I wanted to bring a brick with me into the Chamber this morning but I was told that that would not be permitted. That is unfortunate, as I wished to illustrate my speech with that brick. Thousands of bricks, cemented together, form one of the major aspirations of young people in Britain today. In the course of my remarks I shall give quite a long preamble on the history of housing and the phenomenon of first-time buying. I will make a few suggestions on how the first-time buyer might be helped.

Housing in Britain over the centuries has, until comparatively recently, been the preserve of the great landowners and freeholders who were responsible for putting up property in the cities and on the land. Going back to medieval times, most of the land was held by the great feudal lords or by small farmers. Several hundred years later on, houses were erected by small tradesmen by way of investment and were let out to agricultural workers for a few shillings a week.

Starting at the time of the industrial revolution, there was a great movement of people from the land into the cities. The housing in the cities was mainly for rent or to lease. Of course, most people's incomes then were such that they could not afford to buy. They had to rent or lease, and the cost of housing reflected that.

I want to dispel the myth of the idyllic country cottage. The sight of a cottage with a thatched roof and roses over the porch in a charming country village is a modern phenomenon. For the people who perhaps only 100 years ago had to live in such cottages, life must have been pretty grim. There were earth floors, no central heating, no insulation, no running water and the privy was outside at the bottom of the garden. How the wind must have whistled through the gaps around the windows in the winter.

Until comparatively recently, most housing was rented. Houses were erected to be rented or leased for a term of years, and that fact cannot be over-stressed. However, starting at about the time of the First World War, we had the first signs of rent control. Up till then, the vast majority of people had lived in rented accommodation, but the decline in the private rented sector began then and has gone on ever since.

Today, young people have both the inclination to become homeowners and, unfortunately, a lack of alternative. There are few other choices, so they simply have to become home buyers. This puts a great deal of stress on them, particularly when they are just starting out in work, and their salaries are not all that great. Therefore, although the inclination is there, the means may be lacking. Young people living with their families may want to move out, and this can generate stress and turmoil within the family home.

Another factor at work is divorce. It is greatly to be regretted that this is ever on the increase. About one in three marriages end in divorce, and this has a knock-on effect in that those households become divided and there are then two people seeking somewhere to live separately. The chances are that each person will be looking for a fairly small place as their means will be divided because of divorce. Therefore, many of them will be competing with the first-time buyer.

Yet another factor is mobility of population. This started with the coming of the motor car and with the increasing affluence ever since. Between the wars was the age of the country house weekend. Rich people would go off and stay with their rich friends in their country houses. Although that may be a good thing socially, it was not in terms of comfort. Many of those country houses were as poor in amenities as the agricultural workers' cottages, especially in the lack of heating. In the winter, many of them were freezing cold.

Nowadays, an increasingly affluent population has decided that it is a good thing to get out of London for the weekend, so people buy themselves a cottage somewhere in Dorset, Wiltshire, Berkshire, Gloucestershire or Hampshire—anywhere within fairly easy reach of London—and go off for their weekends there, which is nice for them. Unfortunately, it has a bad effect on local people. They do not have the purchasing power of buyers from London, so they cannot afford to buy. They may want to stay in their home areas, but if they cannot buy, they have to move. That has a shattering effect on local communities.

Unfortunately, the housing market is not perfect. It suffers from many distortions. One of the main ones is the planning system, starting with the first Town and Country Planning Act in 1947. You would not permit me, Mr. Deputy Speaker, to talk at great length about the planning system, but it means that in areas of great demand, planners will often refuse permission to build for various reasons, with the result that the supply is restricted. The increasing demand in an increasingly affluent society builds up, but if supplies are continually pinched, inevitably property prices will rise.

This is all very well if one is already on the housing ladder. It is marvellous if one already owns one's own home, no matter how humble it may be. One can sit back and chuckle and rub one's hands and think, "I paid only £50,000 for this cottage a couple of years ago, and now it is worth £80,000." All I can say is, "Bully for you." That is fine, but it has an effect on those at the bottom end of the market. They see one of the major aspirations slipping ever further away from them.

Another distortion in the market is mortgage interest tax relief, which costs the Treasury about £4·5 billion a year. It is not my purpose to attack this relief, which has done a great deal to help aspiring home owners, but on the other hand, if it did not exist, that much demand would have been taken out of the market and property prices might be lower. Moreover, the relief has now been restricted to one allowance per property. Again, I have no quarrel with that, but it also has an effect on the bottom end of the market. Two young people who may want to set up home together and who need all the help they can get no longer have that extra help available.

Such is the pressure on the housing market that some local authorities have to offer large capital sums to attract staff. They cannot fill vital posts because staff who want to come down from the midlands or the north cannot afford to buy in London. There have been instances of councils offering up to £75,000 towards buying as an inducement to staff to come to live in their areas.

Could not many of the social problems to which my hon. Friend has referred arise from housing shortages that could have been cured earlier if the Government had set about providing more accommodation for rent by means of a more drastic reform, and perhaps a repeal, of the Rent Acts? Rented accommodation should be available for people who otherwise are congested in the first-time buyers' market.

I am grateful to my hon. Friend, for that point and I agree with him. It is absolutely right and I hope to cover that matter in rather more detail.

I have spoken about councils having to offer large capital sums to staff and there is a similar phenomenon with companies. I have heard that some of the richer companies are now buying blocks of flats in London and the south-east to house their staff.

Another matter that impinges heavily on first-time buyers is the conveyancing system, which is uncertain, expensive and wearisome. It is high time that this most absurd system was looked into. It is immensely expensive and involves groups of people who are not exactly well known for speedy action—I almost said, speedy and efficient action. At least two lots of solicitors, estate agents, surveyors, local authorities and the land registry are involved, and the whole process can drag on and on. The worst feature of it is that at the end of the business, the buyer cannot be assured that he will get his property. He may find that after spending hundreds, if not thousands, of pounds on these incidental expenses, the chap from whom he is buying has decided to withdraw the property from the market or accept a higher offer.

The cost of conveyancing a mansion in Hampstead selling at £750,000 and the work involved in the process is exactly the same as that for a two-bedroomed house in Walthamstow selling at £70,000. This conveyancing system is a racket that has been going on for far too long. It is high time something was done about it, but unfortunately I cannot go into that in great detail.

I want to ram the point even further home by quoting a story that I heard about a chain of purchasers. We all know about those wretched chains. The man at the top end of the chain was selling a large house and buying an even larger house somewhere else, but he could not proceed because his purchaser could not proceed as he had not sold his property and so on, all the way down the line. Being quite bright, the man looked into the matter and discovered that the man at the end of the chain was trying to sell his small cottage in Wales for £18,000, but could not find a buyer. The man at the top end of the chain therefore bought the cottage at the bottom end of the chain and the whole series of transactions then went through. It is absurd that those chains should exist, and they only exist because of our ridiculous conveyancing system.

Yet another factor which is no help to the first-time buyer is that of so-called gentrification. Gentrification has its good effects. I imagine that possibly at no time in its history has so much of London been so carefully lived in and loved. Areas of London in which many people would not have been seen dead a few years ago are now highly popular and the streets are full of builders' skips. That is fine, but it means that property prices in those areas, which were once the cheaper areas, are also on the increase and once again, that has a bad effect on the first-time buyer.

Finally, in the course of this long preamble, I want to mention one or two figures. About 8·5 million borrowers benefit from mortgage interest tax relief, of whom about half a million receive multiple relief. Those half a million people will no longer enjoy that relief. The average dwelling in the south-east costs about £56,000 and the average mortgage is about £36,000. In the south-east, almost 70 per cent. of first-time buyers need a second income to step on to the home ownership ladder. Many of them raise the deposit from parents, friends and relatives, but it is becoming an increasingly difficult process and it worries me that young people are borrowing money at multiples of perhaps four times or even four and a half times their income to obtain a mortgage. Anyone borrowing on that sort of multiple is laying up trouble for himself. The vast majority of his disposable income will go on paying off the mortgage and an increase in interest rates could be completely disastrous.

Having raised a number of points, I shall now, in the true Conservative tradition, suggest some answers. I welcome the proposals in the Housing Bill for the expansion of the private rented sector. In my view, that is absolutely vital to help young people who want ultimately to become first-time buyers. There are many old images of the private rented sector. One such image is that of the old landlady, a fag drooping from the corner of her mouth and her feet clad in dirty slippers, shuffling around the house in a dirty old dress with her hair tied up in what looks like a dishcloth, standing outside the door on a Friday evening, breathing heavily, hammering away on the door and demanding her rent. That landlady was perhaps a figure of the 1950s, but she barely exists today.

Another bugbear is that of Rachmanism. The very sound of the word makes that concept sound even worse. One can really spit it out and make it sound horrible. Mr. Rachman was an extremely unpleasant creature, but it must be said that people like him can thrive only where the law has stepped in a misguided attempt to "protect" tenants. If the law did not give tenants security of tenure for life and, in some instances, for two or three generations, if it did not insist that the landlord spend large sums of money on maintaining the structure of the property while, on the other hand, decreeing that the rent he could charge should be limited to a ridiculous amount, there would be no incentive at all for landlords to try to get rid of their tenants.

There would then be no need for people like Mr. Rachman to go around with large dogs, frightening tenants and cutting off water and electricity supplies. If the landlord knew that he could strike a bargain with his tenants over such things as the length of the term and the amount of rent to be paid, he would have no need to do any of that because he would know that, at the end of the term, he could get his property back if he wished.

Our opponents will say that that will mean that rent levels will soar. The rent levels will rise, but, in a constituency such as mine, the rent levels will be at the rate that the local people can afford. It is absurd to say that west end rent levels will apply in a place such as Walthamstow.

The Government scheme called Homeloan to help first-time buyers has not proved to be a great success and I suggest that it should be scrapped in favour of another scheme. Although the Treasury might not like this alternative, I shall put it to my hon. Friend. At present, if someone buys a property for, say, £50,000, assuming that he pays interest at the rate of 10 per cent., he will pay £5,000 a year in interest, on which he will receive tax relief. Let us then take the case of someone who rents a property for £4,000 a year, which is perhaps all that he can afford. If he can save the difference of £1,000 a year and the Treasury then adds to that the amount of tax relief that he would have received if he had paid interest on a mortgage, he will accumulate a capital sum that will be of great use to him when his income eventually reaches the stage that he can put his foot on the first rung of the home-owning ladder.

Housing associations should be expanded. Their activities are excellent and they are well trusted by the public. They operate shared ownership schemes under which one buys 25 per cent. of the freehold of a property, pays rent on the remainder and then buys slices of the freehold when one's income permits. Some enlightened local authorities also operate such schemes. Those schemes are also useful to help local people in country towns because in some cases they ensure that they can never buy 100 per cent. of the freehold. They can perhaps buy 90 per cent. of the freehold and then move on. That means that the schemes will always be there for the use of local first-time buyers.

In conclusion I should like to point out that in 1986–87, there were 670,000 first-time buyers, the highest ever annual figure. I wish also to stress the importance of the first-time buyer. Like Atlas, he hears the world of housing on his shoulders.

I am grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Walthamstow (Mr. Summerson) for giving us the opportunity to debate this important subject this morning. I welcome the constructive and thoughtful way in which he approached this subject which is close to the hearts of many people. He has clearly reflected on the problems facing those seeking to buy their first house and I am sure that none of us would disagree with his general theme of the importance of the first-time buyer.

My hon. Friend has quoted examples of young people, wanting to take their first step into home ownership, but finding it difficult to do so. I can assure hon. Members that I am well aware, from my own constituency surgeries, that it requires real commitment, hard saving and discipline, for a young couple to be able to buy their first home. I admire the commitment of all those who achieve their goal.

I want first to remind hon. Members of the Government's enormous success, since 1979, in spreading home ownership more widely. There are almost 3 million more owner-occupied homes today, than there were in May 1979. That is an increase of 25 per cent. Home ownership has reached its highest-ever levels—in England 66 per cent. In 1975, the figure was only 57 per cent.

Of course, part of that outstanding growth in home ownership has come about through our right to buy. More than 1,100,000 homes provided by the public sector have now been bought by the tenants who were living in them. The right to buy has extended home ownership to millions of people who would never before have dreamed of being able to own their own homes. They are a special class of first-time buyers: people, often into middle age, whose children were about to strike out on their own, and who perhaps had been able to put something aside for savings; people who otherwise would have had no choice but to remain council tenants for the rest of their lives. The popularity of the right to buy is such that even the Labour party has been forced to accept that it is now an established part of the housing scene.

Besides the people who have bought their council homes, there are another 2·9 million who have bought for the first time on the open market. Last year, there were some 515,000 such buyers, compared with 390,000 in 1979. So there are still huge numbers of first-time buyers who are finding the means of buying their first homes, despite all the stories that young people can no longer afford to buy.

I know, of course, that the picture varies across the country. First-time buyers in London, who are paying an average of £56,700 for a home, might well envy those in the northern region, where the average price is less than half as much.

I receive quite a number of letters from hon. Members whose constituents describe the difficulties which rising house prices are causing them or, often, their sons and daughters wishing to set up home. There is often an implicit request that the Government should "do something" about house price increases. All manner of people are blamed for rising prices: the estate agents, inevitably; the better-off outsider who can afford to move into the area; excessive pay in the City.

Letters sometimes urge intervention in the market. I have to remind the writers that home owners trade their homes in a pretty free market. What one can get for one's house depends on what someone else will pay. One may use advisers who will encourage one to expect a high price, but in the end, it is another family, not big business, the professions or the state, that decides whether the price is acceptable.

We reject suggestions that the Government should step in and interfere with deals freely negotiated between ordinary people. No Government have attempted to do that. I was intrigued to see a report, which came out in August 1945, of the interdepartmental committee on the selling price of houses. It was asked

"To consider, and report, about whether it is practical to control effectively the selling price of houses …".

It came up with a scheme involving the district valuer valuing one's house. There were to be penalties for paying more than the permitted price.

It stated

"It may be considered desirable to empower local authorities to investigate cases brought to their notice and to institute proceedings".

It concluded:

"Any form of contracting out of the scheme should be prohibited"

and

"Machinery could be provided whereby enforcement officers examine the certificates and declarations lodged and also the price lists or inventories relating to any furniture or fixtures sold".

That sounds positively Orwellian. Would anybody want that kind of regime? Not even the 1945 Labour Government were prepared to pursue that idea.

One remedy for rising house prices that is put to us is that more houses should be built. That suggestion, of course, comes more often from the housebuilders than from those who might live in the houses. There is obviously substance in the idea, but how much effect on prices would it really have? Each year, about 1,400,000 homes change hands, and about 1,200,000 of them are existing houses. So the builders' share of the whole market is relatively limited. A 50 per cent. increase in the number of new houses built would lead to less than a 10 per cent. increase in the number offered for sale. In most areas, it is simply not plausible that building more new houses would make the critical difference between present-day prices and prices which more people could afford.

Even if the new houses were to be built, what land would be used for them? The greatest pressures are in the areas where there is the strongest resistance to new development. Of course, we want to get more development back into inner-city sites. We want to prise out of local authorities' hands the tracts of vacant land which they still own, and which ought to be put to good use. Our Land Register powers are getting more land on to the market, but some of the land would have to come from green field sites, and enormous controversy is always involved in such decisions.

It is the job of the planning system to ensure an adequate supply of land for housing, while protecting the environment and, in particular, firmly maintaining the extensive green belts. That is one reason why we continue to press for development to be channelled towards our older towns and cities. This can both assist the process of urban regeneration and help conserve the best countryside. Over the past two years or so, some 46 per cent. of land for new housing throughout the country has been land which was previously developed or was vacant land in built-up areas. In the south-east, 55 per cent. of new housing is on such land. My hon. Friend referred to the fact that the planning system restricts supply. However, the planning system is simply responding to the wishes of the public, as I am sure my hon. Friend recognises.

It is simply not possible to accommodate all demands in the inner cities. Some new sites will still be needed to cater for legitimate housing requirements, including those of local people.

My hon. Friend also referred to the fact that tax relief on interest is available to would-be purchasers who take on mortgages. I am glad that he recognised that that tax relief assists first-time buyers. We are committed to retaining it.

Let me turn now to what I see as the more promising ways of helping first-time buyers. I mentioned earlier the need to get developable land out of the hands of local authorities and into the hands of the private sector, which can develop it. Since 1980, we have encouraged local authorities and new towns to sell vacant housing land, especially for housing which new buyers might afford. The results have been quite encouraging: 12,600 acres have been sold to developers, which is likely to be enough for about 150,000 houses.

We have particularly encouraged local authorities and new towns to enter into licence agreements with developers to provide housing aimed at those on the borderline of home ownership. By using a licence the developer does not have to pay for the land at the outset, so that saves interest charges, and the benefit can be passed on to the customer. In addition, the local authority usually has the right to put forward the names of potential buyers for the first few weeks that the property is offered for sale. The local authority can often put in the land at less than its market value, with the saving being passed on to the house buyer. More than 53,000 homes have been sold on that basis since 1980.

Another valuable way of helping first-time buyers is shared ownership. We cleared the way for that in 1980, and since then there have been some 43,000 shared ownership purchases. The majority of these schemes have been provided by housing associations; and I am sure that my hon. Friend, who advocated extending the role of housing associations, will welcome the initiatives on housing associations that we are taking in the Housing Bill.

Shared ownership is a means of part-owning, part-renting, a home. It can be particularly useful to first-time buyers who cannot afford to buy outright. Shared ownership schemes have allowed people to increase the share of their home, when they can afford it, and eventually to become full owners.

Shared ownership schemes have been run for some years by housing associations and local authorities. In the Housing and Planning Act 1986 we cleared the way for shared ownership to be offered by the private sector. There have been interesting developments at Milton Keynes on those lines. I very much hope that the private sector will do more in the future to expand the opportunities for shared ownership.

Here I would like to commend two of the building societies, the Woolwich Equitable, and Nationwide Anglia, for their contribution to helping first-time buyers through a shared equity scheme. The societies lend on terms which mean lower payments by the borrower, in return for giving up part of the growth in the value of the home they buy. That is a welcome addition to the alternatives available to first-time buyers, and I hope that their present schemes, being run on a limited scale, will prove successful and that more will follow.

My hon. Friend mentioned the cost and length of time involved in the conveyancing process, and he knows, this is a matter in which the Government have consistently taken an interest. We are naturally concerned to ensure that house buying is as quick, simple and easy as is practicable. I believe that we have made considerable progress in that area since we took office in 1979. Perhaps I could remind hon. Members of some of the improvements that have come about in the process of buying a house, which enable would-be first-time buyers to buy homes more quickly and at less cost.

My noble and learned Friend Lord Hailsham, who was then the Lord Chancellor, set up a committee on conveyancing in February 1984 which produced a report in January 1985 on conveyancing simplifications. Following that report, my noble and learned Friend asked the Law Commission to establish a conveyancing standing committee, with a continuing remit to seek and promote ways of improving the conveyancing system. The conveyancing standing committee has done some very useful work, which I believe will be of genuine help to people trying to buy their first house, who are daunted by the conveyancing process.

The committee has, for instance, produced useful proposals on pre-contract deposits. The idea is that the prospective purchaser and the prospective seller agree to put down deposits in advance of exchanging contracts on the property. If one party pulls out of the deal, he or she forfeits the original deposit.

The conveyancing standing committee also published a valuable report on the Scottish system of buying and selling property. Many first-time buyers suffer from the length of time that it takes from the point when their offer is accepted by the seller to the exchange of binding contracts. The difficulty is, of course, that the seller may pull out before contracts are exchanged, but after the purchaser has incurred search fees, solicitors' fees and survey costs.

Under the Scottish system, binding contracts are exchanged much earlier in the process. Many people have not realised that there is no reason in law why this system should not he adopted in England. If buyers and sellers want to use the Scottish system, they can do so. The value of the committee's report is that it brings out that fact and explains how conveyancers and their clients can use it. It should be said that there are advantages and disadvantages to the Scottish system. The reason for delaying the exchange of contracts in England is that there are advantages to both parties. However, I hope that those involved in the house-buying process—both the individuals and those advising them—will consider whether the Scottish system would be better suited to their needs and their concerns.

I believe that we are also seeing progress in the area of speeding up local authority searches, an area which has given much concern to hon. Members and to the public at large. For many people attempting to buy their first home, this is the stumbling block, especially in the competitive house market in London, the south-east and other areas with rapidly rising house prices. We must not forget that this is not a universal problem. Many local authorities can already respond quickly and efficiently. However, there are some authorities whose response time could be shorter. The solution which has often been recommended is to computerise the records which local authorities need to draw on, in responding to searches.

Until recently, that solution was very sensible in theory, but local authorities did not feel able to implement computerisation because of the costs. but this obstacle may now have been overcome. At least one private company is now offering a computerisation package to local authorities without any need for expenditure on the part of the local authority. The initial capital outlay is funded by a private investor, and is recouped by a premium on each search fee. I am sure that most house buyers who might otherwise face a critical delay would be prepared to pay something extra for the prospect of a speedy search.

We have, of course, ended the solicitors' monopoly on conveyancing by introducing competition from a new profession of licensed conveyancers. There is no doubt that, with the prospect of competition, conveyancing charges have fallen dramatically. some commentators have estimated a fall of about 30 per cent. Competition on conveyancing has also been enhanced by the relaxation of the rules on advertising by solicitors.

A further benefit to first-time buyers has been the staged reduction that we have made in the level of stamp duty. As hon. Members know, stamp duty often vies with solicitors' fees as the single most expensive administrative cost for the house buyer, especially in the south of the country. The Government have reduced stamp duty in successive Budgets. When we first came to office in 1979, it ranged between 1 and 2 per cent. for houses costing more than £20,000, on a sliding scale. Since 1984, there has been a common level for all those house purchases over £30,000.

Perhaps we take it for granted that finance for house purchase is much more readily available than in the past. The mortgage queues which blighted so many people's aspirations are now a thing of the past. Increased competition from banks and new specialist mortgage lenders has meant that those seeking a mortgage have a wider variety of sources and types of mortgage.

Lastly, I should like to say something about renting. My hon. Friend the Member for Walthamstow and my hon. Friend the Member for Orpington (Mr. Stanbrook) were quite right about the role which the private rented sector can play in meeting housing needs. A couple of years ago, some commentators suggested that some people felt they had to get into home ownership sooner than they would really have liked, simply because of the lack of decent rented housing. They were people who could afford to pay quite a lot more than fair rents, but perhaps not as much as a mortgage would have cost.

