (Mr. Jenkin), and by my hon. Friend the Minister for Environment, Countryside and Local Government, that we would introduce legislation to put a stop to this nonsense. Those commitments were given at a time when the Court of Appeal had ruled, in the case of Wheeler and Others v. Leicester City Council, that the action of the city council was not unlawful. But the subsequent reversal of that decision by the Law Lords has altered the balance of considerations.

I accept that the Law Lords' decision does not put beyond doubt the legality or otherwise of the sort of politically based discrimination that we are discussing, but it reinforces the view that local authorities, albeit democratically elected, are not free to take capricious or ill-founded decisions. Democracy is about responsibility, not irresponsibility, and the courts have shown that authorities must exercise their considerable powers in a reasonable manner. There is informal but distinguished legal advice that the existing law is adequate to deal with the more blatant examples of political discrimination such as the banning of contractors who are connected with the cruise nuclear missile programme or who have some South African connections.

This legal advice recognises that these are uncharted waters and acknowledges that a challenge to such local authority practices is unlikely, It would be a costly exercise and any contractor taking action risks being blacked by other Left-wing councils. This is relevant to the small firms that may feel that they cannot afford to take action or, if they did so, might find it impossible to obtain work from neighbouring authorities because they have a similar approach.

Our legal advisers say that there are two options. One is the hope that there is someone around with sufficient funds to make a challenge, and the other is to seek the advice of the Audit Commission with a view to getting policy guidance for authorities on this matter. I can give some hope about the possibility of action.

I recognise that companies and their trade organisations face a difficult problem in deciding whether to challenge such abuses in the courts. I am still not sure, although my hon. Friend has gone a long way towards convincing me, that legislation will be the answer. I appreciate that it may appear attractive to spell out in legislation the limitation on authorities' powers to act in this way, rather than rely on non-statutory tests such as that of reasonableness, to which my hon. Friend referred.

It is acknowledged that there are clear problems in framing legislation that would prohibit political discrimination without either restricting the imposition of desirable, although not strictly commercial, conditions concerning, for example, equal opportunities and health and safety. One recognises that, within that framework, one has to ask about the habits of firms tendering.

One must not be seen to be inviting the courts to say that anything that is not covered in such legislation would, by implication, be permissible. We have a case. and, although, I say this with hesitation, we must avoid rushing into what might be called bad law, and we must not forget that whatever laws we enact can be enforceable only through the courts.

We should not forget that, even if we introduce fresh legislation to prevent overt discrimination, it is much more difficult to prevent covert action. My hon. Friend mentioned the tender document issues by Leicester city council. I also have a copy. I found it daunting. It is thick and filled with questions. I imagine that it is unusually long and complicated. I have seen other documents put out by local authorities which set so many hurdles as to make it almost impossible for ordinary contractors even to contemplate filling them in. If such firms receive a 95-page document with 200 questions they are likely to decide that they have neither the management skills nor the available labour to fill it in.

Unlike some of the documents that I have seen, the Leicester city council one does not say that no contractor who works at a nuclear missile site or has connections with South Africa will receive work. It says:

"The City Council would wish, as far as practicable, to dissociate itself from anything which directly or indirectly facilitates the manufacture and location of nuclear installations and weapons in Europe. The Council recognises the legal implications of a boycott of firms connected with nuclear installations but wishes to draw the attention of its prospective contractors to its policies in this respect".

The contractor is then asked to state:

"whether or not he is involved directly or indirectly with contracts which facilitate the manufacture and location of nuclear installations and weapons".

There is similar provision in regard to trading with South Africa. The Leicester city council document contains the quite amazing statement:

"The Council would rather you did not tender for contracts if your company has interests in South Africa."

In the event of legislation which outlaws politically based discrimination being passed, it is clear that the determining factor could not be simply what is or is not said in the tender specification or the contract. It would have to be the action of the local authority. It would be for the aggrieved contractor to establish, through the courts if necessary, that he had been unfairly discriminated against. That seems to be precisely where we stand now.

It is and always has been a fundamental principle that, in the exercise of powers and duties conferred upon them, local authorities must act reasonably. My hon. Friend knows the confines of our interpretation of "reasonably". That fundamental principle underpins our local government system and we must think carefully before we undermine its generality by introducing legislation to tackle the egocentric actions of a mere handful of authorities.

