May I pay tribute to the many right hon. and hon. Members whose constituents are also victims of the APW pension scandal for their support? It is a good example of all that is best in our Parliament, with Back Benchers working together, regardless of party, for the common good of those whom we represent. I also thank the Minister and his team for meeting a delegation of fellow Members and some of those affected by the collapse of the APW pension fund. We met the Minister late last year, and he listened at first hand to the desperate situation of the workers who were represented at that meeting. However, I am sure that he would be the first to agree that listening is not enough. What we now need is a set of responses that will reassure the members of the APW pension scheme about their future retirement.

Three months have passed since this latest pension failure broached the headlines. The failure left hundreds of my constituents in Eastleigh traumatised by the news that their pensions had been slashed—if they were lucky, to one fifth of their expected value.

The discovery of large deficits in final salary pension schemes has become all too common. It has been caused by a combination of employer contribution holidays, the abolition of tax credits paid to pension funds, and a recent slump in the stock market. It has resulted in many schemes becoming unviable. Sadly, it is not even a new phenomenon. Final salary pension schemes have been under increasing threat since the 1980s. For the record, before entering Parliament I too was a victim of a failing pension scheme, as colleagues from my area may recall. I mention it now in case, by some remote chance and even at this late stage, I might myself have an interest in the Government's proposals.

The Government's own figures show that about 65,000 people have been affected by final salary pension scheme deficits. As we know, employers are required to make good those deficits, but many prefer to close or wind up their schemes rather than continue to incur the cost of closing the funding gap. All too often, firms genuinely do not have the funds to make good the deficit, and paying the pension debt could bankrupt the company. Pension fund trustees are then faced with a choice. They can bankrupt the company, but still not recover the debt; or they can enter a compromise agreement to accept less, but still more than if the company were to go into liquidation. Inevitably, however, it is the members of the scheme who lose out—the pensioners by having their pensions frozen, and the workers by suffering a significant reduction in their deferred benefits.

In general, the decline and winding up of the APW scheme closely followed that pattern, but it is in the particular that we are interested. Our debate provides an opportunity to explore and expose actions that at best can be described as unethical, and it allows us to highlight the deficiencies in the regulations that can result in the failure to provide protection to the employees in the fund. It is the latter who are the real victims.

From our discussions with the Minister and his officials, and from our meetings and correspondence since then, I am sure that the Minister is aware of the detailed events that surround the failure of the APW scheme, but it is important that the salient facts should be placed on the record.

I start by confirming that, under regulations introduced in June 2003, solvent employers who want to wind up their pension schemes have to purchase annuities for all scheme members. For a while, that seemed to stop the wind-ups. Prior to June 2003, employers could wind up their schemes and pay only the minimum funding requirement—the MFR debt—which was usually between a fifth and a seventh of the cost of the annuities. It was understood by most Members that after those regulations came into force, no solvent employer would be able to close an underfunded pension scheme.

However, unscrupulous employers began to realise that the common law that enabled trustees to compromise a debt could still be used if they could show that the new buyout debt would force the employer into bankruptcy. In fact, because the new buyout debt was so much larger than the MFR debt, the new regulations gave employers more scope to compromise.

In the case of APW, the MFR deficit was about £7.8 million, compared with a buyout debt of £55 million. Therefore, while it could be argued that the MFR level of debt could be met over 10 to 20 years—so the trustees would refuse to compromise it—it was obvious from the accounts that the APW group could not afford £55 million all in one go to buy the annuities. Furthermore, APW knew that if it allowed its pension scheme to keep going beyond April 2005, the trustees would not be open to any compromise. They would simply allow the firm to go into liquidation, knowing that the scheme members would receive 90 per cent. of their pensions from the new Pension Protection Fund. APW would also have known that, although the new financial assistance scheme would be a further incentive to trustees not to compromise, at that time the trustees had no concrete information to go on. The Pensions Bill merely stated that all the detail would be provided by subsequent regulations. Therefore, the trustees had no way of knowing whether the APW scheme would be eligible and, if it were, how much it would receive and whether a limit would be placed on members' pensions.

The choice was between forcing the firm into liquidation over the pension debt and leaving members hostage to fortune on the vagaries of the FAS, and the best possible compromise, which would still only secure 20 to 30 per cent. of members' deferred benefits. Should anybody think that the threat by APW directors to put the firm into liquidation was a bluff, I am assured that the trustees received a written ultimatum that unless they agreed to the compromise drawn up in November, the directors would file for bankruptcy the next day. To add insult to injury, the trustees were also told that APW's American parent would then buy the firm back out of bankruptcy, free of the £55 million pension debt, at a knockdown price. So the compromise was made and the bombshell fell on hundreds of scheme beneficiaries, many of whom found their expectations of a secure retirement in ruins. Members were left distraught, having to rethink their lives.