What we need for these people is a revival by the private sector of the rented housing market. That will give them a genuine choice between owning and renting. The measures in the Housing Bill are designed to make private renting a real possibility again, by sweeping away rent controls for new lettings. Landlords will have the opportunities to offer a decent product at a reasonable price.

The shipbuilding and marine engineering industry is of considerable importance to the economy of the lower Clyde. The industry once dominated the local economy, but in recent years it has suffered what appears to be a remorseless decline. That fall from economic grace, coupled with losses suffered by other local traditional industries, is reflected in the unemployment statistics for my constituency.

Male unemployment is about 25·5 per cent. The overall rate—in both cases I use Department of Employment figures—is about 19·9 per cent. In the most dismal of all league tables—unemployment in parliamentary constituencies—my constituency is 15th from the top. I want my constituency to tumble down that league table. I want it to be at the bottom of the unemployment league.

It is my firm belief that if the Government take the decisions that I advocate upwards of 1,000 highly skilled jobs for adult males could be created within the next 15 months in the shipbuilding and marine engineering industry on the lower Clyde.

During the Prime Minister's visit to Greenock seven weeks ago she claimed that the newly announced enterprise zone on the lower Clyde would lead to the creation of about 3,000 jobs over the next 10 years. Naturally I welcomed that announcement. However, the enterprise zone will create entirely different jobs from those that I want to discuss. To be more specific, I am referring to job opportunities that could be realised within the near future at Clark Kincaid at Greenock, Appledore Ferguson at Port Glasgow and Scott Lithgow at Port Glasgow.

I readily accept that the market plays a critical role in the scheme of things. I agreed with the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster when he said last week:

"The prospects of having a viable shipbuilding industry, which we would all like to see, remain extremely uncertain because of the conditions of world markets.—[Official Report, 19 May 1988; Vol. 133, c. 1114.]

No one with any kind of knowledge of shipping and shipbuilding could dispute that observation. I believe that the British shipbuilding industry will for ever remain a shadow of its former self. The epicentre of shipbuilding is to be found firmly in the south-east of Asia.

British ship owners have a major role to play in the market. They should order their vessels from British yards. Given the continuing decline of shipbuilding in Great Britain, some British ship owners will soon be able to say, to their secret relief, that no British shipyard has the capability to build the specialist ships that they require.

It will be interesting to see where BP, which has flagged out its tanker fleet, will place its orders for new vessels. Recently, Sir Peter Walters, chairman of BP, was whingeing about the possibility of a Kuwaiti national being appointed to the BP board. He might elicit more sympathy from the maritime communities of Britain if he were to re-register his fleet under the British flag and order his replacement vessels from British yards.

I return to the subject of Greenock and Clark Kincaid. A marine engineering capability should be an important element in a domestic shipbuilding industry. In that context, it is worth noting that Harland and Wolff has mothballed its marine engineering facility—I refer to the British shipbuilding industry and not to that of the United Kingdom. British-built vessels, that require slow-speed engines or large medium-speed diesels should be fitted with engines built in Great Britain. Clark Kincaid is an outstanding builder of marine engines, and it is important to remember that it does not receive shipbuilding intervention fund support. It has completed all its engine contracts on time, within cost budgets, and to a very high standard of quality control. At present, it is building the engines for the two container ships being constructed at Govan for the Chinese Government. I am able to inform the Minister, with justifiable pride, that the Chinese superintendent engineers billeted in Greenock are delighted with the test bed performance of the first of those two engines—and I mean delighted, for I am not indulging in hyperbole. That first engine will be delivered to Govan in August, when the ship will be ready for its installation.

The quality of Clark Kincaid's engines is matched by that of its industrial relations. In my view—and I have some experience of these matters—the yard has a first-class shop stewards' committee, ably led by my old and trusted friend councillor Robert Jackson. However, the firm is handicapped by the growing tendency within the EC to order marine engines outwith the Community. The Minister knows that 94 slow-speed engines were imported into the EC in the period 1981–86. From 1981 until the present, Clark Kincaid has manufactured only 23 engines. Over that same period the company has suffered a 62 per cent. reduction in its labour force. In addition, there have been long periods of short-time working.

It appears that some EC shipyards, and particularly those in West Germany and Denmark—and I am trying not to be a little Scotlander—have received state subsidies to close the cost gap with the far east. The supply of engines to the EC at uneconomic prices from the far east and from Poland should be investigated by the European Commission. I shall be interested to hear what the Minister has to say about that matter.

There is a fine relationship between Kincaid's and Govan. I was particularly interested to hear what the Chancellor of the Duchy said in last week's debate about the negotiations between Govan. British Shipbuilders, and the Norwegian firm of Kvaerner Industries. The right hon. and learned Gentleman said:

"I can point out to the House that not only has Kvaerner made it clear that it would contemplate two orders for gas-carrying ships in the yard—and there must be hopes of more orders—but it wants to make west Scotland the centre of its gas technology business. If that were to happen, there would be prospects for many more jobs on the Clyde."—[Official Report, 19 May 1988; Vol. 133, c. 1115.]

I seek today a ministerial assurance that Kvaerner will be persuaded by the Government to buy the liquid petroleum gas vessel engines from Clark Kincaid, which is just down the Clyde from Govan. Will the Government impress upon the Norwegians the need to order those engines from Greenock if they are successful in their bid for Govan? If that were part of the deal struck between British Shipbuilders and Kvaerner, Kincaid's job prospects would be enhanced, and such an agreement would ripen Kincaid's chances of being purchased in turn. If Kincaid, like Govan, is to be sold off, naturally I want the best possible deal for my constituents who work there.

Another deal in the offing would be of much greater importance to Clark Kincaid than the Kvaerner deal and it would involve the company recruiting 200 to 300 more workers. I refer to negotiations between North East Shipbuilders Ltd. and a Cuban shipping company for an order for 10 vessels worth more than £100 million. Derek Harris, the industrial editor of The Times, wrote on Monday:

"Negotiations on the Cuban order are expected to reach a crucial stage early next month,"—

I believe he has the timing wrong, but that is what he wrote—

"but what is likely to prove the biggest hurdle is whether BS can persuade the Government to put in cash under the European Economic Community's intervention route."

On Tuesday, the industrial correspondent of Lloyd's List emphasised the importance to Clark Kincaid of that order when he wrote:

"The Cuban order would not only be a boost to NESL but it would also mean the possibility of a 10 Sulzer 5RTA 48 engine order for the BS engine building subsidiary, Clark Kincaid, which is also up for sale."

If Kincaid were to receive the Kvaerner and Cuban orders for 12 or 13 engines, not only would the company be able to retain jobs but it would need to recruit more than 200 highly skilled men. Incidentally, the Minister well knows that a large number of companies scattered throughout Great Britain would benefit enormously from those two deals.

United Kingdom suppliers of marine equipment likely to benefit would include Peter Brotherhood of Peterborough, which manufactures turbo alternators, NEI Clarke Chapman at Gateshead, producing cranes; Green's of Wakefield, which produces boilers; Stone Manganese of Birkenhead, which manufactures propellers; British Steel, for the plate and the bar needed; and Marconi of Chelmsford, which produces navigational gear.

What is the Government's attitude towards the negotiations between British Shipbuilders and the Cubans? Is it, as some of my hon. Friends fear, that the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry and the Chancellor of the Duchy are reluctant to give their support to British Shipbuilders? One of my hon. Friends has been informed by a number of journalists that clear signals are being given by the Department of Trade and Industry that the Government may refuse even a 28 per cent. contract subsidy under the EEC sixth directive.

Is there any truth in that speculation, and is the Department reluctant financially to support that deal, if it is struck? What is the Government's position? Will the Minister give me plain answers to those worrying questions and concerns? I offer no apology for voicing those anxieties, because they are felt by many, not only in the north-east but on the lower Clyde. It is plain that the Cuban deal could have an enormously beneficial effect for many hundreds of my constituents, let alone the people of Sunderland.

Appledore Ferguson of Port Glasgow is another yard, mentioned by the Chancellor the other day, which may be sold in the near future. If that happens, I want the best possible deal for its 315 employees, for they, too, would be purchased, and it is right and proper that I should defend their interests. Can the Minister tell me anything about the approaches by potential purchasers? As with Clark Kincaid, I do not want any encouragement to be given to asset strippers, who are about as welcome as loan sharks in my community.

This is a specialist yard, or rather one of two such yards called Appledore Ferguson. The other is in Devon. The two yards specialise in ferries and aggregate dredgers, and there is an important niche in the market for both yards. For example, the Devon yard has received two orders for aggregate dredgers, and the company is also negotiating an order for a ferry for Mauritius. Ferguson is the only British yard on a short list of three. I believe that the Government have promised ATP financial assistance, but can the Minister quicken the signing of the deal? If it is successful, the vessel will be built in the Newark yard in Port Glasgow. Can the Minister say anything about the negotiations? Will he also say what information he has about the decision of the Orkney Islands council to place orders for two or more ferries in the near future?

Given that Scottish Office money is involved, I suppose that that question ought to be directed to the Secretary of State for Scotland. Ferguson, however, is keenly interested in the orders. I have been told that the islands council is seeking tenders from foreign shipyards, which is an extraordinary state of affairs. Has the Minister any information on that? Can he also give any information about the contract for a new British Antarctic research survey vessel? That order will also be keenly chased by a number of British yards. Naturally, I hope that Ferguson, with its research ship construction experience, will secure the order, but I should like to hear something about the Department's involvement in the tendering. Other ship owners are showing an interest in the possibility of vessels being built by Appledore Ferguson, and I remain confident that the yard will survive—and, I hope, prosper.

Scott Lithgow, unfortunately, has had a chequered history. As the Minister well knows, it is now on a care-and-maintenance basis; in other words, it is close to being mothballed. Between March 1984 and today, employment at the yard has dropped from about 5,000 to just 100, with the loss of only two days' work owing to industrial disputes. That is a remarkable record, given the dreadful changes in the yard's fortunes. Scott Lithgow has the best shipbuilding union agreement in Great Britain, with complete flexibility and interchangeability of trade within the men's individual skills. The yard was treated very shabbily by the Ministry of Defence recently. As a result of that squalid treatment it lost its naval design and building capability, and can no longer tender for such orders.

I have to say, with considerable regret, that there is no prospect of offshore work for the yard. The only recent merchant work contract was the conversion of the Cunard container ship Atlantic Conveyor. That was an astonishing success story, which showed clearly what the yard can now do when given the chance. The contract was completed on time and to budget, 65 days elapsing between the arrival of the vessel and its departure. The steel work productivity achieved was better than that of any other British yard, and as good as the best in Europe. Incidentally, Scott Lithgow beat one of the conversions undertaken by a yard in South Korea, although in fairness I should point out that the South Koreans were hampered by a strike for better terms and conditions. What used to be known as the British malaise is now becoming the Asian malaise.

As a result of being denied access to intervention fund support, Scott Lithgow has had to pursue other types of contract. At present it is pursuing two orders, one for a floating jetty to be built for the Royal Naval armaments depot at Coulport, across the Clyde from me, and the other for a floating hotel for Antigua. On the floating jetty contract, it must be said that the consultants to the Property Services Agency, Rendell, Palmer and Tritton, are civil engineers and unashamedly biased in favour of concrete. Scott Lithgow, along with Harland and Wolff, bid for a jetty to be built of steel. In my view, there are major problems associated with the use of concrete in that kind of environment. For example, alterations either during building or later will be very difficult. It is possible to drill or burn a hole through steel, but what is to be done with concrete? There could be a corrosion of steel reinforcing rods in later life, a problem encountered recently in the construction of the Tay bridge. Nevertheless, I think that the PSA will plump for a concrete structure, which, I regret to say, is bad news for Scott Lithgow and Harland and Wolff.

Scott Lithgow's submission on the floating hotel project must be close to arriving on the Minister's desk, and I am confident that his platoon in the Box will be able to help him. I almost called it a battalion, but "platoon" is more appropriate. There is an opportunity for Scott Lithgow to become a leader in this new form of maritime construction. The only other floating hotel in service is moored above the Great Barrier Reef, and is much smaller and much less luxurious than the one sought by Scott Lithgow's American buyers. A number of international hoteliers are planning to order similar hotels.

Scott Lithgow, if given the opportunity, would build the first of the luxury suite accommodation type of floating hotel. The competition from Europe, I need hardly say, is fierce and heavily subsidised. Can the Minister tell me what is to happen to the Scott Lithgow submission? Does it meet with ministerial favour and approval? The people of Inverclyde are anxious to hear the answers to those questions.

I estimate that if the project goes ahead, Scott Lithgow will need to recruit upwards of 800 people. With my estimate of Clark Kincaid's labour requirement, that gives a figure of 1,000 new jobs for the lower Clyde. Here is a superb opportunity for the Government to grasp. I know that it is the easiest thing in the world for a Back Bencher to offer solutions to problems which seem to bedevil Ministers—the Scottish Nationalists indulge in such behaviour all the time—but I assure the Minister that I am not engaging in that stupid game. On the contrary, as an honest and open critic. of the Government, I genuinely believe that the case that I have presented today is a good one. The Government have little support in Scotland. An increasing number of Scots believe that the Prime Minister and her Ministers secretly despise us for our electoral rebelliousness.

Even at this late stage, the Government could display the magnanimity that was extolled by the Prime Minister earlier this week when she addressed the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland.

In her Greenock speech, the Prime Minister referred to 3,000 jobs being created on the lower Clyde. I welcome that announcement. The Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster referred to jobs being created on the Clyde by the Kvaerner takeover. I am delighted to hear that if the takeover goes ahead, jobs will be created. I offer the Government the prospect of 1,000 highly skilled jobs for workers to be recruited within the next 12 months. How will they react?

I thank the hon. Member for Greenock and Port Glasgow (Dr. Godman) for taking the opportunity to raise a matter which is important not just to him and to his constituents but to many people on the Clyde.

It is best to begin with something on which we can agree. The hon. Gentleman and I share a commitment to the creation and multiplication of highly skilled jobs in his part of the country. Engineering skills are embedded in the very chromosomes of the people of that region. The skills that he commended at such places as Clark Kincaid are well appreciated all over the world.

The question is how to produce a framework within which jobs can be maximised and which can give to the various yards and sites along the Clyde the chance to succeed in what we all agree is a very tough market which has been vigorously attacked, particularly by Pacific basin countries. We both agree that the creation of highly skilled jobs and the retention of those jobs is important for the region and that policies introduced either on a pan-European basis or on a United Kingdom basis should be directed towards providing help, bearing in mind that we have to live in the real world, the competitive world.

The hon. Gentleman voiced his concern about the future of two British Shipbuilders' sites—the Ferguson yard and the Clark Kincaid engine building facility. Between them, those sites support over 800 jobs and are therefore significant in the economic life of the lower Clyde. Ferguson retains a strong local identity, despite its merger with Appledore, British Shipbuilders' Devon yard, in 1986. Both yards have substantial work in progress. Ferguson is building a second Caledonian MacBrayne ferry which will be delivered in mid-1989. That vessel follows the first Cal Mac ferry which will be in service this summer. Ferguson does not build only ferries. It has a wide product range, including small product tankers, cargo vessels, tugs and offshore supply vessels.

The Clark Kincaid site at Greenock is the sole survivor of British Shipbuilders' engine building companies. Its sister yard at Wallsend on Tyneside was closed in 1986 as part of British Shipbuilders' restructuring programme. Employment at Clark Kincaid is currently 546, with an increase of about 50 people over the past 12 months. Clark Kincaid can build up to five engines at a time and is building two engines for the Chinese container ships that are under construction at British Shipbuilders' Govan yard. It has also recently won a £1·3 million order for part of a slow-speed diesel engine, together with components, to be delivered to the Belgian shipbuilder, Cockerill. That order will provide work until the end of the year.

Engines for use in land-based power generation schemes are another string to Clark Kincaid's bow. It has recently completed such an engine for use in the Cayman Islands and is looking at other opportunities around the world, but with its diesel engines it is not resting on its laurels. It is winning contracts for general engineering work, including work in the nuclear industry, as part of a diversification strategy. Recent examples include twelve 400-tonne winches for the offshore industry and blast-proof doors for power stations in the United Kingdom.

My right hon. and learned Friend the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster said during the shipbuilding debate on 19 May that British Shipbuilders had received a number of inquiries about the purchase of the Ferguson yard. Some of those inquiries have been from potential bidders who are interested in the whole Appledore Ferguson company. Some approaches have been for Ferguson only. Discussions are at an early stage, but my right hon. and learned Friend said that he was optimistic about a successful conclusion, a view with which I concur.

There have been four expressions of interest in Clark Kincaid, including an approach from the management who wish to buy out the facility. Negotiations began just over a week ago. All the approaches were entirely unsolicited, as was the approach by Kvaerner Industries to buy Govan, which my right hon. and learned Friend the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster announced to the House on 18 April. All this is very encouraging. It shows that the yards have the real prospect of a future in the private sector. We welcome that, but the way ahead will present some challenges.

I should like to refer to the background to the industry before dealing with the hon. Gentleman's points. The United Kingdom has not been a major player in the world market for merchant shipbuilding for some years. Like most others, we have been swamped by the far east yards. The Japanese have succeeded because of their much greater productivity and efficiency. The South Koreans succeeded initially because they offered simple ships at very low prices, but they are now establishing themselves as builders of more complex ships, too. The Japanese are beginning to get out of shipbuilding, but they still retain a formidable presence in the market and will do so for many years to come. The Koreans are moving up market, and coming in behind are the Chinese, the Brazilians and some Soviet bloc countries.

The major Japanese yards have just completed a centrally agreed capacity-cutting programme, which has taken Japanese capacity in the major yards from 6 million compensated gross tonnage to 4·8 million CGT. South Korea has less capacity—around 3·5 million CGT. The South Korean response to the crisis has not been to consider any cut. It was recently announced that the large Hyundai yard, previously devoted to ship repair work, is to be used in future for new building. The South Korean yards have been cutting their work forces recently. They have scope for significant increases in throughput as they develop their efficiency and productivity. Moves on mainland China suggest that China, too, will be looking at its capacity and will probably make vigorous attacks on international markets.

Against that background—I make no apology for referring to it again—the new owners of yards on the Clyde will have to be mindful of efficiency. Their costs will have to be pared rigorously. I am not, however, trying to paint a bleak picture. These people know their business. Their judgment is that they can make a go of the yards. The Kvaerner interest in Govan is a case in point.

Kvaerner first approached British Shipbuilders a couple of months ago. It was looking for a new site on which to construct additions to its fleet of gas-carrying ships. Kvaerner Industries has long been a well-established and respected Norwegian company in the oil and gas-related sectors. It now wishes to move offshore because building costs have become too high in Norway. It has a high regard for engineering and shipbuilding on the Clyde. As the hon. Gentleman will know, a connection, going back a long time, is that senior shipbuilding experts in Kvaerner Industries trained at Scottish universities, so they know the area and its culture. That is why the company has chosen Govan as its preferred new shipyard.

I cannot say how the negotiations will end because the discussions are still in progress, but progress is being made and a valuable first meeting with the work force has taken place. If the negotiations are successful, Kvaerner will bring a number of new orders to Govan that should provide work well into the future.

I have dwelt at some length on the prospects for Govan because I know that the yard's future is of keen interest to people along the Clyde. What is more, there is a strong chance that Kvaerner will make the area a centre for its gas-carrying technology. I am sure that that would be very good news for the hon. Gentleman.

The hon. Gentleman mentioned Kvaerner's potential purchase of engines from Clark Kincaid. That will depend on Clark Kincaid putting in a competitive hid for work immediately in prospect and for the medium term. I am sure that the hon. Gentleman would not want the Government to issue some kind of edict saying that the company must order engines only from Clark Kincaid. Kvaerner believes that Clark Kincaid's engineering is first class. It is a magnificent engineer and just along the river. We hope that it will build strong relationships with Govan in the new dimension to business on the river, should the negotiations with Kvaerner lie successful.

It has always been the Government's policy to return British Shipbuilders' yards to the private sector as circumstances permit. In the meantime, we have been fully committed to the support of the yards. My right hon. and learned Friend the Chancellor of the Duchy reminded the House of the extent of that support during the debate on 19 May. This is not the occasion—the hon. Gentleman did not make it the occasion—to bandy figures about levels of support provided by different Governments, but it is worth reminding the House that, since 1979, we have spent well over £1,850 million in contract subsidy and other forms of support for the corporation. Last year alone, £20,000 was spent for every job in British Shipbuilders. That is a great deal of support.

The Ferguson and Clark Kincaid yards in the hon. Gentleman's constituency have had their commensurate share of funding. The Scott Lithgow tale is well known. I shall take the case of the Ferguson yard in its various company forms over the years. As Ferguson-Ailsa and now as Ferguson Appledore, its accumulated trading losses until 1986–87 amounted to more than £33 million. That loss had to be met by the taxpayer. The figure does not include the intervention fund grants that were provided in support of individual contracts. During the same period, such grants were worth another £12 million for the Ferguson companies. Total support has therefore been about £45 million. That is a lot of money.

Clark Kincaid has also made substantial losses—£42 million to 1986–87—although I appreciate that not all of the loss is attributable to the Clark Kincaid Greenock works as it now exists. While part of British Shipbuilders, Scott Lithgow also needed massive support. Up to the point of sale, losses in that one company totalled a colossal £234 million.

The Scott Lithgow yard has suffered from a lack of new oil-related work recently and, as the hon. Gentleman reminded us, employment is therefore down to only 100 jobs. New work outside the oil sector is being sought, including a rig conversion to a floating hotel for use in Antigua. That may be a budding new industry. I note that one such vessel, if I may use that word, has gone into service on the Great Barrier Reef off the coast of Australia.

Scott Lithgow was privatised specifically as an oil rig builder, not as a merchant shipyard. I say that because it is germane to the point about the intervention fund, which the hon. Gentleman has pursued vigorously. It would make no sense to support merchant shipbuilding at Scott Lithgow by offering subsidies when there is already massive overcapacity in the world. The floating hotel for Antigua will probably require aid and trade provision support. The case for such support is being considered carefully, but I cannot give a commitment today that support will be offered. The hon. Gentleman will know that, when considering development aid, we consider the industrial case, the commercial case and the development case. All those issues will be brought to bear.

Ferguson is on the short list for the order for the Mauritius ferry. That is encouraging, but there is stiff competition from West Germany, South Korea and China. We hoped that the order would have been placed by March this year, but the Mauritians changed the specification and the order is now not likely to be placed much before mid-August.