We do not underestimate the importance of the problem. In his former capacity, my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Education and Science invited the Federation of Civil Engineering Contractors and the Building Employers Confederation to liaise with our officials with a view to establishing how best to proceed. We have said that if appropriate provisions can be drafted and it can be clearly demonstrated that the benefits from further legislation outweigh the risks that I have described, the Department will give every consideration to legislating at the earliest opportunity. I hope that that assurance will go some way towards answering my hon. Friend's points. I understand exactly what he means. If we do not take steps now to challenge that practice, the problems could soon become serious.

The FCEC and the Building Employers Confederation will submit their proposals to us shortly. The Department has not ruled out the possibility of legislation. However, since announcing last October that we were not minded to introduce legislation, my colleagues and I have often expressed the hope that a company would challenge in the courts this blatant abuse of the contractual process. My hon. Friend will share my considerable delight in learning recently that a coach operator, with the backing of the Bus and Coach Council, has obtained leave to commence proceedings for a judicial review of a decision by the London borough of Newham. I understand that the coach operator's grievance is that Newham borough council refused to renew an educational transport contract, because the firm also has a contract with the Metropolitan police and is transporting police officers to take up duty at the News International print works at Wapping.

That is a good example of my hon. Friend's point, which has been prayed in aid by several colleagues. Although I cannot predict the outcome of the judicial review, it may be found that the firm has been discriminated against for reasons other than the normal practices of commercial tendering — local authorities usually consider several tenders and choose the one that provides the service that they require at the lowest price. We are talking about competitive tendering in its honest sense. We await the outcome of the case with considerable interest. If the courts decide that there has been malpractice, other companies will have a clear legal precedent on which to take local authorities to court.

Although I appreciate the problems facing companies in deciding whether to take action, I hope that even now other firms will find people who are willing to support them and follow this example. Thereby, they will uphold the well-established principle that in this area, as in all others, local authorities must act reasonably and in accordance with the fiduciary duty that they owe to their ratepayers. I feel strongly about that fiduciary duty in relation to local government. During the past few years, the practices of some extreme local authorities have caused the problems my hon. Friend has clearly exposed in this interesting debate. Sadly, the Government and their supporters will have to rectify the position.

That is not a situation which the Government, nor, indeed, the large mass of local government, enter into with any great joy. Therefore, I hope that today's debate, introduced so eloquently by my hon. Friend, will be taken note of and that at some stage we shall happily reassert the fiduciary duty and the accountability that the locally elected people sensibly hold.

First, Mr. Deputy Speaker, I want to thank Mr. Speaker for giving me the opportunity to raise a matter of considerable importance to a large section of constituents whom I have the honour to represent. I also want to thank most sincerely my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary for his presence on the Front Bench this afternon. I am sure that the House will join with me in extending my condolences to him on the bereavement that he has suffered this week.

What is the purpose of this debate? I should like my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary to say that the Department has made a mistake, that it understands the reasons and arguments that I have put forward and that it will withdraw its letter of 4 March and grant-aid the extension of St. Michael's voluntary aided school at Bowthorpe in my constituency. However, that may be going a little further than my hon. Friend is prepared to go this afternoon, so perhaps he will concede that his Department will think again, taking into account all the arguments that I hope that I can put at his disposal this afternoon, and reconsider the decision not to grant-aid the school so that we may look to some not too distant time in the future when there will be a decision to grant-aid the school.

The subject of this debate has a great deal of support in my constituency. It is not often that within a constituency one has so much support for a particular project. I have the support of all the local residents within the area of Bowthorpe, of Norwich city council, the county council and the local education authority, the governors and the chairman of the governors of the school and all the denominations of the churches within my constituency.

I particularly want to thank the Reverend Ray Simpson, the chairman of the governors, who is in the Gallery today, and Dougy Underwood, the chairman of the Bowthorpe school campaign. They have given me considerable help in preparing the case.

Order. I am sorry to interrupt the hon. Gentleman, but I should point out that he ought not to refer to anyone who is outside the Chamber.

I beg your pardon, Mr. Deputy Speaker.

Bowthorpe is not just a housing estate adjoining part of Norwich. Although it is within Norwich it is a separate community. It was planned about 1972 and conceived as three separate villages, not part of Norwich. It comprised the villages of Clover Hill, Chapel Break, and Three Score. The development has started and Clover Hill already has 1,506 houses.

Chapel Break, the second development, has 361 houses already and a further extension is proposed. The population at Bowthorpe is now about 5,800, and with the further 1,370 houses planned will rise in six or seven years to about 13,000. It is important to bear in mind that the area contains a high proportion of young people, and as the House will appreciate, it is younger people who have children of school age.

The area is a separate community. Of course, it has great attachment to the city of Norwich, but it has its own separate community—its own village hall, community policeman, local churches and recreational facilities. There is very much the building up of a community spirit within the area—something that we do not often find on many housing developments.

The area is geographically separate from the city of Norwich, and there is little through traffic, it is very much pedestrianised. There is, of course, a ring road and there are roads within the area, but one does not go through Bowthorpe to get to another area. If someone wants to go to Norwich from Bowthorpe, he has to go out of the area, away from the city, on to the ring road and then back into the city. That is a slight geographical description of the area.

What is the problem that the area faces? I recognise the very difficult problem of the Department of Education and Science with falling school rolls throughout the country. Indeed, my local education authority is also having to grapple with that problem because there are falling rolls throughout Norwich. When proposals are made to close a school, that is done with a heavy heart. However, the argument of falling rolls cannot apply to Bowthorpe which is the most expanding area for school population in Norfolk.

Even within my constituency there are areas where the school population is falling. Within the last few days it was decided that the Gurney middle school would close in September. There is a great deal of regret about that, but I am explaining the point so that the Minister understands that we have accepted that, in some cases, it is necessary to close a school.

However, the area of Bowthorpe has an expanding child population and the figures are there for the Minister to see. We can calculate the number of Bowthorpe pupils who will go to St. Michael's school from 1987. The estimated number for 1987 is 373, increasing by 1992 to 490. Those figures are based on known children. With the new building development, the projected figure for 1987 is 430, rising by 1992 to 739, and all those children must be educated within the area.

In some of the other areas the rolls have fallen slightly. Four other schools are within striking distance of Bowthorpe-Blackdale middle, Wensum middle, Mill View middle and West Earlham middle—which have a capacity of about 1,120 pupils. One school is about to be closed so all the pupils from that school will have to he educated elsewhere. Although there is a surplus of places, the projected increase in the population and the projected increase in the number of children makes it clear that even if all the places at the other schools are occupied there will be still a surplus of children to places in the next five, six, or seven years. Those children have to be educated.

The local education authority will have a difficult problem. It will have to review its education policy. It will not be easy, without the permanent expansion of St. Michael's in my constituency, for the education authority to say to parents living close to St. Michael's that their children cannot attend the school which they can see from their bedroom window. It will be difficult to tell those parents that their children must attend a school two, three or more miles away, some distance from the area in which their friends live.

We have to look beyond this year and the late 1980s into the 1990s and consider what will be happening then. The Minister might say that we cannot spend the money now so he will put off the decision. But he can put it off only for a short time because it takes time to plan, build and equip a building and to organise the education policy to accommodate new classrooms.

The cost to which I referred earlier was estimated by the local education authority to be £525,000 at 1985 prices. We are looking for grant aid of about 85 per cent. towards the building. When St. Michael's was first built in 1981 — the Department accepted that that was only the first phase — the core facilities such as office accommodation and community areas, were provided on the basis of a school with 480 places, not 300 permanent places. We are asking only for an extension of the classroom space. The school is slightly inefficient because it is over-provided with those facilities. Its efficiency will be maximised when it has the 480 places.

The Department rightly has rules and regulations about the distances that anyone can be expected to travel. Two to three miles from the mid-point in Bowthorpe to one of the alternative schools does not sound far. However, I tried walking it the other day. I am relatively fit, I did not have children with me, it was a Sunday afternoon and it was not raining, but it took me 29 minutes to walk from St. Michael's school to the nearest alternative school.

Most parents would do the journey on foot and they would have to walk with their young children for at least 30 minutes. Anyone going by car has to go out of the Bowthorpe area, on to a busy ring road and back into the area of the other schools. I suggest that the local education authority and the Department of Education and Science would not want people to do that.

I hope that my hon. Friend the Minister will take account of all the points that I have made. We are talking about a community and an expanding population that will need to be educated. There are not sufficient places in the long term for all the prospective children to be educated. It would be silly of me not to accept that there are places close by now, but I hope that the Minister will take my arguments seriously and will understand the strength of local feeling, backed up by facts and figures. Like any responsible Member, I am looking not only at the present, but at what will be needed in my constituency in the next five or 10 years.