My right hon. and learned Friend the Chancellor of the Duchy said on 19 May that we are prepared to discuss support for new orders with potential private sector purchasers of British Shipbuilders' yards. We should have to exercise considerable caution over requests for support from British Shipbuilders, which has made very heavy losses on contracts in the past, over and above intervention fund support.

There is much talk in the press of the order for a series of standard cargo ships, and I know that British Shipbuilders has had discussions with the Cubans, but no proposals have yet come in and ECGD has not been asked to cover the business. The customer has needed substantial price support in the past, so we should have to examine any follow-on project carefully. I cannot say who would get the engines or, indeed, any other sub-contracted items, but I listened carefully to what the hon. Gentleman said about the implications for other potential suppliers. Clark Kincaid supplied the engines for the previous Cuban order, so it is understandable that it should entertain hopes of further such business. I have to say, however, that that is a commercial matter.

As for dumping marine engines into the European Community from non-EC countries, it is up to the companies involved to mount an anti-dumping case if they consider their own business to have been adversely affected by unfairly priced imports. I stress that the price of the imports must be lower than is normally charged by the companies that produce the goods concerned. Low prices are perfectly above board if they represent normal commercial practice. The hon. Gentleman has asserted, however, that that is not the case.

There is no reason why the European industry should not make an approach to the Commission. The procedure is well established, but it is up to the industry to make its case. Nevertheless, my officials are available for guidance and advice.

Licensing restrictions are relevant to Clark Kincaid. It is discussing matters with Sulzer and Man-B and W, who are its licensers. I understand that the talks are proving successful. I hope that there will be a satisfactory outcome.

The hon. Gentleman said that the Scott Lithgow yard has suffered from the lack of new oil-related work recently and that, in consequence, employment is down to only 100. I went around the yard some three years ago. I suspect that it is now a much quieter place. That is sad. New work outside the oil sector is being sought, as I have already said. Scott Lithgow was privatised as an oil rig builder, not as a merchant shipyard, which is why it has no access to the intervention fund.

The Orkney Islands council orders will go out to competitive tender. We are not aware of any bids from overseas being invited. As for the British Antartic survey ship, interested yards are being invited to bid. Ferguson should register its interest with the consultants. I assume that that is in hand. The case for aid and trade provision support for the Antigua floating hotel is being considered carefully. I have mentioned the criteria involved and I am afraid that I cannot give a commitment today that support will be offered. The Property Services Agency has received a number of bids for the Coulport jetty, including one from Scott Lithgow and Cementation. The Property Services Agency did not consider the bid competitive and the companies have been told.

The House has appreciated the way in which the hon. Gentleman has presented his case on behalf of his constituents. I hope that I have answered most of his questions, but I shall examine the record of our exchange and, if there are any lacunae, I shall of course write to him with appropriate further details.

The hon. Member for Greenock and Port Glasgow (Dr. Godman) spoke with considerable knowledge and feeling about the effect of current conditions in shipbuilding and marine engineering, particularly on the lower Clyde, and outlined part of the history of shipbuilding in Scotland. The shipbuilding industry in Northern Ireland goes back to 1636, although many could trace its origins back several centuries before that. Shipbuilding is a major part of the Northern Ireland economy. I know that the Minister flew back from Northern Ireland last night. If he had had to make his way by plane this morning as I did he might have decided that it would have been quicker to go by boat, as we had to circle London for at least an hour before we were allowed to land.

Changes in transportation clearly affect shipping. Nine years ago this month, when I was elected to the House, the shipbuilding industry was suffering the impact of the oil crisis. The outlook was particularly gloomy for my constituency, which depends heavily on shipbuilding, not only for jobs in the yard but for the supply and sub-contracting work that flow directly from the industry. So depressing was the picture that the newspaper headline writers—not always the most enthusiastic or cheerful of characters—heralded the shipyard's closure as a very real possibility. We read headlines such as:

"Yard shuts soon if no orders come in"

and

"Harland and Wolff faces Tory axe"

and

"Harland and Wolff—does it have a future?"

and again

"Harland's fight for survival."

For many years after 1979 such headlines appeared in our newspapers almost weekly. It was suggested that the closure of the shipyard was just around the corner. Harland and Wolff led a hand-to-mouth existence. I can recall many occasions when we were waiting for an eleventh hour decision—whether from BP, the Blue Star Line, or the Ministry of Defence—in the hope that we would get a vital order that would maintain shipbuilding in Belfast.

It was recognised then that there would be an upturn in the shipbuilding market. Then, as now, it was a matter of hanging on for that upturn. Those in the shipbuilding industry believe that it will happen in or around the 1990s, and I do not think that the expectations are misplaced. Several indicators suggest a brighter hope for shipbuilding on the horizon. First, there has been a vast reduction in laid-up tonnage over the past few years. In 1983 it accounted for about 18 per cent. of the world's fleet whereas it has now been reduced to 3 per cent. to 4 per cent. Secondly, both new build and second-hand prices have increased quite substantially—albeit admittedly from a low level—and there are sound forecasts that the trend will continue.

Thirdly, a significant percentage of the world's fleet is nearing the end of its useful life; 60 per cent. of the world's supply tonnage and more than 70 per cent. of its tanker tonnage is over 10 years old. Moreover, 57 per cent. of the fleet is in the 11 to 15-year-old class and that should lead to considerable demand for replacement over the next five years. Furthermore, the differential in price between the British and European shipbuilding industry, and the far eastern yards is beginning to narrow. In that sense, I take issue with the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Industry and Consumer Affairs who answered the previous debate. It is clear that yards in the far east are beginning to encounter new problems. The exchange rates for the Japanese yen and the South Korean won have made the position of those countries less advantageous. There have been considerable problems of industrial unrest in South Korea with demands for higher wages. Over the past year, wages in South Korea have increased by 40 per cent.

I am not saying that the gap has closed, but there are signs that it is closing. Last year, the differential between the prices that could be offered by European yards and by Japanese and South Korean yards ranged from about 48 per cent. except in one respect—for cruise liners, where the differential was only 16 per cent. The only ships falling within the 28 per cent. specified in the EEC directive on intervention funding would be cruise liners and more sophisticated ships. As the gap narrows and problems continue to arise in the Japanese and South Korean yards, those countries will be forced to increase prices still further, and it will become more difficult for them to keep their prices down artificially.

It is towards cruise liners and more sophisticated ships that the managers of Harland and Wolff have directed their attention because they believe that they can be most competitive in that sector. The Ultimate Dream contract is a key component to a better future for Harland and Wolff. For once it is not a matter of obtaining or gaining an order. The order is sitting on the table. Instead. it is a matter of the Government establishing whether they are prepared to forward the standard funding permitted under the European Community regulations. Any other shipbuilding country with the building capacity to carry out that contract would grasp the opportunity with both hands, and yards in both France and Japan have been attempting to wrestle the order and unseat the Belfast firm.

Lest anyone is unaware of the position, let me make it clear that the Ultimate Dream contract is not the product of a cosy backroom deal between Harland and Wolff and the ship owner. It is the result of a design and build competition with other yards world wide. I recognise that the Government must make calculations, and that they await a study of the figures from the yard before they can make a decision. Although I expect that the figures will not be available until next week, I urge the Minister to inject a little enthusiasm into the Government's attitude and approach to the project.

Does the Minister accept that winning the order would open great possibilities for Harland and Wolff? Does he agree that a new concept such as the Ultimate Dream will present an unavoidable challenge to cruise operators, who must keep up with improved standards and increased facilities if they are to get their share of the market? If he accepts that, he must recognise that other cruise operators will have to modernise their fleets. Does the Minister accept that there is a potential for the cruise liner market to take off? If he accepts that, it follows logically that the builders of the Ultimate Dream will be in the lead when that move comes.

Does the Minister recognise that the order would represent four years' work for Northern Ireland—a region that has the highest unemployment in the kingdom— and that it will maintain thousands of jobs in the United Kingdom? He will know that 1,200 firms in Great Britain and more than 700 firms in Northern Ireland are likely to benefit from the contract. It will help to maintain and, we hope, increase the 4,000 jobs in the shipyard, plus 1,500 jobs in support firms in Ulster as well as more than 4,000 jobs in Great Britain. More than £160 million worth of orders would be placed on the mainland United Kingdom if the contract went to Harland and Wolff—orders for steel, other materials, components, equipment, insurances here in London and sub-contracting work. The deal will be good not only for Northern Ireland but for the United Kingdom.

In the past year, Harland and Wolff spent about £75 million with outside suppliers. Of that, £15 million was spent in Northern Ireland, £55 million in Great Britain and £6 million overseas. Of the £55 million, 30 per cent. was spent in the south-east, especially in Greater London, on insurances and on much of the electronics needed in the yard—25 per cent. was spent in Scotland—and 20 per cent. was spent in the north and north-east, concentrated in traditional shipbuilding industries, especially engineering. The project will benefit all parts of the United Kingdom.

It is estimated that the total tax revenue from Harland and Wolff and its supplier companies, above that which would occur if the yard was not getting business and its employees were receiving benefits, is £20 million a year. That money goes into the Treasury. Interestingly, the yard is looking for about that amount from the intervention fund to secure the contract. The Minister should not regard it as a loss. By maintaining jobs in the shipyard and in the supplier companies, the Treasury will gain to exactly the same extent through tax, VAT and national insurance.

When I mentioned my next point yesterday, the Minister concentrated more on personal remarks. That is not what I was suggesting. Does he accept that in many quarters the level of debate on the order has not been high? In some parts of the press it has verged on the scurrilous. Had the Minister been here for the entire debate on British shipbuilding last week, he would have heard—they were not exactly whispered—comments from hon. Members on both sides of the House implying a similarity between the failed De Lorean project and the Ultimate Dream. I am sure that he will wish to emphasise that there can be no comparison between the two. Unlike the car assembly industry, which was in Belfast for only a short time, shipbuilding is an integral part of the industrial structure of Northern Ireland and is familiar to workers there. It is not an innovation to the work force in the Province. The business styles of John Parker and Ravi Tikkoo do not fit comfortably with that of John De Lorean. The Minister will agree that such implications and uninformed comments are capable—if they were not so designed in the first place—of turning away customers. No other shipbuilding country would treat potential customers to such a barrage of abuse.

Have either the Minister or his officials taken steps to reassure the customer that the subsidy application will be given a fair hearing? Would it worry the Minister if the customer went elsewhere? I have to ask such basic questions because the Minister and the Secretary of State have been uncharacteristically poker-faced on the whole issue of the Ultimate Dream contract.

I do not belong to the school of thought that closes its eyes to the role played by Government and the taxpayer in the survival of Harland and Wolff. I and the men of Harland and Wolff recognise that substantial sums have been allocated to shipbuilding in the Province. That very fact forces me to urge the Government positively to study the viability of the project, because it would be inexplicable if the Government funded the yard through a period of decline, when the prospects were grey and bleak, but held back now when hopes are dawning of a brighter prospect and there is evidence of a better future for Harland and Wolff.

Logic demands that the project he supported. Moreover, the yard deserves and has earned support in view of the steps that it has taken during the past few years to strengthen its position. It has a first-class management team led by John Parker. No one disputes his capabilities and foresight. His ability is transforming the yard, and the spirit and morale of its work force is very much in evidence. The craftsmanship of the work force has never been in doubt. In the words of Ravi Tikoo, it is simply

"the best in the world."

Harland and Wolff takes second place to no yard in terms of quality and high standards.

For the past four years, Harland and Wolff has been undergoing a change in strategy and direction. Many might say that a strategy change is not the most appropriate term to use. Perhaps major surgery would be more suitable. The company has been streamlined, and, while that process was necessary, the metamorphosis is always painful. It has reduced its work force from 9,000 in 1986 to 4,000 today.

Rationalisation, modernisation, diversification and improved efficiency have been the guidelines for the new-look yard. Significant changes in company organisation and personnel have taken place from the boardroom down. New technology has been embraced and is as advanced as any to be found in the world. New construction methods are being employed, using modular techniques, quality assurance programmes, cost reduction programmes and computer-aided design and manufacturing systems, which take the yard to the forefront of the European shipbuilding industry.

The adaptation of facilities, including the closure and demolition of older buildings, was initiated with the aim of moving the yard not only to high-tech design and build capability but to a highly competitive environment for the expected upturn in the 1990s. That approach has already shown success.

The design and build of, undoubtedly, the world's most sophisticated ship, the 73,000-tonne displacement single well oil production ship for BP, designed to recover oil from the marginal fields in the North sea, is one example of the yard's new capability in action.

Harland and Wolff has come from a position in 1982–83, when its trading losses per employee were three times greater than those of British Shipbuilders, to one where comparable losses are half that of the nationalised yards. The company has become more competitive.

In spite of those achievements, the management regards the changes as an unfinished symphony, and recognises the need for constant updating. The cut in the work force and the reduction in the yard's area increase its viability, yet still it is the largest of the European yards and employs more people. Those factors give Harland and Wolff a competitive edge, which will help the yard to take its share when the upturn in the market occurs.

I urge the Minister to ensure that the order comes to the yard to bridge the gap between now and the shipbuilding revival in the 1990s. He will know that much of Harland and Wolff's deficit last year resulted from the restructuring programme and the redundancies that flowed directly from it. Few other organisations undergoing such major changes have been expected to absorb massive job cuts in such a short period of time.

Does the Minister accept that the greatest incentive for increasing productivity is a substantial order book? It is human nature that, when men are on the last contract, they know that the harder they work the faster they will be out of a job.

We must bear in mind that Harland and Wolff is not seeking more intervention funding than any European competitor would receive if it had won the order. It should be made clear that it is not a massive lump sum payment, as has been suggested in some quarters of the press. The contract would last for about four years and the funding would therefore be spread over that period.

The Government are considering proposals from the Norwegians about the sale of Govan. Is not central to Kvaerner's willingness to purchase an understanding that intervention funding will be available from the Government? That should not be regarded as surprising or unrealistic as it is accepted practice among European shipbuilding nations to match far-eastern prices. In the past, even the far-eastern shipyards have operated policies of capturing orders at any price. I make no judgment on the Kvaerner bid, but surely a British-owned yard may expect no less favourable or generous treatment than the Norwegians?

The innovative new concept of the Ultimate Dream project has been remarkably well received throughout the shipbuilding world, and is recognised as a major breakthrough in cruise shipping. It would therefore be a matter of major regret if any discouraging noise or negative comment were to come from the House or elsewhere that would cause a potential customer to look away from Belfast to one of our European competitors. Let us not forget that there is no United Kingdom competitor for the contract; Harland and Wolff is not taking it from another region of the United Kingdom. Indeed, it is bound to diminish Harland and Wolff's dependence on other orders that are being sought by British yards.

The Government and the House must face two inescapable questions. Are we prepared to let the order go? Are we prepared to hand it over to our foreign competitors, and with it the prestige of further similar orders? To do so would effectively remove the United Kingdom from the large passenger ship market.

Do not let the rules of doctrinaire economic policy stop this order coming to Belfast. If the Government want Britain to rule the waves, they will have to waive the rules.

Support for the contract coming to Northern Ireland has come from Ulster Unionists and, I am pleased to say, the Social and Democratic Labour party and hon. Members of all parties. I trust that the Minister will say something that will cause us to feel that the thrust of the Government's approach is to make the Ultimate Dream a present-day reality.

The hon. Member for Belfast, East (Mr. Robinson) has expressed his concern about the future of Harland and Wolff, which has been a major employer in Northern Ireland since the last century and has played a significant part in the local economy. I am, of course, aware of the concern felt by all about the future of the company and I shall address the extent of commitment that has been shown by the Government in supporting it.

I agree with the hon. Gentleman that the level of debate on the proposed Ultimate Dream ship has not been high. Criticism has been levelled at the possibility of Harland and Wolff building it. I further agree with the hon. Gentleman that the yard and the customer, Mr. Tikkoo, deserve better than the criticism that has sometimes been levelled at the suggestion. I exempt from that criticism the way in which the hon. Gentleman presented his case. It was a model of the manner in which an hon. Member should submit a case on behalf of his constituents. I am happy that he had the good fortune to win a place in the Adjournment debate, which gives me an opportunity to respond.

I acknowledge the rich history of Harland and Wolff and the part that it has played in the Northern Ireland community over the past 126 years. More than 1,700 ships have been built by the company, including many famous passenger ships such as the Olympic, the Southern Cross, and the Canberra.

During the second world war, Harland and Wolff played an important role in the war effort and built over 250 naval and merchant ships. In addition to those new builds, the company repaired or converted over 22,000 ships in Belfast and its other locations. Employment at Belfast rose to over 30,000 during the war years, with over 20,000 employed at other locations throughout the United Kingdom.

In the immediate post-war years, Harland and Wolff produced a greater tonnage of ships than any other British company and, in the three years 1946 to 1948, the company headed the world league of shipyard output. In the 1960s, it built Britain's first supertanker and achieved further success in launching the oil platform, Sea Quest.

The 1970s were a traumatic time for shipbuilders worldwide, including Harland and Wolff, and orders became increasingly difficult to obtain. The facilities were best suited to building the types of ship that were no longer required in such numbers, and where competition from the far east was most severe.

These sophisticated ships required new skills and approaches to work. With Government support, the company continued to rationalise its facilities and implemented sophisticated computer aided design and manufacture facilities. New systems of ship production, including the greater use of pre-outfitting, were introduced in an attempt to improve productivity.

Despite the undoubted successes of the past, Harland and Wolff has not been immune from the more recent crisis facing the shipbuilding industry worldwide and particularly in western Europe. I recognise the efforts that have been made by the management and work force over the years to deal with the situation. Employment in the yard has fallen from 10,000 in the early 1970s to under 4,000. Some of that fall has been the result of declining orders, but part has been the result of efforts to cut operating costs. The company has also altered its marketing strategy to seek to obtain orders for more sophisticated ships where the competition from the far east is currently less intense.

As a consequence of the global changes in the industry, which I have described, Harland and Wolff has suffered severe financial difficulties over the past 20 years. Between 1966 and 1975, when Harland and Wolff was taken into public ownership, the company received some £60 million of public funds. Since 1975 it has received a further £450 million, of which approximately £240 million has been provided by the Government in the past five years alone.

Every merchant order which the company has won recently has required significant support and there have been other losses due partly to overcapacity at the yard. In the year to 31 March 1988, the Government paid £58 million to Harland and Wolff and in the previous year the amount was £64 million. Those are very large sums of money, equating to almost £15,000 per employee per year, and they demonstrate the commitment which the Government have shown to the company.

I should like to take this opportunity to stress the extent to which the Government have been supportive of Harland and Wolff. The company has been provided with the finance to acquire new facilities and every assistance to win orders. Ministers have been supportive in the effort to win orders for the shipyard. The problems which it is facing are linked to changes in the industry worldwide and are not attributable to any lack of support by the Government.

As regards the present order book, Harland and Wolff recently completed the RFA Argus—a conversion of a standard container ship to an aviation training ship. That was the first major contract won by the company from the Ministry of Defence for many years and provided the opportunity to enter this sector of the market. The finished ship is, I believe, a very significant addition to the auxiliary fleet. It is the largest ship serving with the Royal Navy. The conversion proved to be more difficult than Harland and Wolff expected and, unfortunately, the ship was delivered much later than had been expected and there were cost overruns. Those extra costs are now the subject of negotiations with the Ministry of Defence.

Work is now progressing on the single well oil production ship for British Petroleum, commonly known as SWOPS, which is one of the most technologically advanced ships ever planned. Construction is largely complete and the ship is now entering its complex commissioning phase in which the mass of sophisticated equipment which has been installed will be tested.

Production delays and difficulties have been caused to a considerable extent by the failure of sub-contractors to provide the complex equipment on time. Sometimes it has been necessary to change the phasing of the production of the ship so that, instead of equipping the ship, as originally intended, with sophisticated computer and other equipment which was ready to be installed as the ship was being completed, it became necessary to cut holes in the ship to put in the computer and other equipment later. That obviously caused difficulties for the shipyard, but it is doing its best to overcome them and has been largely successful.

In April 1986 Harland and Wolff, after intense competition, won a contract to design and build the first of class auxiliary oiler replenishment vessel for the Ministry of Defence. The design of the ship has been largely completed and construction has commenced. This is the first whole ship procurement to be placed by the Ministry of Defence where the contractor is responsible for providing the whole ship, complete with weapons, for a fixed price. As it is the first such ship ordered in this manner, and as it is the first of class, both Harland and Wolff and the Ministry of Defence are having to deal with many new aspects. It is an exciting project, and Harland's progress is being closely monitored.

The hon. Member referred to the major potential cruise liner order with Mr. Ravi Tikkoo. The design produced for Harland and Wolff was ambitious and imaginative. It was a substantial achievement to be selected by Mr. Tikkoo to carry the project forward. I concur with the hon. Member on this subject. I accept the importance of such a large project to Harland and Wolff and to Belfast. It will be a massive ship, the largest cruise liner ever constructed. I assure the hon. Member that the potential order has been given the serious response that he would wish and expect of the Government.

My Department maintains close links with Harland and Wolff. Officials and my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland have met Mr. Tikkoo. I cannot say, however, how the Government will respond to any approach relating to this ship. Harland and Wolff has still not yet completed its costings and has not made any formal application to my Department for contract support, nor to the Export Credits Guarantee Department for guarantees for credit facilities. I understand that the yard has asked sub-contractors to tender and give prices for certain components making up the ship. When those are amalgamated by Harland and Woff, the company will be able to produce its final detailed costings. As and when those costings are produced, they will be scrutinised by specialists on behalf of my Department. It will then be possible for us to appraise the ship. At this point, it is too early to say much more. I assure the hon. Member that the application will be thoroughly and carefully reviewed to determine whether the provision of any additional financial resources needed to win the order would represent good value for money in terms of Northern Ireland expenditure priorities.

We are, of course, all anxious to develop projects that have the potential to create and sustain employment. I note from a recent Northern Ireland Economic Council survey that the total of direct and indirect employment generated by Harland and Wolff in Northern Ireland is between 5,300 and 5,800 staff. My Department's estimate of the indirect labour is rather lower, but I gave that figure because the hon. Member mentioned the number of people dependent on the Harland and Wolff yard. Although the record of the Government's commitment to the yard cannot be challenged, we have the obligation to ensure that the public funds required for such projects as the Ultimate Dream represent real value for money. The taxpayer would expect nothing less from us.

As regards the future, we have to be realistic. Productivity in shipbuilding in the far east is at a very high level. Although the situation is changing, Korea also still has the advantage of a low labour-cost economy. Although productivity in United Kingdom industry has increased recently, this will need to continue to improve if we are to retain the opportunity to compete with shipbuilding companies there. The management and the work force at Harland and Wolff have been making strenuous attempts to cut costs and improve productivity through such measures as labour flexibility and by attacking overheads. It is crucial that this progress should continue, and I am encouraged to know that all parts of Harland and Wolff seem to recognise the importance of this and to be determined to make their efforts successful. There should be no doubt about the nature of the challenge: there is a major objective for shipbuilders in Britain in closing the gap in productivity compared to our competitors in Japan and Korea.

Harland and Wolff has, I believe rightly, set out to attract orders for more specialised and sophisticated ships. The strategy is correct—it takes advantage of the strong engineering base in the company and in Northern Ireland generally. It does, as I have already alluded, present new problems for the company in switching its strategy away from building the large tankers around which its facilities were built and in coping with the demands of making new engineering technologies perform within the difficult working environment of a ship.

However, the ability to build sophisticated ships is not a safeguard against worldwide competition. As an example, at the end of 1987, a Spanish yard won a contract for a floating oil production system, which will not be restricted to one well, similar to SWOPS. That order was won in competition with four other European yards, and is an illustration of the type of competition that Harland and Wolff will have to face, if it is to capitalise on the expertise that it has gained on the SWOPS vessel.

That said, the overall outlook for world shipping at the start of 1988 shows at least some promising signs of improvement. The volume of goods carried by sea in 1987 increased, and there was a significant growth during the second half of the year, particularly in the carriage of grain. The size of the world fleet continued to reduce, and, with falling efficiency as the existing ships aged, the balance between the demand and supply for shipping came closer to equilibrium.

The overall reduction in the size of the fleet, together with the increasing age of many ships, suggests the possibility of a certain upturn in demand for replacement of obsolete ships. Such a development would ultimately offer some prospect of better conditions as regards the shipbuilding market. Despite those encouraging signs, it is extremely difficult, especially when looking at future trends in world trade, to estimate shipbuilding requirements over the medium and longer term.

Throughout the 1980s there has been a number of long-term forecasts of shipbuilding demand produced by shipbuilding trade organisations including the Association of Western European Shipbuilders. Each of those has predicted an upturn in demand before 1990, but that has not yet occurred. Consequently forecasts of an early upturn need to be treated with caution. To add to that, the offshore oil and gas market has not made any substantial recovery since the last fall in oil prices; and there is now more than adequate shipbuilding capacity to meet the United Kingdom's naval defence requirements.

Even when there is an upturn in the market, the competition for new orders will be intense, especially from the far east and some new shipbuilding countries such as Brazil and Yugoslavia.

The hon. Gentleman did not mention privatisation. My right hon. and learned Friend the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster has made a number of statements to the House recently regarding the position of the publicly owned British Shipbuilders, which faces similar problems to Harland and Wolff. He highlighted the large amounts of subsidy that have flowed into British shipbuilding, and correctly concluded that there can be no long-term future in continuing to pour in such amounts.

The most interesting development in British Shipbuilders is the interest now being shown by the private sector in many of the facilities. I understand that negotiations with Kvaerner regarding a takeover at Govan are proceeding, and considerable interest has been shown in Appledore and some of the smaller subsidiaries. We welcome the prospect of returning some of the shipbuilding yards to the private sector if they have a future there.

If those sales are achieved, new management and forms of business will have been introduced. There are people who are prepared to try to turn round loss-making yards into businesses that have a real future. If successful, that approach is bound to be advantageous for the work force in the yards and the local communities. I should make it clear that, were there to be a n expression of interest in the privatisation of Harland and Wolff, the Government would take any such proposals very seriously.

We remain concerned at the high level of support required to keep Harland and Wolff in business, and Ministers keep its performance under regular review. I can assure hon. Members that no recent decisions about the future of the company have been taken, but equally there can be no absolute guarantee of lasting support from public funds regardless of the company's ability to compete effectively. I have already referred to the commitment that Government have shown to the company. The Government are not indifferent to the problems facing the industry but the main challenges relate to the winning of new orders at competitive prices.

In Northern Ireland, we need to look at the best ways of sustaining economic activity and employment. A healthy profit-making manufacturing sector has a vital role to play in creating wealth in the economy. I hope that the shipyard will be part of that but I can give no guarantees. I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on raising the issue and giving me the opportunity to make the Government's position clear.

This is the third Adjournment debate in less than a year that I have shared with my two Labour colleagues, the hon. Members for Bradford, South (Mr. Cryer) and for Bradford, West (Mr. Madden). We have discussed poverty in Bradford and the Health Service in the Bradford health district. Those two debates were initiated by my hon. Friend the Member for Bradford, West. On Wednesday this week, my hon. Friend the Member for Bradford, South raised the issue of education and the condition of schools in the Bradford area. Today it is my turn to bring to the House the position of the wool textile industry in Bradford and the West Riding of Yorkshire.

I and my colleagues take pride in co-operating with one another better to represent the people of Bradford, in particular the working people of our city. I use that term in its widest sense. I mean those who earn their living by hand and by brain, by their own efforts and not by rent, interest and profit—the efforts of others. We include those too young to work, those too old to work and the large number of our fellow citizens denied the right to work. In a sense, we have put the cart before the horse. We have described with some passion the effects before the cause of the serious health problems in our district and the appalling levels of poverty that have given us the name of low-pay city.

Our city is also wool city. Its history is bound up with the development of the wool textile industry. For generations, the wool industry has dominated the lives of Bradford people and, in large part, its domination is the cause of much of our low pay, poverty and ill-health.

In my maiden speech I referred to old-style mill capitalism in Bradford, to the power, flaunted wealth and arrogance of the old mill owners and to the exploitation and the back-to-back houses. I have no wish to repeat those comments this morning, but it is sufficient to say that it is still possible to meet pensioners who were employed as part-timers in the mills from as young as eight years of age.

One thing can be said in defence of the mill owners of those days. They worked in the industry and, even into the late 1960s, owner-managed mills were quite common. In more recent times, much like the rest of British industry, the mills have become dominated by investment managers in financial institutions, by off cum dens, as we call them, in remote boardrooms, and even by a film star's wife. Their interests are entirely in profits and high returns for their investors and the coupon-clipping class that they represent. They demonstrate little interest in the living standards and aspirations of the workers and those who depend on their earnings.

The modern history of the industry stems from a report prepared by W. S. Atkins and Partners for the National Economic Development Office in 1969, entitled "The Strategic Future of the Wool Textile Industry". It made 14 recommendations, which include more specialisation, a 40 per cent. reduction in productive establishments, a reduction in the work force from 144,000 to 121,000 by 1975, investment of £40 million by 1975, a higher rate of return on capital, more shift working and higher productivity, thereby, it said,

"ensuring higher remuneration in competition with other industries."

It is interesting to note that a similar report, dealing with the Lancashire cotton industry was issued in 1969. Called "Cotton and Allied Textiles", it was produced by the Textile Council in Manchester. The trend in that industry has been similar in almost every way to that in the wool industry. Colleagues from my native county of Lancashire could make much the same points as those that we are making about the wool industry. The work force in the industry has suffered massive redundancies. Overall, some 300,000 jobs have disappeared in the textile industry since the war. Workers accepted new shift patterns and work practices and their efforts have led to substantial increases in productivity.

Between 1980 and 1986, productivity in woollen yarns rose by 41·4 per cent. Between 1980 and 1985, productivity in the carpet industry rose by 49 per cent. In bleaching, dyeing and raising, productivity rose by a staggering 69–4 per cent. between 1980 and 1986. The overall fall in employment since 1978 in the textile industry has been 46 per cent., and in woollens and worsteds, over 50 per cent. In the same period, the sales by United Kingdom firms declined by only 33 per cent., which is further proof of the enormous increase in productivity in this industry.

I asked the statistical section of the Library to prepare some information for this debate. Commenting on this phenomenon, its report said about output:

"Much of these falls occurred between 1979 and 1982 but while output has since risen employment has not."

Fewer workers, producing far more per operative, has been nice for the shareholders. Profits as a percentage of total sales have risen from 1·4 per cent. in 1981 to 10·5 per cent. in 1986 in textile finishing, and from 3·75 per cent. in 1981 to 9·75 per cent. in 1986 in woollens and worsteds.

The Atkins report stated:

"However introduction of new plant and methods of working should provide scope for wage increases associated with improved productivity in many sectors. It is recommended that all parties to productivity negotiations should be mindful of the need for substantial increases in earnings."

Wool textile workers have met all the conditions of the Atkins report. Their skills and efforts have achieved the recent upturn in the industry. Output is rising, productivity is high profits are booming—it is all very nice for the shareholders, but in terms of wages and employment there has been no such improvement for the workers or the unemployed.

Textile workers as a whole and wool textile workers in particular were low paid in 1969, and in 1979 when the Government came to office, and they remain definitely low paid today. In 1987, the average gross earnings in textile finishing for a full-time adult male worker were £25·20 lower than the average in manufacturing industry, in the woollen and worsted industry they were £31·30 a week lower, and in carpets around £20 a week lower. These earnings, deplorable as they are, can be achieved only by persistent and excessive overtime working. Average weekly overtime working in textile finishing is 7·1 hours a week, compared with 6·3 hours in the textile industry as a whole and 5·7 hours in all manufacturing. In the woollen and worsted industry, overtime hours average a staggering 9·1 a week. What a record that is for the vast number of unemployed workers in the city and the area as a whole.

Textiles are the sixth largest sector of British industry, and sales amounted to £12·5 million in 1987. In terms of value added, it is the fifth largest industry in Britain, bigger than the motor industry. In 1985, the value added was £4·67 billion, nearly £2 billion more than that achieved by the aerospace industry.

In my view, the textile industry is a mirror of what is wrong with British industry and with the Government's attitude towards British industry. In the run-up to the 1983 general election, the Prime Minister said:

"Most of the increased productivity comes from adopting the latest developments in equipment and machinery technology and working them up to the limit of what the machines themselves will permit. Unions have got to accept it and work it. If they don't then they are in danger of losing whole factories."

I would argue that textile workers have met all the conditions that the Prime Minister laid out in that speech. They have accepted redundancies, they have witnessed closures and they have increased productivity. They have worked damn hard to create the wealth of that industry, yet their return is still absolutely scandalous and pitiful, and job opportunities have not improved, even during this modest boom. Workers have certainly responded, but again, mirroring the national position, the industry is not competing in the world market. While exports fell from £1,382 million in 1980 to £976 million in 1986, at the same time imports rose from £1,607 million to £3,400 million. Textile imports now take 44·6 per cent. of the market, compared with 31·5 per cent. when the Government came to power.

We are now faced with a protectionist situation developing in the United States because of that country's enormous balance of trade deficit. A recent trade report stated:

"Exports of cloth, yarns and tops to the EEC countries totalled £153·1 million, 6·5 per cent. higher than in 1985, while sales to the rest of the world were £247·9 million, a decrease of 12·7 per cent."

That is mirrored in particular by the over-strength of the pound in comparison with the dollar, which affects trade not only with the United States, but with Taiwan, Korea and other far eastern countries whose currencies are directly related to the dollar. We are certainly not competing against those countries, and in that sense the future looks bleak.

Textile workers and the trade unions that represent them are not little Englanders. We object to unfair competition and during this debate my colleagues will speak about, among other things, the imports of Turkish cloth. The textile unions have accepted the multi-fibre arrangement, which makes provision for the interests of low-paid and highly exploited workers in the Third world. They welcome the enormous movements of South Korean workers and the establishment of trade unions in their industry.

I recall speaking to a Bradford wholesaler who visited South Korea eight or nine years ago. He visited a textile factory there and said to the manager, "It's different from a textile factory in Britain. There's no music." The manager said that music was not allowed, to which the British business man replied that the girls in Britain liked to listen to Radio One or Pennine Radio. He said that he thought it was too quiet and commented on the fact that nobody was talking. The manager said, "If that girl spoke to another girl, we would sack her for talking and the other girl for listening."

Those young girls work 60 hours a week and 28 days a month with only two days off. They are brought in from agricultural areas and live in hostels. Bradford workers and trade unionists welcome the fact that those workers are now establishing trade unions and obtaining better conditions. The Transport and General Workers Union supports the KMU trade union in the Philippines in its heroic battle against a subsidiary of the British firm, Baird textiles. We are not little Englanders, but we object to dumping and unfair competition.

Bradford is part of the West Yorkshire closure area. The social conditions of our town are reflected in all walks of life. There is low pay. Many families have low incomes. We have the lowest paid women workers in the whole of Britain and our area has the third lowest paid men. 'The average earnings of our workers are appallingly low. The history of the domination of the wool industry is reflected in the general level of wages in our area.

One of our major problems is capital investment, which amounts to only £1,030 per worker annually in Yorkshire and Humberside, compared with the national average of £1,193.

In my maiden speech and in other speeches in the House, I have spoken of the fraud of modern "people's capitalism", which the Prime Minister speaks about so often. It is a fraud for working people in Bradford and in the country as a whole. It has offered us nothing. There has not been an increase in service jobs. All we have had is an increase in the proportion of service jobs because of the decline in manufacturing jobs in our area. The engineering industry, which was brought to Bradford to replace the decline in textiles, has suffered a similar decline during the Government's period of office. Eighty-three per cent. of the 11,600 jobs that were brought to the city of Bradford over five years were for part-time workers.

We are a city and an area with a proud history and tradition of craft and skill. If I make one criticism of Yorkshire wool workers and Lancashire cotton workers, it is that they are not proud enough of their skills and that they do not demand enough recompense in terms of wages and conditions for the skills that they have exhibited. They are hard-working people who have never asked for anything other than to be able to give their labour and to ask for a decent living in return for the hard work that they are prepared to put in. The Government have denied wool workers in Yorkshire and in the city of Bradford a decent standard of living for their efforts. The Government's economic policies offer those workers no real prospect for the future. The Government and the wool employers stand condemned. It is up to all Opposition Members to work for a situation in which the workers in the industry will get a decent return for their efforts.

I shall be brief, but should like to say how pleased I am to take part in this debate, which has been initiated by my hon. Friend the Member for Bradford, North (Mr. Wall) and in which we shall be joined by my hon. Friend the Member for Bradford, West (Mr. Madden). We wish to raise our concern about the major industry of Bradford and West Yorkshire.

It is interesting to reflect on the fact that 10 years ago I took part in a press conference at the Victoria hotel in Bradford to report on the effect of the wool textile scheme by which the then Labour Government had stimulated investment and improved quality in the wool textile industry because we believed in the need to assist industry.

That contrasts with the current limited policies of this Government, who are letting industry drift asunder, in many cases on to the rocks. At that press conference we pointed out that in the West Riding wool textile industry, over 500 jobs—not a lot—had been created by the development of the industry, in partnership with the Government. That presents a strong contrast to the 50 per cent. reduction in employment in the textile industry since 1979.

That contrast is symbolised for me by Salts mill in the village in which I was brought up. In 1979, that mill was working. It was the largest integrated textile operation, and although it was by no means then working at full employment, it is now empty. Its vast bulk signifies the Government's attack on British manufacturing industry. People are now talking about turning it into a museum or an art gallery, about anything but providing jobs in the wool textile industry. Those are the decisions of the entrepreneurs to whom the Government are giving such free rein.

I should like to make a brief point about the imports of Turkish acrylic yarn, which has caused so much unemployment and short-time working in the wool and spinning sector in the area and in my constituency, as in the other Bradford constituencies. I know that those imports have declined somewhat, but the Government have not negotiated an adequate safeguard clause to prevent severe and real damage to the industry before such a safeguard clause can be brought into operation.

We are talking about a massive increase in imports from around 4·5 tonnes in 1984 to about 4,500 tonnes in 1987. While I dare say that the Minister will claim that there was no safeguard clause before the Government negotiated one through the EEC relationship with Turkey, the fact is that that clause is less than adequate. It is a sign of the difficulties facing the textile industry in its association with the EEC.

As my hon. Friend the Member for Bradford, North said, the industry faces difficulties in exporting as a result of the high value of the pound. That is symbolised by the clash between the Prime Minister and the Chancellor of the Exchequer. At least the Chancellor of the Exchequer wants to control the level of the pound and has so far beaten the Prime Minister, although her malign influence is still causing difficulties for British exporters.

The current circular from the Bradford chamber of commerce says of the textile, clothing and footwear sector:

"Firms in this sector continue to find it difficult to penetrate export markets."

My next point relates to false labelling and adequate labelling for consumers. The West Yorkshire trading standards service often prosecutes for false labelling, but it has difficulties because the current legislation requires that false labelling is something carried out by way of trade. Other countries, even in the EEC, have legislation regarding counterfeiting. The Government should seriously consider making the counterfeiting of goods a criminal offence. That would help.

I express deep regret that the Government have given way to pressure from the EEC over labelling and have repealed the Trade Descriptions Act 1972 and associated regulations. Concern has been expressed by the wool textile and clothing industry action committee—Wooltac—over the legislation that the Government will introduce to replace the repealed legislation to ensure that consumers have adequate information about the origin of the material and the garment. It is wrong and mistaken of the EEC to try to impose its will on our country and remove information to which consumers have a right when making a purchase.

The multi-fibre arrangement has been renewed by the Government and that has been welcomed by the industry. However, the Government will be under increasing pressure as the internal market in the Common Market develops by 1992 to remove all kinds of labelling protection for consumers and international arrangements like the multi-fibre arrangement. The internal market, much advertised by the Government for 1992, spells disaster based on experience of subsidies for other EEC countries and unfair competition. We will have to face that, unless the Government are prepared to take action to ensure that we keep the jobs in the wool textile industry in Bradford.

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Bradford, North (Mr. Wall) on his successful application for this debate and on making an extremely powerful speech in introducing it. At the outset I should declare my interest. I am sponsored by the Transport and General Workers Union, whose textile group represents 50,000 men and women in the textile industry. As my hon. Friend the Member for Bradford, North has said, at the moment and over recent years those men and women have seen profits rise and their productivity increase substantially. They have also seen their senior management take fat pay increases from the wealth that they have created. They should now look for a fair share from the wealth they have created.

The debate is about the woollen industry, but I want to take this opportunity to pay tribute to the men and women working in the cotton industry, who are taking their first official industrial action for 50 years calling for a modest increase in pay and conditions of employment. They are seeking a 10 per cent. increase in pay. The low pay in the cotton industry and low pay throughout the textile industry is clear from the fact that that 10 per cent. increase, if granted, would result in only an extra £11 a week.

The workers' demands are set out in early-day motion 1118. I hope that the employers in the cotton industry will concede their demands. It is also interesting to note that one demand is for cancer screening facilities. It is significant that, so far, the employers have proffered only a working party to consider whether such facilities should be made available.

My hon. Friend the Member for Bradford, South (Mr. Cryer) referred to the damage done to the British textile industries by imports of Turkish acrylic yarns. Hundreds of British textile workers are on short time or have lost their jobs as a result of those imports. It is no use the Government blaming, as they have in recent months, the failure of British textile companies to complain, as an excuse for not having done anything effective to reduce Turkish yarn imports. The Transport and General Workers Union extensively set out information about the harm being done as long ago as last September.

In his written answer to a parliamentary question I recently tabled, the Minister for Trade replied:

"The volume of acrylic yarn imports from Turkey has fallen off sharply in the first three months of 1988, compared with the same period last year. The Department's unfair trade unit is assisting the United Kingdom industry in preparing an anti-dumping complaint on Turkish acrylic hosiery yarn."—[Official Report, 24 May 1988; Vol. 134, c. 114]

I hope that the Minister and his officials will make sure that that complaint is sent to Brussels as quickly as possible, because the damage being done by imports is increasing at an alarming rate.

I turn now to a matter affecting British textiles and British Coal. I recently took up with the Prime Minister the prospect of British Coal buying imported cloth for protective clothing such as donkey jackets and duffle coats. I much regret the fact that, as from I May, British Coal has decided to import foreign cloth from Europe for that purpose. My letter to the Prime Minister was referred to the chairman of British Coal, Sir Robert Haslam, by a Minister at the Department of Trade and Industry, and Sir Robert wrote to me:

"This particular contract was let following a competitive tender exercise with a number of U.K. manufacturers of workwear; we have no direct involvement with the purchasing of cloth. We found from the tender exercise that, when comparing garments made up from European cloth to those of British cloth, the savings offered were considerable.

I am sure that over the coming months tenderers will be reviewing their pricing policy prior to the next round of tenders, when it is to be hoped that the British textile industry will be able to make the most competitive offer, and thus allow us to use British cloth exclusively for our needs once again."

It is regrettable that British Coal, which rightly urges consumers of its own products to buy British, should itself buy foreign cloth. Judging by Sir Robert's letter, there can be only one explanation. It is either that foreign producers are able to undercut British cloth manufacturers because of unfair subsidies, or that British textile manufacturers attempted to rip off British Coal in a way that would be considered wholly unacceptable and which would lay them open to the charge of seeking to make excessive profits from a public sector customer. I suspect that this is further evidence of unfair trading from Europe, and of substantial subsidies being given directly to European textile producers. I ask the Minister to mount an urgent investigation, so that the British public and the British textile industry can know the truth.

As my hon. Friends have said, the British textile and clothing industry is a major one. It is a major employer, a major exporter and a major source of added value. It is not expendable, nor will it ever be. British jobs cannot be traded for bridges in Turkey, or to facilitate Turkey's entry into the Common Market. The industry demands proper consideration from the Government. When negotiations are being mounted overseas, whether for GATT or the multi-fibre arrangement, its interests must be put forcefully by British Ministers.

All that the industry and those who create its wealth want is a fair trading environment, and they have been waiting for it from the Government for a long time. Now is the time for those men and women to be given a fair share of the wealth that they created, and to be able to look confidently to the Government at long last to put the interests of British textiles at the top rather than the bottom of the agenda.

First, I congratulate the hon. Member for Bradford, North (Mr. Wall) on securing this debate, and also on mustering the support of his hon. Friends the Members for Bradford, West (Mr. Madden) and for Bradford, South (Mr. Cryer).

The hon. Gentleman has a reputation as a staunch exponent of the more radical approach within his party, and it was thoroughly to be expected that he should introduce some of his economic philosophy into the debate. It is not, of course, his intention to engage in a long discussion on that today, but I should like to say two things in response to his general comments.