I hope that the Minister will look sympathetically at our case and at the representations of interested parties and will give me some grounds for optimism that he will review the decision that I am sorry that his Department had to take a few weeks ago.

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Norwich, South (Mr. Powley) for his kind personal remarks at the start of his speech. They are sincerely appreciated by me and my family.

I also thank my hon. Friend for raising a number of important matters on which I welcome the opportunity to reply. I am grateful for the close interest that he has shown in St. Michael's Church of England middle school. He has written many letters and lobbied robustly in its cause, and I am aware that the reasons for the rejection by my right hon. Friend the former Secretary of State of the St. Michael's extension proposal have not been fully appreciated locally.

St. Michael's is a voluntary aided school and the estimated cost of extending it, at £630,000 at November 1985 prices, would represent a major investment from the very limited resources available to the Department for voluntary aided provision.

When considering projects involving additional voluntary provision, as proposed at St. Michael's it is our policy first to consider whether there is a basic need for more places in the area. If such a basic need is proved, we consider whether there is a case for enhanced denominational provision. I am sure that my hon. Friend realises that even following the impending closure of the Gurney county middle school later this year, there will still be about 450 surplus middle school places available in the area.

All those places are within the three-mile statutory walking distance for children of middle school age. Indeed, some sections of the Bowthorpe estate are closer to schools with surplus places than they are to St. Michael's. Therefore, it appears to us that there is no basic need in the area as a whole. I appreciate that my hon. Friend's constituents are opposed to the prospect of pupils moving outside the immediate boundaries of the Bowthorpe estate, for their education.

On the question of denominational need, I am aware that, although designated as a Church of England establishment, in practice, St Michael's plays the role of the local community school. Indeed, when I met a deputation led by my hon. Friend it was made clear to me by the diocesan representatives that St Michael's operated a policy of admitting children from Bowthorpe in preference to pupils from other parts of the city, irrespective of denominational affiliation. No pupil had either been admitted to the school or, indeed, refused entry on denominational grounds. Against that background, therefore, it would seem to be self evident that, at the present time, there is not only no basic need for additional provision in west Norwich but no case for additional denominational school places.

The case for an enlargement of St Michael's cannot, however, be considered in isolation from the effect that such an enlargement would have on other schools in the area. My hon. Friend may recall that in our White Paper "Better Schools" which stated the Government's policies for school-based education in England, we stated our views, based on Her Majesty's Inspectorate's advice, regarding the desirable minimum size of certain types of schools necessary to maintain educational standards and make efficient use of resources. This advice was that middle schools providing education for pupils in the age group eight to 12, which is the system in operation in west Norwich, should not fall below two forms of entry—240 pupils. When they do so, it requires above average staffing levels and makes uneconomic use of other resources.

My hon. Friend is aware, I am sure, that, due to the general and sharp fall in demand in west Norwich, numbers on roll in four other middle schools in his constituency have reached the point where, in each case they have significantly fewer than two forms of entry. Latest returns collected by the Department in February this year show that total numbers at West Earlham middle school are down to 215, leaving 85 surplus places; attendance at Mill View middle school is very low, at 186 pupils, leaving 96 surplus places; Wensum middle school has only 209 on roll with 241 surplus places; and Blackdale middle school has 217 on roll with 43 surplus places.

I know that my hon. Friend cannot fail to agree that it does not make educational sense to allow the four schools that I have just mentioned to atrophy, or economic sense to add to the great number of surplus places currently available in his constituency within such close proximity of the Bowthorpe estate. If my right hon. Friend the then Secretary of State had approved the significant enlargement of St Michael's, such a decision would have had expensive consequences for the staffing levels and resources necessary to maintain adequate standards of education for pupils at West Earlham, Mill View, Wensum and Blackdale middle schools.

I have listened with great interest, and appreciate the arguments advanced so capably and well by my hon. Friend, but I believe that he appreciates the general situation that I have outlined and the need to protect the interest of all the children seeking middle school provision in the west Norwich area.

It is, of course, open to the governors of St Michael's to make fresh statutory proposals in the appropriate way for the enlargement of the school. Should such proposals be received, the Secretary of State would be required by law to consider them anew with due regard to the material facts and his general policies. I cannot, therefore, speculate on what his decision might be. However, I hope I have made clear why the recent statutory proposal was rejected.

I thank my hon. Friend most warmly for the way in which he has, in this case, as in so many others in recent years, represented his constituents' interests so capably and well. I hope that he will accept the response that I have had to make this afternoon.