I listened carefully to the hon. Gentleman's speech and I do not believe that the word "customer" featured prominently, if at all. The difference between us is that Conservative Members start from the proposition that the customer is the job creator and the wage payer. In a command economy—for which the hon. Gentleman would presumably feel some affection—there is more direction and control and judgments are made more from the centre; or, indeed, to put the syndicalist view, on the shop floor. Evidence throughout the world is that such command economies consistently under-perform compared with demand-based economies founded on the enterprise ethic.

I spent most of my working life dealing directly with customers, so I, too, know the importance of a customer to industry. I do not wish to become involved in a long debate, but I should like to clarify a point that is often misunderstood.

The faults of the state-controlled industries in China and Eastern Europe lie not in the fact of state control but in the fact that they are run entirely undemocratically. There is proof, not only in those economies but in capitalist economies as well, that if working people have no real say in the running and management of an industry it becomes bureaucratic and inefficient. I am certainly not a supporter of those totalitarian regimes, and I never have been.

I accept that. In my view, the hon. Gentleman's approach and philosophy have rather more to do with syndicalism than with old style Communism, but that is for another debate and another day. The hon. Gentleman may be personally acquainted with customer power, but this debate should have accentuated the fact that customer decisions result in the provision of jobs.

The hon. Member for Bradford, South asked three questions. The Copyright, Designs and Patents Bill is being considered in Committee, where I have said that it will provide for counterfeiting. Some of the groups who feel most strongly about counterfeiting have told me that this is a step in the right direction but that we have to keep an eye on it. That links up with origin marking, another live issue.

I shall be taking soundings of my counterparts in other EC countries from which I hope we can agree that there should be an EC origin marking regime for non-EEC imports. The issue is more complex than that, but in Yorkshire, with its interests in steel or wool, or in Lancashire, with its interests in cotton textiles, there is real concern about origin marking. I am determined that common European regime should be introduced and that it should go as far as possible towards meeting those concerns, including misleading labels. They imply a clear manufacturing location in the United Kingdom when there is no such location. Yorkshire and Lancashire are very agitated about that. I shall deal later with Turkish imports.

The wool industry is one of our oldest industries. For many years it has been an important part of our industrial base. Its products are diverse. They are wool tops for processing into worsted yarns; wollen and worsted yarns for making woven and knitted fabrics, carpets and knitwear: woollen and worsted fabrics mainly for making up into outerwear, but also for blankets, furnishing and non-apparel uses. I could deal at length with the variety of products involved.

The industry employs around 40,000 people, the majority of them in West Yorkshire, a region that relies heavily on the continued existence of a healthy wool textiles industry. I am pleased to say that production has been gradually increasing since the severe contraction in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The industry continues to enjoy a positive trade balance, to the extent of almost £100 million in 1986 and probably much the same last year.

Against a backcloth of substantial import penetration in other parts of the United Kingdom textile sector, it is worth considering why the wool industry still enjoys a positive trade balance. First and foremost, I believe that it is because British wool textiles have a reputation for quality that is perceived worldwide. Even a layman such as I can appreciate the feel of a fine worsted which, for suiting, is in a class of its own. But design is also important—never more so than in recent years, as consumers have become increasingly more sophisticated in their requirements and ever more design conscious. More casual clothing styles have come to the fore. Fashion dictates have also led to the development of lighter weight wool fabric for the ever-increasing number of overseas markets in warmer climes, as well as for the occasional good summer in the United Kingdom.

A reputation for quality and design would in itself be incapable of sustaining the United Kingdom wool industry in today's intensively competitive world markets. There is very real professionalism within the industry that belies its somewhat traditional image. There have been major investments in new machinery, and marked improvements in productivity. The industry has long recognised that it is not enough to produce a desirable product and expect everyone to beat a path to its mills. Even quality products have to be marketed effectively and it is increasingly important to be able to react speedily to changes in market requirements.

The industry pays close attention to developments in its major markets, principally the United States, West Germany and Japan, where the United Kingdom industry's performance is particularly impressive, showing just what can be achieved on the basis of quality and perseverance in a notably difficult market. At the same time, it keeps a watchful eye on opportunities to break into or to expand existing trade with developing markets. British wool textiles are currently exported to no fewer than 160 countries, with export earnings of around £600 million a year, an impressive achievement by any standard. The performance was improving in the early months of this year. Despite these positive aspects, I recognise that the United Kingdom wool industry is facing some very real problems today, and I should like now to consider the problem of imports from Turkey in the acrylic yarn sector of the industry.

This is a matter of considerable concern to my Department. Turkish exports to the European Community of certain textile products are covered by a voluntary restraint arrangement, which was renewed—and acrylic hosiery yarn included for the first time—after very difficult negotiations between the Commission and the Turkish textile export associations in December 1987. Although the restraint level agreed was higher than we and the industry would have liked, without the restraint the United Kingdom would have been wide open to unlimited imports of Turkish acrylic yarn.

At the time of the negotiations we had insufficient evidence of serious disruption to United Kingdom industry. Although we had information on short-time working and low prices, the other economic data which we had to take into account, such as domestic production, consumption and exports did not show the sort of systematic downward trend that would have been necessary for us to make a convincing case for a lower restraint level.

The Department has received numerous representations from the industry expressing concern about the situation in the acrylic yarn spinning sector and complaining about unfair trading by the Turks resulting from the low price of their acrylic yarn. Officials in the Department's unfair trade unit are in close contact with the Confederation of British Wool Textiles to provide advice on the kind of evidence needed to mount an effective anti-dumping complaint against Turkish imports and, more recently, against imports of similar yarn from Mexico. However, success in anti-dumping complaints depends not only on establishing dumping, but on showing that injury to domestic producers is directly attributable to imports from the country in question. This is not proving easy.

Although Turkish imports rose significantly in 1987, total import penetration fell to 49.7 per cent.from 55.4 per cent. in 1986. That suggests that Turkish imports were substituting for yarns imported from other countries rather than adding to import penetration. In addition, there are clear signs that the problems in the acrylic yarn spinning sectors are, to some extent at least, a result of falling UK demand. The latest figures show that imports from Turkey so far this year are greatly reduced. Nevertheless, officials are continuing to work closely with the industry to ensure that the anti-dumping case that they are preparing has the best possible chance of success when it is presented to the European Commission in Brussels. I am sure that the House will be united behind that endeavour.

I know that the industry's sense of grievance is aggravated by what it preceives as the unfairness of the situation. There are formidable barriers in the form of multiple duties, taxes and other charges on our exports of textiles and clothing to Turkey. I assure the House that the Government take every opportunity in trade negotiations to argue that countries such as Turkey should adopt a more open stance to imports. We shall continue to do that until disparities of the magnitude involved are diminished. I should also add that the Commission has invited member states to submit evidence of practices that are contrary to the European Community's association agreement with Turkey. The United Kingdom intends to respond fully to the Commission's request for information and it is hoped that the Commission and Turkey will soon be able to set up a joint group of experts to study all the issues impeding free and fair competition between the Community and Turkey.

On the wider front, we attach considerable importance to achieving a better balance between developed and developing countries in the current round of GATT multilateral trade negotiations. The hon. Member for Bradford, North made some interesting comments on that. I hope that he is reassured that, whenever we negotiate, in the European Community and elsewhere, we examine countries that have exceedingly low pay—the very poorest countries in the world—in considering more amenable arrangements for imports from those countries.

While there may be some justice in the poorest developing countries continuing to be largely exempted from the obligations of GATT, we have long believed that the strongest among them—the newly industralised countries—should, in their interests as well as ours, fulfil the expectation that they recorded in GATT at the end of the 1970s: that, as they developed, they would progressively abandon the special relaxations that GATT allows for its poorest members and enter fully into the GATT system of rights and obligations.

Although the return of textiles and clothing to normal GATT rules is on the table in the current Uruguay round, progress on that will depend very much on developments, such as the GATT safeguard clauses and market access. We would also want to be sure that any return to normal GATT rules did not lead to undue disruption for United Kingdom textiles and clothing.

The hon. Member for Bradford, North raised one or two other points, some of them for my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Employment I shall examine the record of today's debate and refer the relevant points to my right hon. Friend, so that he can reply to the hon. Gentleman.

We are fortunate to have such a full House to hear this important debate. I am blinded by the sight of the empty Opposition Benches; it is obviously a foretaste of things to come.

We are very fortunate to have the Minister responsible for the inner cities here to answer the debate. He is well known for his interest, knowledge and balanced judgment, and we are grateful to the Government for ensuring that he is here on this beautiful sunny day. We hope that that will mean that we shall get a more forthright and informed response to the question that I have been posing for the past 10 years: why have the Government not ordered the public sector to get rid of its vacant, surplus, underutilised, derelict, dormant land? Every time I ask that question I am cheered by my hon. Friends, who all say, "Wonderful. That is just what we want to do." Minister after Minister says, "You are absolutely right. You are spot on. That is just the thing we should do." But nothing happens; no one does anything. I hope to explain some of the problems that the Government face, and why they need to do more.

I speak as a former inner city Member—I was a Member for nine years in Liverpool—and as a youth worker in east London—a community worker in most of the principal cities in Britain—for 14 years. In addition to being chairman of the urban and inner city committee of the Conservative party, I should perhaps declare an interest as part of the caucus of the new SANE planning group, well known for its good sense, good timing and sane approach to planning.

There are 100,000 acres of public land on the Government's vacant land register, which has been in existence since 1981 when my right hon. Friend the Member for Henley (Mr. Heseltine) prudently set it up to identify public vacant land, to highlight the problem and to shame public authorities into doing something about it. The amount varies. It increases when the planning process, which is like a sausage machine, turns out more public land.

The planning system itself creates public vacant, dormant, derelict, underutilised land. Like a sausage machine, the process will go on churning out more land as long as it is organised in the present way. The figure decreases when the Government privatise a nationalised industry. When a nationalised industry goes off into private orbit, it takes its public land with it. Therefore, the figure on the register decreases every time we privatise. It may decrease by a few thousand or increase by a km thousand, but, as the Minister will no doubt tell the House, unfortunately there is still a sizeable amount of public vacant land—probably about 100,000 acres for the past seven years. It may have increased to 110,000 or decreased to 98,000, but it has not altered much. But because the sausage-making machine will continue to produce more derelict vacant land, even if we sold 10,000 acres a year, we would still not get rid of it all by the turn of the century. It is an intractable problem that successive Governments have failed to remedy.

In 1978, the Secretary of State for the Environment in the Labour Administration said that he was writing to all public authority chairmen to ask them to review their land holdings. They may have done so, but nothing was clone about it. In 1981, my right hon. Friend the Member for Henley set up the land register to try to pinpoint vacant land. We know where the land is, but that has not helped very much. The Government keep saying, rightly, that they are committed to revitalising the cities, especially the inner cities. Vacant and derelict land is dotted all over the inner cities and on their fringes. It is the canker in the revitalisation process because it destroys the confidence that businesses and new firms need. Dereliction has a spin-off effect on neighbouring areas.

The legislation that covers the land register is cumbersome, time-consuming and open to abuse. The Government must push for derelict land to be sold. At present they have to go through a tortuous timetable.

In answer to a written question on 24 May, my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister said:

"Following the announcement by my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for the Environment on 7 March that public bodies would themselves publish information about unused and underused land they own, similar publication of information by Government Departments is under consideration."—[Official Report, 24 May 1988; Vol. 134, c. 102.]

Does the House realise that no Department need publish how much vacant derelict and underused land it has? It is extraordinary that the Government should say that local authorities must disclose their land holding but that Government Departments need not disclose how much land they hold. Some Departments tell us how much land they have, but they are not obliged to do so.

A couple of weeks ago, my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for the Environment said that he wanted 494,000 new houses to be built during the next 12 years and that he will use 53,700 acreas of land to do so. That is on the basis of an average of 9·1 houses to an acre. He said that where development is needed, developers will be able to buy private land, obtain planning permission and get on with building. If those houses can be built on 53,700 acres of private land, they could equally well be built on 53,700 acres of public land,—that is, if the Government and the developers are prepared to insist that the public authorities release such land for building.

Even after those 494,000 houses have been built on public land, there will be some 50,000 acres of public vacant land left on the register. That presumes that the sausage machine will not pump more land on to the register while those houses are being built.

The Government sometimes argue that land is not suitable for housing and give the example of the one-in-three railway embankment. Railway embankments have been built on in Hong Kong and other places, but we are not that desperate for land, so we should rule out that example. We can rule out land that is heavily polluted because formerly it was the site of a gasworks. Even if such land is ruled out, there are still 60,000 or 70,000 acres on the register which could be used. That land is lying idle because there is almost no incentive for a local authority to sell it. I think that a local authority receives 30 per cent., and the other 70 per cent. goes into a sinking fund that it can use from time to time. There is so little incentive or return that local authorities are not motivated.

Professor Alice Coleman of King's College, London says that the 100,000 acres of land on the register represent only about one third of the public vacant land in this country. She said that there are 300,000 acres of vacant land, but that the Government have restricted the criteria for land going on to the register. I hope that when my hon. Friend the Minister replies—we are already looking forward to his speech—he will say something about the criteria used. If the criteria were opened up, the figure would swell to 200,000 if not 300,000 acres. That is borne out in a book that I shall be publishing in early July, which highlights the public scandal of a wasting public asset.

If the Government fail to recognise the assets that are wasting away in the public sector and insist on using greenfield private sector land, there will be a growth in our market towns, especially in the south, on a scale that we cannot contemplate. It must be against the public interest to build on private greenfield sites when there is so much public land going to waste.

I speak from personal experience of what is happening in the small market town of Ivybridge, south Devon on the edge of the Dartmoor national park. There were 1,500 souls living there 10 years ago. I am told that Devon's planners became aware of the threat to one of the most beautiful parts of Britain and decided to spoil only one area to prevent the other small hamlets and villages from being damaged by overbuilding. They have failed because Ivybridge is growing and there is constant building in the other villages. Some 6,000 souls now live in Ivybridge, and the figure will be 14,000 by 1995. Private greenfield sites have been gobbled up by bulldozers and developers, but the infrastructure cannot cope. Sewers, drains, gas, telephones and the fire and health services cannot cope. I led a delegation to the Secretary of State for Education 10 days ago because we are running out of school space. There will be too many schoolchildren in Ivybridge, but the builders continue to build. It will become a nightmare. The Secretary of State admitted that the 235 houses being built in Ivybridge every year is greater than the yearly figure for his constituency of Mole Valley. Ivybridge's population is growing at the rate of 60·5 per cent. a year. The number of pupils in primary education has grown by 28·7 per cent. since 1983. The county council's forecast for the number of people who will be living in Ivybridge in 1991 was 8,272 people, but already 8,245 people are living there. Those increases are taking place while Plymouth sits on acres of vacant land in public ownership. The Ministry of Defence, with its bases at the dockyards and the outskirts, is one of the culprits.

Why are the Government behaving like the carpenter? On the one hand, they are bewailing the acres of public land, saying "If only something could be done" and dabbing their eyes with a handkerchief, saying "Is this not dreadful?", but on the other they are responding to the developer-led and inspired demands for more private land to be built upon. Is that to make good the income of farmers, who have been hit by the declining output of agricultural land? Do they regard this as a device to make good farmers' incomes by allowing them to sell greenfield sites for more houses to be built on, thus saving the public purse having to make good their income shortfall?

I have initiated the debate to get some sense from my hon. Friend the Minister, who is well known for his good sense.

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Order. Do the hon. Members have the consent of the hon. Member for South Hams (Mr. Steen) and the Minister to take part in the debate?

indicated assent.

indicated assent.

I am grateful to have a brief opportunity to take part in the debate and to congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for South Hams (Mr. Steen). I agree with every word that he said and laud his experience in inner cities and rural areas because he speaks from his knowledge. In the proposals in my pamphlet "This Pleasant Land", issued last September, I supported some of my hon. Friend's proposals, and I support those that he will make in his excellent book in July.

My hon. Friend said that Government land was being sat on. How much land is the NHS sitting on in inner city areas? We should know the answer and should have no hesitation in ensuring that that land is put to good use. I am delighted to see here my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary of State for Health and Social Security—the hon. Member for Derbyshire, South (Mrs. Currie)—who I am sure will take note of that point.

Having pursued this subject for some years, I do not believe that politicians generally understand the importance of the environment to people, whether they live in the cities or in the countryside. Quality matters. The Government understand that, but not nearly enough of our inner city local authorities do so yet. How we treat that land matters very much. If graffiti are left bedaubing inner city walls, people get the message that the inner city does not matter. If acres of corrugated iron are left for years, as Southwark borough council has done, people get the message that it is an unpleasant and undesirable place in which to live and work. If a city is rotten at the core, the rot spreads outwards.

I should like to make two substantive points, one general and one particular. On the general point, there is a direct and clear connection between what happens in our inner cities and what happens in rural areas. It matters to people in London that they have a green belt to be their lung. It matters to people who live in London that rural areas, even if they visit them perhaps only once in a lifetime for a holiday, are preserved. Likewise, it matters to people who live in Dorset or other rural areas that inner city areas such as in London are pleasant, habitable and safe. We forget that at our peril. I welcome the Government's inner city initiatives.

On the specific point, I regard with the greatest suspicion the figures produced on the demand for housing. My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for the Environment has said that there is a demand for 610,000 houses in London and the south-east. That demand comes from developers and is nothing to do with the need for houses. It is part of our developer-led planning system. I urge my hon. Friend properly to consider the figures for real demand for housing and not to accept what he is told by the developers.

I have a letter from a lady who lives in London who read a speech that I made saying that I regretted the number of people who had to move from inner cities to retire and live in rural areas. She said that she had lived in London all her life and worked there. Her one desire was to retire to a rural area because she hated London so much. The aim of our policies must be to ensure that ladies and gentlemen who live in London want to live, work and retire there. I never again want to receive a letter from a lady in such despair.

I am grateful for the opportunity to take part in the debate, and I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for South Hams (Mr. Steen). I agree with most of what he said. In so far as the debate will contribute to the revitalisation of our inner cities, I must emphasise that that will be one of the main tests by which the Government will be judged in three or four years' time.

I wonder whether there is much idle land in areas such as my constituency, which are subject to the greatest housing pressure. My hon. Friends the Members for South Hams and for Dorset, North (Mr. Baker) both mentioned Ministry of Defence and health authority land. In my constituency there are two health establishments for the mentally handicapped and the mentally disabled and they are located out in the country. There is also one defence establishment. I have great reservations about putting the inmates of institutions for the mentally handicapped into the community and I certainly do not want to part company with No. 40 Royal Marine Commando.

But, we have to ask questions about the planning potential for housing on the areas occupied by such institutions. We should raise wider questions about where Ministry of Defence personnel are concentrated nationally. I believe that 60 per cent. of service personnel are located in the south.

Such questions will be with us for some time. 'We cannot sweep them under the carpet and hope that they will rot like a carcass. I hope that my hon. Friend the Minister will be able to respond positively on those points.

I am glad of the opportunity to pay warm tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for South Hams (Mr. Steen) for raising this subject and for the excellent work he does as chairman of the inner city and urban affairs Back Bench committee. I am grateful to my hon. Friends the Members for Dorset, North (Mr. Baker) and for Taunton (Mr. Nicholson) for their contributions.

I should comment on the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for South Hams about farmers. I am not sure whether he made that point tongue in cheek, but I believe that it is stretching credulity to breaking point. My hon. Friend also mentioned the book by himself and Professor Alice Coleman which is shortly to be published, entitled, "Public Vacant Land and National Wasting Asset". I look forward with great interest to reading that.

My hon. Friend said that he has raised the matter in the past. In fact, he raised it at the Department of the Environment's Question Time on Wednesday. I hope that he agrees that I was positive in my reply then I shall endeavour to be positive in my replies to all my hon. Friends today.

Publicly-owned and underutilised land is a matter central to the Government's efforts to regenerate our cities and conserve the best of our countryside. I can, therefore, agree with most of what my hon. Friend said on the importance of both those objectives. But it is also a subject which, in detail, is frequently subject to confusion and misunderstanding, as my hon. Friend suggested. So I must start by setting the record straight on some basic facts about the nature and performance of the registers of publicly owned, unused and underused land to which my hon. Friend has referred extensively.

The registers were established in response to evidence from various sources that too many public authorities were holding land for which they had no immediate use but which they were unwilling to release on to the market. Some of that was land owned by nationalised industries, rendered surplus through changes in the structure, output or technology of those industries. As well as that, there were the holdings of many local authorities which had acquired land and property, sometimes in pursuit of overambitious plans that had not materialised. Also, throughout the public sector, there was a lazy habit of retaining land without accounting for the cost of doing so. So public sector land ownership was undoubtedly a constraint on the recycling of urban land for new homes and businesses.

The land registers of publicly owned, unused and underused land were established to bring pressure to bear on those land hoarders. The scope of the registers is often misunderstood. They cover "unused and underused land", which is definitially broader than "derelict land", which is eligible for derelict land grant and is not necessarily the same thing as "vacant land" or "wasteland". Both terms were used today and are in popular usage. There is no official definition.

As was made clear at the Action for Cities presentation, given recently by my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister, we are committed, through our urban regeneration policies, to minimise the extent of vacant land in towns and cities, but we have the specific measures of derelict land grant and the land registers to attack derelict land and publicly owned, unused land in particular.

To date, some 159,000 acres of this latter form of vacant land has been entered on the registers—which is in my view a shameful statistic, and evidence of the rightness of the concern about the land management practices of public authorities. Since then, there have been regular additions to, and removals from, the register. The additions have arisen chiefly as additional land has become surplus to the requirements of the public authorities and unused. Effectively, it will go on to the register if it is not immediately sold. The removals have occurred as unused land has been brought into use by its public owner, sold or transferred out of the public sector following privatisation. The register is therefore rather like a bank account with credits and debits and, as with a bank account, it is most important to see which way the bottom line is moving. In this case, the trend is clearly downwards as the last few years have seen progressively more removals than additions.

The position at the end of April 1988 is that 88,400 acres of land are still on the register. I am pleased to say that the annual net reduction over recent years has been rising. It was 1,500 acres in 1985; 5,900 acres in 1986; 7,800 acres in 1987; and 2,900 acres in the first four months of 1988, equivalent to about 8,700 acres in a full year. If that rising rate of reduction were maintained, it would take less than a decade to clear the registers. That is a shorter time scale than that suggested by my hon. Friend the Member for South Hams at Question Time, which was about 1,000 years.

My prognosis may be unrealistic. Of the 88,400 acres of land remaining on the registers, over half has low or negligible potential for development, and less than one fifth is regarded as suitable for residential development. This is another common misunderstanding. The register records, factually, that sites are unused or underused by the present owner. It does not judge whether they are usable by another owner. As a further illustration, about 3,000 acres of the land on the registers is in the green belt or other areas where development is not normally permitted. I am sure that all my hon. Friends would join me in not hoping to see these sites used for housing.

What we face in the future is dealing with this more intractable rump of the historical legacy of unused land and ensuring that better property management practices in public authorities prevent a major recurrence on the scale of problems that we inherited. In this context, my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State has reviewed the use of his land register powers and decided on two significant changes which were announced in the recent Action for Cities package.

First, in the exercise of my right hon. Friend's power to direct public authorities to dispose of unused land, we propose to pay close regard to any evidence that there is a willing purchaser facing an unwilling vendor. The land registers can thereby reinforce market pressure. I repeat the invitation issued by my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State in the House on 20 January that if any developer, investor, housebuilder or housing association wishes to use unused land in the ownership of public authorities, all that he or it has to do is to apply to my Department and invite my right hon. Friend to consider the use of his power of direction. That is of particular relevance to the less obviously developable remaining land register sites for which there may not be much of a general demand.

Secondly, my right hon. Friend believes that it will encourage good property management if public authorities—not just local authorities—are responsible for maintaining and publishing records of the unused and underused land in their possession rather than merely providing such information to my Department. He is, therefore, preparing, in consultation with the local authority associations, a code of practice under part II of the Local Government, Planning and Land Act 1980 to require the publication of such information and, most importantly, it is proposed that a similar code of practice will be adopted by other public land owners, including the Government. That is the very point that I made to my hon. Friend in answer to his oral question last week. All public landowners will thereby have to expose to annual scrutiny an account of their own holdings of unused and underused land with its debits and credits and the current balance.

My hon. Friends will be aware that, in providing for necessary development, the Government have not encroached on the green belts or areas of outstanding natural beauty or other statutorily protected areas. I am happy to repeat what my right hon. Friend has repeatedly made clear. The Government's commitment to the protection of green belt remains as strong as ever.

In comparison with Governments of previous decades, this Administration has had a great success in meeting the demands of people and businesses for new homes and work premises without undue loss of rural landscape or excessive densities of urban development. Both the 19th century nightmare of the overcrowded city and the 20th century nightmare of the overbuilt countryside can and will be avoided.

I am grateful for the opportunity today to have at least 15 minutes to present to the House observations on the code of practice on access to children in care. I realise that 15 minutes is not long enough to introduce this subject, so I must be selective in the issues with which I deal It would be nice to have a Second Reading of the Bill that I have sought to introduce so that a Standing Committee could be set up to consider the complexities of the rights of access by grandparents to their grandchildren.

The more I have considered this matter and the more I have read about it, the more complex it appears to be. From my discussions with members of the legal profession, it appears that they agree that it is a complex law. I consulted the White Paper entitled "The Law On Child Care and Family Servxes" presented to the House in January 1987, particularly the conclusion of the report, which I should like to put on record. It states:

"The Government accept the widespread criticism of current child care law as confusing, unnecessarily complex and in places unjust. It is hard for those parents and children who may be affected by it to understand its implications for them and how their rights and responsibilities may be affected. It is difficult also for professionals who must use or act in accordance with the law—social workers, lawyers, police and others. Changes are needed to rationalise, clarify and where possible simplify the law, above all in the interests of the children whose well being is the primary objective of child care law."

We recognise the urgent need for reform when we discuss the issue with all those who work in child care or have been involved directly, because of family problems. or indirectly, as advisers or representatives. That is why I am glad to have been afforded this opportunity to put on record a call for the early implementation of the proposals contained in the White Paper, "The Law on Child Ca re and Family Services".

Since the White Paper was presented to the House in January last year, we have heard nothing from the Government. There has been absolute silence. Perhaps there has been an occasional reply to some hon. Members, such as myself, from the Under-Secretary of State for Health and Social Security the hon. Member for Derbyshire, South (Mrs. Currie). I received such a reply on 30 March this year. However, the Government have taken no steps towards implementing those proposals. Why is it taking so long? What is the reason for the silence? What discussions is the Minister having with groups? What is the Government's intention for the early implementation of the White Paper? Is the Minister not aware of the continuing heartache and suffering of children, parents, grandparents, and the many others who are crying out for help?

The present law is in a muddle as was made clear by the Government's conclusion to the White Paper. The law is often unjust to children, whom it was introduced to protect and fails to give a fair hearing even to the parents. The White Paper contained proposals for streamlining court proceedings, for giving more rights to parents and better protection for children at risk. It showed a greater concern for the future of children. It would end the present confusion of laws which are increasingly difficult to operate. It would also allow grandparents and others who are interested in the well-being of a child, to take part in court proceedings if they feel that they have an interest in being present.

It has taken 10 years of lobbying and consultation to get this far. Let us not stop now because Parliament is too busy. We must find the time to ensure that we change the present complex unjust laws to give parents and children a far better deal.

I pay tribute to Baroness Faithfull of Wolvercote for her efforts to highlight the essential and urgent need for reform. She will undoubtedly find some solace in knowing that her efforts are appreciated, if not by Ministers or even by some Back Benchers. I wish her well in her efforts and hope that my contribution today will be of some help.

We know that excuses for delay could be recent reports and public inquiries into child care abuse cases, especially the Cleveland case. However, further delay means more risks for children, more abuse of the present laws and more difficulities and problems for parents and grandparents.

As this debate is about the code of practice for access to children in care, I took the trouble to read the documents—in all probability, the Minister has done likewise. If I read out the introduction to the code of practice my total of 15 minutes would be used up, yet all the clauses are as complex as the law relating to access to children. It would therefore, be far better for me to concentrate on recent rulings by the Law Lords. I refer to an article in The Guardian by Clare Dyer, its legal correspondent, on 26 February, which stated:

"a member of the adopted child's natural family should continue to have access to the child, the House of Lords unanimously ruled yesterday."

The article referred to access by a brother to his 13-year-old sister. It went on to claim that because of the complication of the case:

"The court would not, except in the most exceptional case, impose terms or conditions as to access to which the adopting parents did not agree … A family law specialist said yesterday that access conditions would still be a matter of exception rather than the rule. 'But I can see the possibility of allowing access even in cases involving young children, for instance to maintain a link with grandparents.'"

That is the point that I want to refer to in the short time left to me.

I must declare an interest. My wife and I are grandparents to five wonderful grandchildren—three grandsons and two grand-daughters. We live only five miles from them. I always appreciate my wealth in this materialistic world by the treasures that my close family give to me. Its value is priceless and its benefits unmeasurable. I know that you, Mr. Deputy Speaker, now enjoy the blessing of being a grandparent. Only grandparents can fully appreciate the joy and the love that that can bring.

When I became involved with the problems of other grandparents I began to appreciate the heartache that they suffer through no fault of their own. I introduced a ten-minute Bill. I also tabled early-day motion 792, which has been signed by no fewer than 303 right hon. and hon. Members. Eighteen Cabinet Ministers, two Law Officers, 63 other Ministers including 14 Government Whips, Mr. Speaker and three Deputy Speakers, two Opposition Whips and 40 Government Parliamentary Private Secretaries, plus 15 shadow Ministers, makes a total of 144 right hon. and hon. Members who cannot support my early-day motion—although many have expressed support. Even though I am no mathematician, once those 144 are deducted from the possible 649, 509 right hon. and hon. Members are left. Therefore, 303 signatures to my early-day motion from a possible total of 509 represents more than 60 per cent. support of all those eligible to sign my early-day motion. That is proof enough that action is called for by the majority of Members of this House.

I hope that the Minister will not dodge or duck the issue in her reply. I want a positive reply rather than the excuses set out in a letter to me or her use of the reply made by the Leader of the House on 19 May. My early-day motion and ten-minute Bill are not complex. They do not represent a lawyer's paradise. The proposal is short, sharp, understandable and could be implemented without great difficulty and with very little expense. It would extend legal rights to grandparents which should be theirs long before they become grandparents.

Everyone involved in this call for rights for grandparents must first think of the child or children. What do those children think when the love, understanding and protection that they have been given is cut off from them without explanation, notice or warning? Who can assess a child's suffering? That child must feel deserted by parents and grandparents. The child is in a torment and usually grandparents suffer the same. Surely grandchildren and grandparents have the right to have their own flesh and blood to love and care for them.

My ten-minute Bill, which was supported by so many, does not ask the Government for estates. It has no selfish motives, and it does not ask for more money. It asks for nothing but the right to give. Is it because of that that people cannot understand that grandparents are wise, understanding, compassionate, caring, want to show love and give love to restore a child's confidence? In this selfish society, people wanting a legal right to give should be reason enough for my Bill and for a reasonable reply to be extended by the Minister.

I conclude by reading a poem sent to me by Mrs. H. Matthews of Plymouth. It crystallises all the hurt and distress which grandparents feel in this situation. I am no Dylan Thomas, but her poem. which is entitled "Grandchildren Lost Through Divorce", reads:

"I gaze at your picture hanging, there, on the wall And I wonder, have you lost your curls, have you grown tall?

Do you like school now—chocolate-strawberry ice cream

It would be lovely to know, but it's all just a dream.

It's a long time since I saw you, well over a year

I remember birthdays and Christmas, but you never come near.

Do you get my cards and letters, maybe you wonder too

What happened to the Granny who said she loved you?

Love grows, flourishes, withers

Sometimes it dies between mummies and daddies, and they have to part

But the love of a granny lies, ever deep, in the heart.

Now you and your mummy have drifted away

'We're no longer your family', I hear with dismay.

It isn't true, sweethearts, you'll always he mine,

Blood's thicker than water, there's always a line

Between you and me darlings, for as long as I live

And I hope that your mummy, if not forget, can forgive

And remember sometimes, there's a Granny, who sorrows

For all the lost yesterdays, todays and tomorrows.

I don't want to hurt you, but it would mean so much

If your mummy would only let us keep in touch.

I don't ask for a lot, just a card, and a photo or two

So you don't forget me, as I can't forget you."

That poem symbolises the thoughts of many people. There are 98,000 children in care at present, and I appeal to the Minister, on behalf of all those children and their grandparents, to take action now, to show compassion and caring, and to help those people who live only in the hope that they can give.

I congratulate the hon. Member for Ogmore (Mr. Powell) on three things. First, on winning the ballot; secondly, on raising once more, as he has done all this year, the important question of access to children in care—especially by their grandparents; and thirdly, on enabling me to respond to my 50th Adjournment debate since becoming a Minister. My hon. Friend the Member for Ealing, Acton (Sir G. Young) holds the record for Adjournment debates, as he replied to more than 100. However, on looking up his record, I found that he achieved his century in December 1984, which was some five years after he began. I have clocked up my half century in less than two years, and so I reckon that we are getting on a little faster.

I regard the task of replying today, as on all those other occasions, not as a chore but as a privilege. We are all privileged to he Members of this august House and we Government members regard ourselves as being immensely privileged to be followers of my right hon. Friend the Member for Finchley (Mrs. Thatcher). The Adjournment debate is also a first-class parliamentary device enabling ordinary Members to raise issues of both national and local importance. I hope that I shall never forget how important they are.

When I was a Back Bencher, I raised five Adjournment debates. As a result, those of my constituents who were workshop employees of British Coal were able to take early retirement with good pensions, and Calke abbey will be open to the public by the National Trust next year. I hope that hon. Members will he able to attend on that occasion, and I shall be delighted to welcome them all to my constituency.

The hon. Gentleman is quite right: grandparents are important people in a child's life. That is especially true when the parents arc preoccupied with their own problems or may have absconded, gone missing or died. I well understand the concern of grandparents in such circumstances, and have been approached by my constituents in similar cases. Happily, all those cases appear to have been resolved satisfactorily. In the end, however, the law must be written to put the child's interests first. The needs of the grandparent, or indeed parent, do not come first.

The child's needs are usually best suited by living in a caring family. If the child's natural family cannot look after it, another family is the next best alternative. That is why I have always regarded foster parents as an essential resource, and often the next best thing to the child's own family. Foster parents may well be grandparents or other members of the child's family, in which case they can receive foster allowances in the same way.

As the hon. Gentleman may know, some years ago I was chairman of the social services committee in the city of Birmingham. I had a survey done of all the children in care in that city who were with foster families. To our surprise, we found that the majority of foster parents were relatives, or had been known to the child before the family break-up. They were neighbours or teachers, for example. Often that is what is best for the child. Since I was in Birmingham the law has changed, and we are monitoring carefully the effects of that change. The hon. Gentleman has done us all a timely service by raising the issue as he has done today.

Prior to 1983, the law left decisions about management and access to children in care entirely to the professional judgment of social workers. The parents or extended family had no right of appeal to a court if access was terminated by a local authority, and rights of access could be decided simply by resolution of the authority. The movement for reform surfaced during the passage of the Health and Social Services and Social Security Adjudications Act 1983—usually known as the HASSASSA Act—which resulted in a Government amendment to section 12 of the Child Care Act 1980. The Act came into force on 30 January 1984.

Under that legislation, parents, guardians and custodians can apply to a court when a local authority has notified them of termination of access. The decision of access is a matter for the court. The legislative changes recognised that the interests of a child and its parents may differ, and a guardian ad litem may be appointed. The provisions do not apply to children subject to a High Court or county court order, or to children in voluntary care—which is where many of the problems tend to arise—or subject to a place of safety order. It was therefore a somewhat limited reform, but very much a step in the right direction.

Local authorities are required to notify parents, guardians or custodians of termination of access. Termination takes effect from the date of the notification, and parents, guardians or custodians can apply to the juvenile court to challenge the decision. An appeal can be made to the High Court. If financially eligible, a parent, guardian or custodian may apply for legal aid, and the court will make an access order if appropriate, to which conditions may be attached. There is also provision for an emergency whereby a single magistrate may terminate an access order for seven days.

The hon. Member for Ogmore has mentioned specific cases and judgments, but I am sure that he will understand that without notice of them I do not wish to offer any comment. We have been monitoring the working of this exercise with the greatest care, and I take what the hon. Gentleman has said very seriously. The social services inspectorate has now completed a postal survey of all social services departments, a consideration of policy and procedures documents and an inspection of nine social services departments in the working of the new access provisions. I understand that the completed report will be put to Ministers shortly, but I have not seen it yet. The work shows that, on the whole, the departments have taken the provisions on board. From the response to the postal survey it appears that the number of termination of access cases is increasing, as is the number of court hearings.

Our Department also commissioned the Dartington social research unit at the University of Bristol to undertake research into the working of the provisions. The preliminary results have just reached the Department, and my officials are examining them. The findings tend to show in both studies that children whose parents receive notices terminating access are not typical of children in care. The children appear to be those who have entered care at a young age, stayed a long time and experienced neglect and possibly abuse before coming into care. The findings also show that contacts with their family before entering care have been poor. That is typical of certain groups of children, but it is not typical of all the children concerned. I know that concern has been expressed about the fact that rather than terminating access local authorities are seriously limiting access, but at present I have no consistent information about it.

The hon. Gentleman referred to the code of practice. He probably knows that there is a statutory requirement to produce and to revise from time to time the code of practice. The one that is currently extant was laid before Parliament on 16 December 1983. It was very well received by those working in child care. It has also been circulated, with a local authority circular, to all local authorities, the courts and voluntary agencies. The code of practice recognises that the most difficult and unhappy situations concerning the children in care can arise from disputes about access. All too often, the links between children and family can wither away. Children can become pawns in battles between parents, but for the majority of children there is no doubt that their best interests will be secured by efforts to sustain some links with their natural families, including, where appropriate, the grandparents.

Local authorities and family agencies need to plan for children from admission to discharge and to include access in their plans. That should include the importance of maintaining contact with relatives, particularly grandparents, by access arrangements. All that is included in the code of practice.

We should also bear in mind the duty to consider the wishes and feelings of the child. That again is mentioned in the code of practice, because those to whom we are referring are often not children but teenagers. They may have their own views on contact with parents or grandparents. In such cases, social services departments should remember that young people may later change their minds. They should therefore ensure that reasonably up-to-date information is held on record about grandparents, should children want to make contact with them later.

The hon. Gentleman referred to his ten-minute Bill. As I am sure he realises from the response to his efforts, the courts already have power in adoption proceedings to make grandparents parties to those proceedings and it is therefore open to grandparents to ask the courts to make them parties. Grandparents who are made parties are eligible to apply for legal aid. In addition, the Children and Young Persons (Amendment) Act 1986, that comes into force this year, will allow the courts to make grandparents party to care proceedings, at the courts' discretion. I know how much the hon. Gentleman is concerned and I hear what he says about his Bill, but we are particularly anxious to resist a piecemeal approach to the reform of child care law. It is generally acknowledged that that has been the cause of much of the confusion and uncertainty that we shall seek to remove by a Bill that we hope to present to the House before too long, based on the White Paper on child care law that we published in January 1987.

If the hon. Gentleman reads again the White Paper entitled "The Law on Child Care and Family Services" he will see that the proposals on access include significant changes to the resolution of disputes about parents' access to children in care. In paragraph 55 we say that we

"recognise the advantages of involving in the proceedings anyone who has a proper interest in the child's future and his welfare … anyone who is permitted to seek and is seeking legal responsibility for the child in the proceedings will be able to be a party. This will include anyone seeking a custody order such as a parent or stepparent or a person who is qualified to apply for a custodianship order. If the first two limbs of the proposed grounds for a care order"—

which are set out in paragraph 59 of the document—

"are satisfied, anyone who establishes that he has a proper interest in the child and who wishes to have custody of the child will be able to be a party."

The White Paper says specifically in paragraph 56 that

"Grandparents who wish to retain or take over custody of a child would be able to be parties".

In paragraph 64 further comments about access are made. They would change the whole approach of the law by making it clear that reasonable access is to be presumed and that local authorities are to be encouraged to agree with parents about access before a court order is made. If agreement cannot be reached, the court has power to determine reasonable access when making a care order and will require any parties seeking alternatives to refer the matter back to court, if agreement on variation cannot be reached. That is quite different from what happened 10 years ago when only social workers could make such a decision.

The hon. Gentleman asked why there appears to have been no action since publication of the White Paper. I assure him that we take seriously our responsibilities as set out in that White Paper. This is highly complex stuff. Our preliminary effort at producing a draft Bill has already created well over 80 clauses. We hope to introduce comprehensive reform as soon as possible, but nobody can anticipate the Gracious Speech in the autumn. I am sure that the hon. Gentleman recognises that, but we intend to legislate as soon as parliamentary time is made available.

The events in Cleveland, to which the hon. Gentleman referred, came to public attention barely weeks after publication of the White Paper in the spring of 1987. Those events are directly relevant and a full inquiry has taken place. We expect the report of Mrs. Justice Butler-Sloss shortly. We may need to revise some of our proposals in the light of her report, but it would not be wise to have an inquiry and a full judicial report only to ignore its findings. We regard the matter as requiring urgent attention, however.

I hope that I have convinced the hon. Gentleman that Ministers share his concern and are determined to take action as quickly as possible. I wish him, his family and all his grandchildren a very happy holiday.

It is a great pleasure and privilege to have the opportunity to speak to the House today on the Government's policy towards training pupils in emergency aid in schools, because the matter is closely associated with the St. John Ambulance and because my hon. Friend the Minister of State, Department of Education and Science, who has such a wonderful reputation for care and helpfulness to the community, is to reply to the debate.

The community suffers 20,000 fatalities a year as a result of accidents at home, on the road and at work. That is a salutary fact, but quite a number of lives could be saved if the right action were taken in the first few minutes after the accident. When people are surrounded by others with some basic knowledge of emergency or first aid, their chances of survival are considerably enhanced.

I was astonished, when I started to research this matter, that I could find no requirement to have first aid experience on hand for pupils in schools. I have seen a report by Dr. Jennifer Bennett, senior registrar in community medicine in the Brighton health authority, which says that, as far as she is aware, the civil law states that schools must provide for adequate first aid for pupils. The Department of Education and Science has issued guidelines, saying that all teachers should have a simple working knowledge of first aid and that it is also desirable that some teachers in every school should have specific first aid training.

I understand that the health and safety at work regulations require first-aiders to be available in places of employment where there are more than 150 employees. In a large school, therefore, where there are more than 150 staff, it might he necessary to have not just one first aid post but as many as three to allow for absences and sickness. There is no requirement for a first-aider if there are fewer than 150 employees. Three first-aiders would, I believe, suffice for up to 450 staff, and there should be an extra first-aider for each additional 150 staff.

No such legal requirement exists in regard to children, and that is a major mistake. As the law considers it necessary to have an average of one first aider for every 150 staff, one would expect a still higher proportion to be required in schools.

The Department's guidelines propose that in

"schools with less than 150 employees there should be an appointed person who is responsible for first aid and is available at all times when employees are present on the premises. Where there are more than 150 employees, a first aider holding a Health and Safety Executive-approved first aid certificate must be appointed. The appointed person is expected to do the following: administer minor first aid treatment, call for an ambulance in the event of serious illness or major injury and if a qualified first aider is not present maintain the contents of the first aid box or boxes."

That leaves a large hole in our first aid precautions, particularly for the young. I should like my hon. Friend the Minister to consider that matter seriously and also to examine the need to train the young to look after themselves and others in an emergency.

To encourage the process, St. John Ambulance, under its director, Robert Balchin has introduced a scheme called the "three cross award" scheme which is an excellent example of the way in which we can help ourselves to improve our knowledge. The scheme has many advantages because the learning process starts early. The scheme is said to be designed for pupils from the age of 10 upwarcls, but I believe that there are considerable advantages in starting earlier still. One can teach children as young as six basic first aid skills. We must give young children the confidence they need. In first aid, as in all branches of education, it is confidence that counts. When action is required very quickly after an accident, children can come into their own.

The "one cross award", which is suitable even for six-year-olds, covers the four stages of emergency procedure—the ABC of first aid, which involves checking for breathing, opening the airway, taking the wrist and carotid pulse, checking the level of consciousness and making an emergency phone call. Those are simple matters, which a six-year-old of average intelligence should be able to master. If he does, he is entitled to receive a "one cross award".

The next stage is the "two cross award", which it is entirely possible for a nine-year-old to master. The techniques tackled at that stage are mouth-to-mouth ventilation, external chest compression and how to combine both processes to carry out full resuscitation. It is vital that the techniques are taught correctly and it is therefore important that the teacher should have sufficient knowledge.

The "three cross award'', which is appropriate for pupils of 12 and older, deals with serious bleeding, fractures, shock, burns and scalds and checking for poison. A young person who gained that award would be competent in first aid. All young people should have the opportunity of learning first aid for their own advantage as well as for that of others. In a number of cases, young people have been able to save the lives of adults, including their parents, as a result of the knowledge that they have obtained under the schemes.

There are one or two good examples. The first concerns the village of Bedlinog in Wales, 50 of whose residents—virtually all of them—know first aid. It is just as well that they do, because the young mother of two-year-old Richard Rees was in some panic when her child turned blue and was clearly suffocating. Three first-ciders, Mary Thomas and Pam and Doug Hughes, were able to unblock the child's airways and to keep him alive until the ambulance arrived. In that case, the ambulance had to come a considerable distance., and had they not intervened the child could have died.

Young people have made a positive contribution in many other cases. Louise Mulholland of Hitchin was able to help Rayna Baines, who cut her leg on a glass door and needed about 80 stitches. That young girl stopped the flow of blood, which contributed greatly to saving Miss Baines' life. Had she not had that knowledge of first aid, there might have been a fatality in that case.

Melanie Gates of Charlwood in Surrey helped to save the life of a 70-year-old lady who had fallen on ice and broken her leg and who had lain outside her front door in the cold for about two hours. That young girl implemented her knowledge of first aid and summoned the authorities, which ensured that the old lady was taken safely to hospital.

Michael Annetts of Llanhilleth was able to help Paul Jones who, while playing, was covered in some paint that caught fire. Michael was able to save his friend from suffering serious injuries.

All those cases show us that these days we can do much more than simply dial 999. Many skills are acquired, and we should be imparting the knowledge to young people.

These days we hear a great deal about violence on the football terraces and elsewhere. I like to think that those who learn how to save and protect life are much less likely to become involved in violent behaviour that is likely to maim others. If we could get the message over to all children, we should be going a long way to stopping some of the violence from which we suffer today. That valid and important view was also put forward by Peter Galloway, the assistant director general of St. John ambulance.

There are more than 250,000 accidents every year. They are a serious drain on the resources of hospitals, which are expected to maintain 24-hour-a-day, 365-days-a-year emergency services. We have all experienced the outcry when the accident and emergency services in a local hospital are withdrawn. Vast amounts of NHS time and money are spent on coping with accidents and emergencies.

We should remember that many cases are referred to hospital casualty departments that should be referred to the local doctor. Often people do not understand how serious the injury is, but if they were in possession of more information they could judge what was serious or what could be fairly dealt with by the general practitioner. It would save the Health Service much money.

We should give every possible encouragement to the initiative taken by St. John Ambulance and ensure that our children receive proper first-aid education. We could do so at a modest cost. A video is available for about £15 and the other materials required would not cost more than £5. The modest cost of about £20 per school, which perhaps we could encourage some industries to sponsor, would be a worthwhile investment. I ask my hon. Friend the Minister to consider sending a circular urging all schools to take this opportunity to ensure that the next generation are properly and adequately prepared to cope with emergencies.

I am grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Ilford, South (Mr. Thorne) for raising this important topic. I thank him for his kind words about my responsibility to respond to him.

I hope that I shall provide him with some reassurance that the Government recognise the value of emergency and first aid training for pupils in schools. We have taken account of that matter in our proposals for the national curriculum. We have also taken into account the excellent work being done by St. John Ambulance.

My hon. Friend rightly said that there are 20,000 fatalities a year because of accidents. With sensible first-aid and emergency treatment, people would be able to minimise the number of fatalities that occur every year.

My hon. Friend referred to Dr. Jennifer Bennett and her observations about the law as it relates to schools. At the beginning of September 1987, we issued a guidance note on first aid for schools and colleges. It says:

"The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) recommends however that employers should consider how their requirements should be met. The general responsibility of LEAs, their schools and colleges, for taking reasonable care of the pupils and students in their charge is enshrined in common law under the 'in loco parentis' doctrine. It follows that, although the above regulations do not specifically cover pupils and students in educational establishments, those responsible have a continuing duty to provide adequately for them and for any visitors on the premises.

Where possible, it is sensible to combine first aid arrangements provided for employees with those for pupils, and account should be taken of the likely number of visitors. Some visitors however, such as contractors may themselves be `at work' and may remain the responsibility of their own employers. In this respect it should be noted that the Approved Code of Practice requires written arrangements between employers in respect of contractors and other persons who may be at work, e.g. caterers"

and other people who come into schools as a result of other policies being introduced.

"In general, combining arrangements are welcomed by the HSE so long as they do not dilute the level of provision for employees. DES also supports the need to avoid duplication of provision for staff and pupils in recommending that the contents of all first aid boxes should follow HSE guidelines. It is further recommended that whenever possible the provision of first aid personnel and equipment should take account of both employees and non-employees, based on the criteria in the Approved Code of Practice".

A checklist is attached to the arrangements for first aid provision in schools and colleges. Establishments are invited to consider whether they have an adequate number of trained first-aiders to cover all locations, allowing for staff absences and impending retirements; whether there is an up-to-date list of first-aiders prominently displayed on the notice boards and other strategic locations; whether there are sufficient first aid boxes on the premises, including travelling kits for outside journeys, which are part and parcel of school life; whether there is a designated member of staff who is responsible for checking and maintaining the contents of first aid boxes; whether there is a properly equipped first aid room on the premises; whether there are prominently displayed up-to-date lists of local hospital casualty departments and GPs; whether there is a system for notifying parents and guardians when an accident occurs; whether all treated accident cases are recorded; and whether there is a clear procedure for notifying the appropriate authority of potential hazards. The latter point refers to chemistry laboratories and science laboratories generally. There are other check lists and my hon. Friend can be assured that schools take seriously their responsibilities in relation to members of staff who must be designated and the way in which first aid should be applied.

First aid education is largely a matter for determination by individual schools and, in practice, depends on decisions taken by individual members of staff. Education about different aspects of first aid occurs throughout the curriculum and compulsory years of schooling. It may be considered within the science curriculum, with regard to aspects of human biology and electrical safety and guidance for young people in coping with accidents caused by electrical equipment. First aid education will typically be given through health education, which might be included within a programme of personal and social education, and, of course, within physical education given in the laboratories, on the sports fields and, I hope, in swimming pools. We hope that schools will also provide practical guidance for teachers in a range of different aspects of first aid.

Guidance for pupils in resuscitation techniques is provided in swimming lessons, and the Government recognise the value and importance of that activity. There are some limits to what schools could or should be expected to provide in first aid training for young people. There is no doubt that only a relatively small amount of the curriculum time devoted to such matters can be of long-term benefit to individuals receiving such training and to society as a whole. A small effort in basic first aid treatment provides extraordinarily long-term benefits.

I am aware of my hon. Friend's involvement with St. John Ambulance. I think that all hon. Members appreciate that organisation's voluntary activities on so many public occasions. They may not be aware of the activities of St. John Ambulance in schools, which were outlined by my hon. Friend. For some time, St. John Ambulance has been running a schools project which has been designed to encourage as many young children as possible to remember simple skills of emergency aid. My hon. Friend wisely outlined the possibility of winning a first cross or second cross award for the simple skills that a six-year-old or nine-year-old may be able to master. My hon. Friend drew attention to the fact that the project was launched by Lord Joseph when he was Secretary of State for Education and Science, and we are well aware of the success that the project has had in persuading teachers to utilise first aid and safety skills to the best of their ability.

I should like to refer to the success of the St. John Ambulance three cross award, mentioned by my hon. Friend, which was sponsored by Mr. Robert Balchin, the director general of St. John Ambulance. I understand that since its launch in 1984, 50,000 certificates have been awarded to young people who have been successful in demonstrating knowledge in first aid. That is to be welcomed and St. John Ambulance is to be congratulated on its success in persuading schools to employ the scheme.

I have already referred extensively to the advice issued by my Department concerning first aid for pupils and teachers. I want to reiterate that that does exist and that guidance has been published.

First aid education in schools is not simply a matter for St. John Ambulance; it can be taken on board throughout the curriculum. We believe that those points are recognised within the Government's proposals for the national curriculum. We have identified health and safety education as one of the cross-curricular themes that will be covered by different foundation subjects.

We have already set up a working group to advise on programmes of study and attainment targets in science education. That has had a specific remit to cover scientific aspects of health and safety. In the interim report, which came to the Secretary of State last November, the working group identified scientific aspects of human health and well-being as one of the things that should be covered by science education in secondary schools.

More recently, we set up the design and technology working group and included a similar remit to cover the technological aspects of health and safety education in the workshop and outside school. We envisage that other foundation subjects, especially physical education, will cover health and safety and emergency aid.

I hope that my hon. Friend will accept that at this stage it would be impossible to say precisely what sort of emergency aid education will feature in the national curriculum. So much has yet to be decided and we have to await the recommendations of the various working groups and the consultation processes. I hope that what I have had to say will be of some reassurance to my hon. Friend in terms of the guidance that we have provided for schools in the past and what we envisage will be covered within the national curriculum.

Whatever aspects of first aid education are eventually covered by the national curriculum, I should emphasise that there will be adequate time left over, beyond the subjects that will be taken up by that curriculum, to enable youngsters to obtain additional information. As my hon. Friend said, first aid could be looked at in personal and social development for youngsters.

The Government have emphasised that, in secondary years four and five, at least 70 per cent. of the curriculum time will be devoted to core and foundation subjects, but there will continue to be many important matters dealt with outside the curriculum. We attach considerable importance to that.

Not all schools will necessarily have the expertise to be able to deliver a comprehensive first aid or emergency programme to all pupils. As I have said, they will sometimes have to rely on the expertise of others outside the school to provide young people with that sort of guidance. My hon. Friend will know that many youngsters are encouraged through schools to belong to a number of excellent voluntary organisations—such as the girl guides, the boy scouts and the boys' brigade and the girls" brigade movement, where first aid is something in which youngsters gain expertise. They learn a considerable amount about the process of saving life, minimising dangers to people in the event of an accident.

We shall do what we can within the curriculum and we shall make it plain that there is nothing to prevent schools from joining aspects of the national curriculum with other aspects of emergency and first aid education in a co-ordinating programme of health education. We see this as an important part of what schools are all about. I hope that I have managed to reassure my hon. Friend that the advice issued by the Department about safety matters and our plans for a national curriculum demonstrate the importance that we attach to the issues that he has been kind enough to raise. We fully recognise the possible long-term benefits of emergency and first aid training for young people, which my hon. Friend so clearly demonstrated by the examples he gave of the youngsters who have managed to take action to save lives. I trust that this will be of some help and reassurance to my hon. Friend.

I thank the Minister for delaying her Whitsun break getaway to respond to the debate. I am afraid that that is the limit of the pleasantries, as the health cuts in Waltham Forest are not so pleasant. I can tell the Minister a true story, which happened this morning. I was travelling into the House on the train, and about four seats down sat a smart gentleman. He suddenly got out a piece of paper and stated writing a report, and I noticed that it said on the top, "Financial Strategy for Waltham Forest District Health Authority". He scribbled lots of notes that I could not read and then wrote the word "funding". A minute later he scribbled it out. That is appropriate to this debate and the Government's treatment of the health authority.

I pay tribute to the local health workers, the nurses, ancillary workers and technicians. They are dedicated and efficient in the circumstances in which they have to work. I extend that tribute to many in management, who want the best possible for health care, although some seem to be fully prepared to wield the hatchet over Waltham Forest health authority, or sometimes think that managing the cuts means covering up the extent of the crisis in the Health Service and the consequences on local people. This has meant that Waltham Forest health authority has suffered in silence.

Waltham Forest district health authority is a Tory dream health authority. It has done all and more of what the Government have required. The chairman, Mr. Sidney Wayne, in a letter to me on 11 January, said:

"The Health Authority has already closed hospitals to provide the services more efficiently—the Connaught Hospital in 1976, Harts and Lugano Hospitals in 1984, the Jubilee Hospital in 1985 and the Forest Hospital in 1986. It is hard to see where further rationalisation can take place, although obviously we are continuing to explore all avenues where money can be saved … This year the pressures have started early and my managers have told the Health Authority that routine surgery will be greatly reduced at Whipps Cross over the next 3 months."

The reducing of routine surgery follows a period when the hospital was on red alert, which meant that no routine cold surgery would be carried out. That was unprecedented in the length of its duration over the early winter.

The effect on hospital waiting lists as a result of that reduced surgery and the red alert is likely to be appalling, but the health authority has done more than that. Over the years, we have seen ward closures, temporary closures—such as that of the psychiatric ward at present—that drift into permanency without proper public consultation, restrictions on community health provision and lower staffing levels. In the letter of 11 January the chairman of the health authority said that the staffing levels were low in many areas and the staff were poorly paid. He said that there was penny-pinching in, for example, maintenance, decoration and cleaning.

I wrote to the Minister for Health pointing out that the contractors—it is a privatised cleaning service—

"have difficulty in recruiting staff as their pay and conditions of work are appalling, and a great deal of staff time (nurses and administrators) is spent on "propping up" these contractors. There have also been complaints about the state of the grounds; rats having been seen recently and piles of rubbish surrounding the hospital."

The health authority has made all those cuts, yet it will still have a deficit of more than £2 million at the end of this financial year. It is fifth in the list of the top 10 health authorities in England with deficits. There is a serious shortage of funds to meet its requirements in the current financial year. The district health authority does all that, yet its only reward is that the Government and the regional health authority claim that it is efficient. I am sure that, once again, the Minister will bleat how wonderfully efficient it is. The Government have defined efficiency as working well with less, but, in Waltham Forest's circumstances, one can increase efficiency only with more in terms of resources and better working conditions.

I have written to the regional health authority countless times. I received a letter from the general manager, Mr. Hunt, who said:

"The efficiency savings are dependent on relative performance against a set of performance indicators. As one of the more efficient Districts, Waltham Forest has been required to make relatively low savings".

Then he said:

"The cumulative reduction in resources to Waltham Forest between 1982/83 and 1985/86 was £3·0 million (5·5 per cent.); although above the average for the Region as a whole (2·7 per cent.)".

There is a direct contradiction in those two statements. I wrote to the general manager and asked him if he could arrange

"to recompense Waltham Forest for the severe reductions it has been forced to make in the past and reward the District for its 'efficiency' as you imply should have been done."

I shall return to his figures later, because they are wrong. Efficiency cannot be measured in that way.

I received a letter from the community health council dated 23 February which made clear the sort of efficiency that we are talking about. It stated:

"The CHC hears from people who have been in hospital that services are under a great deal of pressure: indeed they are frequently described as a conveyor belt. We also hear of problems resulting from people being discharged into the community too early and without preparation because of the drastic shortage of beds … Already, Whipps Cross does more complex work than the average general hospital and treats 30 per cent. more people each year than Barts, the London, or the Whittingham, and 75 per cent. more than the North Middlesex or Oldchurch. The Whipps Cross cost per case is the lowest of the Region's London hospitals and the cost per day is also very low. The CHC believes these figures indicate deprivation as much as efficiency, as increasing waiting lists show."

One person's efficiency—the highest group call for beds is another person's deprivation—too few beds. There are many problems, such as higher demand, as a result of social factors.

I said that I would come back to Mr. Hunt's figures. He claimed that the cuts in Waltham Forest amounted to 5·5 per cent. However, the report entitled "Health Trends", published by the Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy, showed that Waltham Forest has had the largest cuts of any authority in the country inflicted on its resources for its hospital and community health services, amounting to 18·2 per cent. for the years 1982–83 to 1985–86. That is the real level of the cuts, for which the regional health authority does not even know the right figures. I have written to Mr. Hunt, putting his figures right, but still have not had a reply.

What has not been mentioned is the level of dissatisfaction that has grown up. One example is the long waiting times in the accident and emergency unit at Whipps Cross hospital. An article in The Daily Telegraph supplement of 7 February referred to the casualty department at Whipps Cross and quoted a senior house officer saying:

"The other day someone was kept waiting for seven hours. That just is not acceptable."

The hon. Member for Stockton, South (Mr. Devlin) lives in a neighbouring constituency and had the misfortune to hurt his hand. He tabled a question about his long wait at Whipps Cross. He also wrote to the general manager and received the reply:

"On the particular day when you attended there were 330 patients attending. Each year we see 97,000 people in our department which I understand from the statistics produced is about twice as many as in the Casualty Department in your own constituency, although the staff there report a staffing level very similar to our own."

Waltham Forest is, therefore, doing double the amount of work with the same number of staff. The general manager's letter to poor old Tim concluded:

"The financial position facing this Health Authority next year is so serious that I believe that we will face significant curtailments in services although I have spent the past two years endeavouring to find any economies rather than close beds, although at times this has led to complaints such as yours about at inadequate service.

I hope that your hand is better and that you will not require the services of our Accident Department in the near future."

The situation at that accident and emergency unit is made worse because surrounding areas are closing their casualty units and restricting their hours whereas Whipps Cross is open 24 hours a day—almost like the old Windmill theatre—never closing. However, the hospital does not receive recognition of that fact from the Government or the regional health authority. Whipps Cross provides, in effect, the regional casualty service, and should be funded as such.

More cuts are being demanded by the Government. The general manager of the health authority was forced to write a letter on 18 February to all her colleagues in the district management team referring to various cuts, stating:

"Managers are looking carefully at all costs in areas that are not patient services …The District already has plans to close Leystonstone House and Claybury, and the financial arrangements for this also remain unclear."

The letter then proposes that

"no additional district money is put into the provision of community facilities for our residents who have a mental handicap or are mentally ill … reductions in patient services will have to be considered."

The letter refers to the three ways in which those reductions can be made: closure of Claybury hospital—Thorpe Coombe hospital is also mentioned in that section; closures of a service or department; and ward closures at various hospitals. The letter says that family planning services cost £150,000 and community dentistry £320,000 and that they are under threat.

I can bring the Minister up to date. That letter was written on 18 February and since then there have been more closures including the closure of an elderly persons' ward. There have also been cuts in community dentistry, in family planning services and in X-ray facilities at two hospitals. However, at the end of the last financial year, the health authority was £230,000 in the red and we are seeing more cuts now.

An agenda item appeared last week on 19 May stating:

"The difficulties the Health Authority has experienced this year in trying to resolve its deficit problem are likely to be repeated in future years."

That is certainly the case. Acute services are under enormous pressure. The same agenda item states:

"The number of local Acute beds in 1987 was below the target set in the Regional Strategic Plan 1984/93, and below the bed norm related to the current standardised planning population for the district."

The agenda continues:

"Significantly, the local Acute case load which the Region assumed would fall to 21,000 cases per year in 1986 has in fact risen to 26,000 cases."

The region has got its facts completely wrong. The agenda item also refers to

"increasing pressure on Acute services which was evidenced in 1987 by restrictions on non-urgent admissions to Whipps Cross and a consequent slight reduction in the 1987 caseload."

There are fewer patients despite a faster throughput. That is hardly greater efficiency. The agenda item continues:

"1987 also saw an increase of 15 per cent. in the waiting lists over 1986 … a noticeably high proportion of non-elective admissions—76 per cent.—to all Acute hospital beds in Waltham Forest in 1987."

That clearly shows the excessive strain in the acute services sector in Waltham Forest.

Only last week the district authority decided to cut two acute wards at Wanstead hospital. One of them, the Jubilee ward, had just received a £150,000 upgrade. The other ward was used in the recent methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus outbreak. Those cuts come in addition to the cut of 37·8 per cent. in available beds ror acute and elderly cases between 1975 and 1988. That represents a decrease of 27·5 per cent. since 1979 and the figure is declining every year. High throughput is the sole claim for efficiency yet that has been achieved as a result of too few beds. That leads to premature discharge and cancelled admissions. There is an example in the local press of a man who had five admissions cancelled. Waiting lists are longer and many people give up waiting for the treatment that they need.

In-patient waiting lists for all specialties have increased. Waiting lists for general surgery rose in the year ended September 1987 from 458 to 618. Ear, nose and throat waiting lists increased from 2,177 to 2,664. Orthopaedic waiting lists rose from 349 to 498. Gynaecology lists rose from 408 to 567, and urology from 217 to 460. The Government are even in breach of their own DHSS guidelines on how long urgent and non-urgent patients should have to wait for treatment.

Maternity services have also been cut and are under enormous pressure. A report "London's maternity services in crisis" states:

"Maternity units cannot cope with the growing number of births while bed numbers shrink, except by keeping women in hospital for shorter periods, and by maintaining dangerously high bed occupancy rates."

The report refers to Waltham Forest hospital as a maternity unit already reaching the limits of efficiency where standards of care are suffering. The position has become worse with the closure of nearby maternity hospitals.

Waltham Forest is an area of severe deprivation. It has one of the highest levels of deprivation in the region and is among the highest in the country, on the 1981 census figures. Many people live in poor housing. The area has the fifth highest number of pensioners, the sixth highest number of children under the age of five and the sixth highest number of large families. Its birthrate and infant mortality rate are higher than the national average. It has the highest overall death rate in London, according to 1977 figures, including causes ranging from pneumonia, bronchitis, emphysema and hypertensive heart disease. However, that deprivation is not recognised. Neither is there proper funding for the reprovision from Leytonstone house and Claybury by the early 1990s. Together, that represents a massive injustice to the people of Waltham Forest.

There have been rumours of a secret report that there will be no more capital for reprovision. I hope that the Minister will, make it clear, if not today, at some future time, what the situation is. Waltham Forest's health service is in crisis. It is caused by the highest level of cuts in resources in the country, and yet Waltham Forest has some of the highest levels of health need. It is no longer appropriate to talk only of efficiency; we want to hear from the Minister about resources and money.

There has been a place for the leech in the history of medicine and now it has returned in a new form. The DHA takes a bite, as is its bounden duty to the Government; the RHA is enormously sluggish and complacent in not admitting the scale of the cut; but the Government, as the biggest bloodsuckers, are draining away the lifeblood of the NHS. I hope that that damage will be reversed and that the people of Waltham Forest will get the health service that they want and deserve. I demand proper funding for Waltham Forest's health service.

This bloodsucker is more than content to take the stage with the hon. Member for Leyton (Mr. Cohen). It is always a pleasure debating with him. He reminds me so strongly of my brother; he shares the same name and has very similar handwriting. As my brother made me an auntie yesterday, I feel even more disposed towards the hon. Member for Leyton than usual. I congratulate him on his success in winning the ballot for this debate on health service provision for Waltham Forest. I thank him for his kind thoughts about my holiday. I am sorry that it will not be starting yet because I shall shortly be on my way to Chester, to meet Mersey district and regional health authority chairmen.

The hon. Gentleman has obliged me to make a brief reply. I hear what he says about deprivation and poor housing in Waltham Forest. However, in Waltham Forest the standardised mortality ratios for the main preventable diseases are very good. Not only are they better than the national average but they are better than the regional averages. The death rates in Waltham Forest from cancer and from heart disease are lower than the national average. Whatever else the hon. Gentleman's constituents and the health authority may be getting up to between them, it is evident that the people of Waltham Forest look after themselves. The death rate there from preventable diseases is one that I should like to see in other parts of the country. It is certainly much better than in my own constituency of Derbyshire, South. I remind the hon. Gentleman that the whole object of the exercise is to have healthy people and not necessarily to have full hospitals. The objective is to have people enjoying a full life and good health at the same time.

The hon. Member for Leyton bombards Ministers and regional and district general managers with letters, some of which make his points well and some of which do not. The hon. Gentleman mentioned particular major changes, and he will know the statutory situation. Any major changes in provision of service have to be put out by the health authority for consultation. If the community health council disagrees, it has the right to say so and to make alternative proposals. If the health authority continues to press forward with its plans, it must apply to Ministers for agreement or refusal. Therefore, I stand in a statutory relationship to the particular issues which the hon. Gentleman mentioned.

Temporary closures are a different matter. If the health authority cannot staff a unit, it may have to take what amounts to emergency action. Recently, the courts clarified the law on consultation and on the term "temporary closures", and we expect local authorities to observe that legislation. That firmly applies also to the "secret report" to which the hon. Gentleman referred, which I understand has been circulating. In other words, if there are proposals for major changes, those affected must be consulted in the usual way.

As the hon. Gentleman said, the MRSA ward at Wanstead hospital was set up when there was a high incidence of MRSA in the district. Recently, it has had a low occupancy, with an average of seven patients, and it is therefore wise for the health authority to consider whether it still needs a separate ward, or whether the patients could possibly be nursed in side rooms.

Similarly, the health authority has sensibly examined the occupancy levels of beds allocated for general practitioner use. In some parts of the country, GP beds are extremely well used and a valuable asset to the community. In others they are allocated but the GPs do not use them. I understand that there is a proposal to close the GP beds at Wanstead and to provide alternative respite and terminal care facilities elsewhere in the district. The patients would not suffer, and the money previously allocated to the resource—which appears not to have been used very fully—could be used in other ways, perhaps to help clear the waiting list mentioned by the hon. Gentleman.

The hon. Gentleman probably knows that an option appraisal is being developed on Wanstead hospital. However, as he is well aware, it is not in Waltham Forest but in Redbridge. The object of his exercise must be the same as the obligation on Waltham Forest health authority—to provide services for people in the district. That is how the service operates.

On 14 April the hon. Gentleman wrote to Terry Hunt, regional general manager of North East Thames health authority, quoting a number of figures. I listened hard to what the hon. Gentleman said, but I am not sure whether the figures that he quoted were exactly the same. On that occasion the hon. Gentleman used figures from the Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy. He is nodding vigorously. I have got him. Those figures were published last year and compared the revenue expenditure in the health authority in 1985–86 with that in 1982–83, which is a long time ago.

The figures appear to show a real terms decrease of over 18 per cent. in the district allocation. The hon. Gentleman may have noted from volume 1 of the recent publication "Health Service Trends"—I do not see him nodding—that that apparent decrease is substantially accounted for by changes in the way the regional health authority made allocation for the service provided at Claybury hospital, and the transfer of services and associated expenditure from Langthorne hospital to Newham health authority. The decrease was not represented by reductions in service. It is a transfer of cash, and there is a good reason for it.

The expenditure was transferred in that way so that the health authorities providing services in the large mental illness and mental handicap institutions, but providing them to people from outside, should have the money transferred to the user authorities. The idea is that the user authority will pay the provider authority. It is partly intended to encourage the user authority to start developing community services for those people so that they can be cared for at home or locally, and good prevention and rehabilitation services can be provided. We hope to see that happening. This greatly distorts the comparisons made by the hon. Gentleman.

As the hon. Gentleman will know, the regional health authorities decide allocations to districts. This year North-East Thames regional health authority's initial net revenue allocation is £1,084 million—over £1 billion. That is a cash terms increase of 8 per cent. over last year and represents a real terms increase of more than 4 per cent.—way above inflation—and, therefore, substantial growth in revenue funding.

In the last year Waltham Forest appears to have been very prudent, managing to stay within its limits, and in the current year it will receive more money. First, it will receive £300,000 from the Department's special fund, which is intended to compensate the health authorities which will not be gainers under the RAWP formula—which was set up by the right hon. Member for Plymouth, Devonport (Dr. Owen) when he was Minister of Health. I understand that the money will be used for the introduction of a community management computer system and other projects. Secondly, £100,000 has been allocated to the authority from the waiting list fund to enable extra cases to be treated from the ear, nose and throat and general surgery lists.

Thirdly, as I am sure the hon. Gentleman is aware, there is a £9 million scheme under way at Whipps Cross, which will provide three new wards, four new operating theatres, a new out-patients department and rehabilitation facilities at the hospital. That will be a considerable improvement for his constituents. We are receiving reports that the health authority, which is very hard working and competent, is successful in delivering services to local people.

The hon. Gentleman is quite right that the accident and emergency department of Whipps Cross hospital is very busy and that it is the hardest working in the whole region. I understand that it deals with about 260 patients a day, of whom 45 are admitted. I hope that this does not reflect on any weaknesses of or lack of accessibility to local general practitioners. There are more than 200 general practitioners in the Redbridge and Waltham Forest family practitioner committee area. It is for the clinicians concerned to decide who is an emergency and who is not, and emergencies take precedence. It is a very busy hospital and a very busy casualty department and it is not supposed to be providing an alternative service to GPs.

For the last five years I have been proud and privileged to represent what I believe to be not only the finest new town in the country but what I think will become the finest town in Europe. I was particularly delighted to be re-elected last year, because in the last Parliament we laid the foundations for the success of this country and for the success of Basildon in particular. The town can take advantage of that fine opportunity and I hope that it will blossom and mature.

It has been brought to my notice that not everybody in the country describes Basildon in such glowing terms. For that reason, I launched a campaign three weeks ago called "I love Basildon—I'm backing Basildon." I am delighted to be able to say that within a very short time the local community has rallied round and given tremendous support to the campaign. Its purpose is to emphasise all the good things that are happening in Basildon and then to entreat the community to work together in an attempt to solve whatever problems we may have.

All kinds of competitions are being held, involving organisations from play groups to senior citizens. By the time the campaign is finished, everybody will be aware of what a wonderful place Basildon is to live in. The media have been very supportive in the campaign.

There is no place in Basildon for the vandal, the litter lout or the graffiti artist. Such anti-social behaviour will be dealt with severely. The "I love Basildon" campaign intends to emphasise that fact.

We shall also be holding a competition in which local residents will be invited to submit tunes for the "I love Basildon" campaign. A record will be made that includes local celebrities and local people. I hope that the record will become a No. 1 hit. Any royalties from it will be used to support our local hospice, St. Luke's.

I congratulate the development corporation, and now the Commission for the New Towns, on the work that they have done in developing and building the town in the past four decades. In particular, I pay tribute to all the staff, the chairman of the Commission for the New Towns, Sir Neil Shields, and its general manager, Mr. Douglas Galloway, who will shortly be retiring after 30 years of service. Although I have not always agreed with everything that the CNT has done, its work has been invaluable to our community. People have naturally begun to take its work for granted. They have found it difficult to accept the change of responsibilities from the development corporation to that of the CNT. It is quite clear to me that we must now look positively towards the day when Basildon is on its own. We have to plan carefully for that event, especially as regards housing and the disposal of assets.

I am delighted with the progress that has been made with the wishes of tenants in the Felmores estate to have individual central heating. Throughout the previous parliament, a succession of Ministers visited Basildon to listen to constituents' complaints about the high heating costs and the inefficient system on Felmores. Many tenants were unhappy with the quality of the heat provided and the frequent, high heating bills.

The Felmores heating action group fought long and hard for tenants to be consulted on the matter, so I am pleased that a referendum was held recently. It would be extremely helpful if my hon. Friend the Minister could say whether the result of the referendum will be acted on, and, if there is to be a change in the heating system, when the work will be carried out.

Now that that matter has been dealt with, I hope that the Department will turn its attention to constituents at the other end of the town, in Langdon hills, who have a similar heating system and similar problems. I hope that they will be given an opportunity to decide what best suits their needs.

Basildon is well known for the diversity of its housing estates—most builders and designers have been given an opportunity to demonstrate their work in the town. Some of the building is superb, but some has been disastrous for my constituents.

One estate where there are many problems is of the SIPOREX type. They are bland, concrete buildings and were built following a supposedly successful pilot scheme involving half a dozen buildings in part of my constituency. An enormous amount of money has been spent on them over the years, but there are still many problems.

In 1979, the Labour Government refused to pull them down. Instead, they embarked on a course of renovation. There have been problems of settlement and movement of the foundations. Many of the dwellings have had to be underpinned. Some people want to purchase their homes, but mortgages have proved difficult to obtain as no insurance company is prepared to back them. There have been problems with ceilings, windows and general dampness. In short, the estate was poorly designed and the people who live there deserve something better.

I hope that there will soon be a meeting of representatives of the local action group and my hon. Friend the Minister to discuss the best way forward. My hon. Friend will also he aware of the Government's involvement last year with defective properties in Vange. There were approximately 1,000 HSSB properties there. The various Ministers involved with the problem rallied round and eventually awarded compensation to the people who found it impossible to sell their homes because they were judged defective. I am delighted to tell the House that the number of people who are still in difficulty has been reduced to 80. I hope that my hon. Friend will view their circumstances sympathetically.

The market is an important part of East End culture. We have two excellent markets—in Pitsea and in Basildon. Stallholders have traded successfully for several years. They have added to the quality of life in our town and we want them to remain, as is demonstrated by the many letters that I have received on the subject and by the petition with which I was recently presented.

Traders from both markets have been to see me and are keen to purchase the sites from which they sell their goods. They are confident that they can raise the necessary capital, and they expected to be given the first opportunity to purchase the two sites. I know that my hon. Friend the Minister has corresponded with one of those groups at least, so she will be aware of the strength of feeling on this subject. The local authority rent paid to the CNT for the Basildon market site has remained very low for a number of years—approximately £10,000. The traders, however, have paid the local authority more than £450,000 a year for their 121 stalls. Because of the serious financial position that the council has got itself into, it is naturally reluctant to give up that source of rental income. It is clear that the interests of the two parties are in conflict. However, it would be quite wrong to jeopardise the position of the market traders because of the fiscal irresponsibility of the former Labour council. My only concern is for the livelihood of the traders, and that depends upon them being able to trade from their present open market sites. I trust that their future will be secure.

Let me deal specifically with the question of the future of the New Towns Commission housing in Basildon. There are approximately 15,100 such properties, arid by and large the tenants are content with their present landlord. It is well known that at some stage, the CNT, in the course of disengaging itself from the town, will hand over its housing stock to a successor authority. In the late 1970s, the then Labour council refused to take over responsibility for the housing stock despite being offered the opportunity on very favourable terms. Now the Labour party has the nerve to question the integrity of the CNT's action. The Labour party has gone out of its way to alarm people—particularly the elderly—by issuing false statements and making what I can only describe as a disgraceful video-nasty. The barrage of propaganda has alarmed people so much that they actually believe that their properties will fall into the hands of wicked landlords, that their rents will shoot sky-high and that they will be thrown on to the streets. I utterly condemn those methods, which are inspired more by a desire to gain political advantage than a desire to assist an orderly transfer of housing.

In spite of repeated reassurances by Ministers, Socialist activists have gone out of their way to issue false information in an attempt to create general hysteria. As a result, people are now worried about something that will not happen. The Housing Bill, currently in the other place, makes it perfectly clear that tenants will be consulted about their future landlords.

One group that can be totally absolved of any irresponsibility in this matter is the joint estate management co-ordinating committee, to whose members I pay tribute. They work extremely hard on a voluntary basis to try to help individual tenants with their problems. At the moment they are feeling a little hard done by. As I heard at a meeting only this week, they feel that they are not being kept properly informed of the options that are being considered for the future management of the properties. The group is ideally placed to allay people's fears and a meeting between the Minister and a few of its representatives would be most useful.

For my part, I am concerned that tenants are properly consulted and are given clear options so that they can decide who is the best landlord to manage their property. There has been endless talk of a referendum in which 98 per cent. of tenants apparently said that they wanted to become tenants of the council. That exercise, conducted at ratepayers' expense, was no more than a cynical attempt to influence the outcome of a local election. How can a referendum be held by people who do not even own the housing stock and who are unable to give voters a choice on the options? It was conducted by people who do not know the meaning of democracy and who are interested in consultation only when they are sure that the result will please them.

We are not clear who runs Basildon council. There are supposed to be democratically elected representatives, but there is no clear majority for one party. That does little for staff morale. We do not know whether the council wants to take over the management of the property, or even whether it can afford to do so. The impression has been given that as people are more or less content to stay with their present landlords and do not wish to change, they will opt for the local authority. But it should be made clear that the Commission for the New Towns is not the same as the council. Judging from letters that I have received from the local authority's 5,500 tenants, theirs is not exactly a utopian existence. If the local authority took over the management of the properties, rents may be greatly increased.

I am anxious that the housing stock in Basildon is brought up to a high standard and is well managed. Any remaining land sold for housing purposes should be set aside for low-cost properties for single people or young married couples. The revival of the shared ownership scheme would be welcomed. I approach the Whitsun recess in the knowledge that my hon. Friend the Minister will do everything that she can to assist the town, and that "I love Basildon" will be forever engraved upon her heart.

I must congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Basildon (Mr. Amess) on his choice of subject for this debate and for the effective manner in which he put forward the concerns of his constituents on a wide range of matters.

My hon. Friend has a fine record as an advocate for Basildon and its people and I have no doubt that the "I love Basildon" campaign that he recently helped to initiate will help even further to enhance the image of Basildon among those who live and work there.

Of the issues raised by my hon. Friend in this debate, the one that I would like to deal with initially is housing transfer. This has been a topic for much rumour and erroneous comments by the press in recent months and I am glad to have an opportunity now to set out the facts and reassure the commission's tenants in Basildon that their best interests are dominant in our thoughts. The overriding principle that my ministerial colleagues and I wish to be adhered to in the transfer of new town housing to alternative landlords is that the tenants should be given a say. That is an integral and important part of our housing policy—tenants have a right to choose.

The right to choose was introduced for the first time for new town tenants in Peterborough last year. The individual wishes of tenants were made known through a formal vote and their choice of either the city council or a local housing association will be respected. The right to choose will apply in all future transfers of new town housing, including Basildon.

That raises the inevitable question of when tenants will be given the opportunity to choose. At the moment, transfer to local authorities on the financial terms for which they have asked is not possible without new legislation. They, reasonably and fairly, want the housing on the same terms as are being offered to the other prospective landlords competing for the housing stock, that is, for them to acquire the houses at tenanted market value, rather than on the basis of outstanding housing loan debt. The New Towns Act 1981 allows for the latter possibility only for local authorities. We are planning, therefore, to provide in the next Session for repeal of part III of the New Towns Act 1981 on housing transfers and the introduction of new powers to allow for that. Basildon district council will be able to compete on the same financial terms as other prospective landlords for the new town housing in Basildon. However, it seems likely that the new powers will not be enacted before April 1990 at the earliest. It seems much more sensible, therefore, if the remaining new town tenants voted nearer the time about whether that transfer could take place.

Another important consideration arises from the need for that new legislation and our intention, annnounced in last November's White Paper, to legislate on local authority housing accounts. Until the implications of the forthcoming legislation are clear and have been fully digested by the councils, it is impossible for them to put a clear and definite prospectus to tenants on the services that they will be able to offer and the charges that they will have to make. We have a commitment to let tenants choose. That choice, which is probably one of the most important decisions that they will ever make, must be made on the basis of full and certain facts.

Tenants have a right to know what their likely rent levels will be in the first few years under their new landlord. They need to know what services they will get for their rent, when their houses will be painted and how long it will take to get repairs done.

It has become clear that the information available to tenants in Peterborough on those matters was not adequate. Tenants, the city council and the housing associations all agree on that. That information is not available yet, so it seems wrong to ask tenants to make that crucial choice now. I have, therefore, decided that in new towns where the local authority wants to bid for the housing, tenant consultation should not take place until the information is available. I recently informed the development corporations in Warrington and Telford of that decision as preparations for tenant consultation were well advanced, but the principle applies elsewhere, including Basildon.

I move to how that applies to the commission and its housing at Basildon in particular. The commission had written to my Department concerning an inquiry from a private property company about acquiring some of the Basildon stock. The disclosure to which my hon. Friend referred was our response to that and the express purpose was to remind it of the need to consult its tenants and to set out the key principles on housing transfer, which I elaborated earlier.

It was suggested that the best way forward would be for the commission to prepare a comprehensive disposal strategy for its housing, as in the other new towns. The commission is keen to prepare such a strategy as it accords with its wish to disengage from being a housing authority at the earliest opportunity. Such a strategy would remove the current uncertainties, which naturally are of concern to the commission's tenants and staff in Basildon in particular. I hope that the commission will be putting forward its proposals to my Department in the near future.

Clearly, it is too early to speculate on which prospective landlords will be identified to compete with the council at Basildon. However, I reiterate the commitments on housing transfer which will apply in Basildon. First, there will be a formal vote for tenants to choose their new landlord. Secondly, the individual choice of tenants will be respected. Thirdly, Basildon district council can bid for the commission's housing if it wants to. Fourthly, tenant consultation will take place only when I am convinced that tenants can make an informed choice of new landlord on the basis of available information. This is largely dependent on new legislation, and means that it will not take place for a couple of years.

I felt it important that I should put clearly on record the Government's policy on new town housing transfer, especially the way in which it will affect the tenants of new town housing at Basildon.

My hon. Friend raised a number of other issues relating to Basildon and the role of the Commission for the New Towns. In the time remaining, I will attempt to give him a response.

My hon. Friend referred to the strained relationship that developed at Basildon between the Commission for the New Towns and the district council. Such incidents are always regrettable, and I hope that, with the recent change in the political complexion of the council, rather better relationships will develop.

My hon. Friend raised the disposal by the Commission for the New Towns of Pitsea and Basildon markets. The commission's agents in Basildon said that tenants and market stall licensees at the Pitsea centre would be given the opportunity to form a consortium to purchase the property. This unfortunately appears to have been a premature notification, and the commission has since come to the view that wider considerations need to be taken into account before a final decision is taken on whether to offer the freehold of the centre for sale. I understand that the commission has written to the National Market Traders Federation to explain the position. I assure my hon. Friend that the commission is aware of the very strong interest of the tenants and market traders in the future of the Pitsea centre and that it will keep them advised of any further action.

The position regarding Basildon market is somewhat different. I understand that the Commission for the New Towns is in negotiation with the local council regarding the renewal of the lease under which the council manages the market. This is clearly a matter of some commercial sensitivity and not one on which it would be appropriate to comment further at this stage. Unlike Pitsea market, however, I understand that the commission no longer owns the freehold of Basildon market and cannot therefore offer if for sale to the market traders.

I shall now turn to the points raised by my hon. Friend on the re-purchase of HSSB houses at Basildon currently being carried out by the commission. Since the then Minister for Housing, Urban Affairs and Construction announced in November 1986 that the Commission for the New Towns would be authorised to offer to buy owner-occupied HSSB dwellings, excellent progress has been made with the re-purchase programme. Of the 300 dwellings involved, over 400 have now been re-purchased and others are currently in negotiation.

I recognise that a small number of owner-occupiers may be unwilling or unable to take advantage of the re-purchase option. However, I can assure my hon. Friend that an early termination of the re-purchase option is not envisaged. The remaining owner-occupiers are therefore under no pressure to sell back to the commission. Before any decision to terminate the scheme is taken, the interest of owner-occupiers who still remain will, of course, be given careful consideration. However, in view of the relatively short time since the re-purchase programme commenced, I feel that it would be premature to consider alternative options for dealing with the residual cases at this stage.

I should now like to refer to the points raised by my hon. Friend in relation to SIPOREX housing at Basildon. As my hon. Friend is aware, another system-built estate constructed by the former Basildon development corporation has given rise to serious structural problems. A major programme of structural repairs was carried out some years ago, which was followed by a programme of window replacement and heating improvements. I understand that problems are, nevertheless, still being experienced with these houses, and I believe that my hon. Friend the Member for Housing and Planning has agreed to meet a delegation of tenants. We shall of course, be happy to consider what further action is required in the light of that meeting.

I shall turn to the points raised by my hon. Friend on the replacement of the district heating system on the Felmores estate at Basildon. I am grateful to my hon. Friend for his remarks on that. As he has said, because of the dissatisfaction with the district heating system, I agreed earlier this year that the commission should consult the residents on three alternative options. These were significantly to upgrade the operation and efficiency of the district heating system or to replace it with either individual gas or individual electric heating systems. In the event, 78 per cent. of those voting opted for the individual gas option. Given the weight of opinion in favour of this option, the commission is now preparing, for my approval, detailed proposals for the removal of the district heating system and its replacement by individual gas heating in each dwelling.

The situation on the Langdon Hills estate, which is also served by a district heating system, is rather different. The introduction of metering and the conversion of the boiler to operate on gas rather than oil has significantly improved the efficiency of the system and there is clearly far less tenant dissatisfaction generally with the district heating system than at Felmores. We have no proposals, therefore, to conduct a tenant consultation exercise on the district heating system at Langdon Hills or to replace the system with some alternative heating method.

My hon. Friend referred also to the need for land sales by the commission in Basildon at discounted values as a means of providing low-cost housing for rent. I appreciate my hon. Friend's concern about the need for such provision. It would be initially for the commission to come forward with such proposals, but it would need to be clearly justified before I could consider approval.

I hope that what I have been able to say has reassured my hon. Friend and his constituents about the future of new town housing in Basildon.