Let me give just one example, that of Karen and Wayne and their daughter Shannon. Wayne has paid contributions for 16 years, and his partner, who has been in the scheme for 11 years, has called the news a kick in the teeth. She said:

"I have a message for the Government. They need to do something about this. It's all very well saying we should build for the future, but if they do not do something to secure company pensions, they will face having more of us relying on their state pensions. They need to put in a clause to stop people being stitched up."

Most people are in no doubt that Wayne, Karen and Shannon are in a devastating predicament through no fault of theirs, or of the trustees of their pension scheme. As the Minister will recall, following his meeting with our delegation late last year, the situation with regard to the APW scheme and the trustees is as follows. At the time when the trustees were being pressed into agreeing a compromise for the scheme wind-up, they were hampered by a lack of information on the regulatory framework of the FAS. They lacked information on the deemed buyback value of members' pension benefits and suffered from the vagueness of the facts about potential support for firms via the FAS when schemes were wound up to avoid their becoming insolvent.

In his response to these points in January, the Minister went to some lengths to describe the Occupational Pensions Regulatory Authority's expectations of the trustees when negotiating a compromise agreement. In what areas, if any, has the Minister been advised that the APW trustees have failed to meet the expectations of OPRA in making a compromise agreement?

I now turn to the situation on deemed buyback of state pension rights. In their negotiations on the compromise agreement, the APW trustees were hampered by a lack of information from the national insurance contributions office on the deemed buyback values of scheme members' state pensions, which were likely to be particularly significant to lower-paid workers.

I have been informed that since our meeting with the Minister things have happened quickly. I am not curmudgeonly; I am grateful if the Minister has taken a personal interest in the scheme and things have moved forward to the benefit of my constituents. I am advised that in late January, NICO contacted the trustees and asked for details of a sample of 20 scheme members who were worst affected by the collapse of the APW pensions fund. Apparently, the results came back from NICO last week. I am sure that the Minister will know that of the 21 cases put forward, 16 qualify for full reinstatement of their rights, three qualify for partial reinstatement and two do not qualify at all. That news will come as some relief to lower-paid APW members.

But life is not that simple. We are told that it will take three years to complete a full scheme reconciliation of guaranteed minimum pension. That will leave hundreds of workers in limbo in the meantime, and will leave those who retire after the scheme winding-up process with nothing to fall back on. We need the Department for Work and Pensions to confirm that pensioners who retire post wind-up will not only qualify for the deemed buyback, but will be entitled to have the benefits backdated to the date at which they retired at age 65. I think that that is the meaning of the law, and I hope that the Minister can confirm that that will happen.

Can the Minister also confirm that his Department has been saying that members' additional voluntary contributions—AVCs—would be lumped together with their ordinary scheme benefits in order to calculate their benefits under the Pension Protection Fund, which will commence after April? Surely he agrees that it would be morally indefensible to penalise prudent members of our society for saving extra for their pensions. That would send the wrong message to the public at a time when the Government want them, and us, to save more for their retirement. I understand that the Department has since realised that that approach contradicted the priority order for benefits in the scheme wind-up set out in section 73 of the Pensions Act 1995. No doubt the Minister will confirm that change of heart by his officials, who are, perhaps, not quite so well versed in the law as I am sure he is.

While the uncertainty about deemed buyback rights is gradually being resolved—albeit at a snail's pace and far too late to help the compromised negotiations for APW—the major difficulty of the application of the FAS remains. I understand, and can even sympathise with, the Minister's concerns that including pension schemes that have been wound up to avoid bankruptcy with those of firms in liquidation puts him, the Government and the taxpayer at some risk. Clearly, the Government do not want to open the floodgates to firms that want to offload their pension liabilities on to the taxpayer, particularly if they continue to trade and subsequently return to profit to the benefit of their shareholders, but not necessarily their workers.

I am following closely what the hon. Gentleman says. Although I understand his argument about opening the floodgates, would not it have been better for all concerned if the eligibility criteria for the FAS had been clear from a much earlier stage?

I agree. That is self-evident, and is an issue that I hope we shall address to the Minister in some numbers today. I hope also that we will receive a sympathetic response from him.

I return to the point that I was making. There is an issue regarding how big the problem is and whether the taxpayer should bail out people who are less careful in the way in which they run their businesses. In the case of the APW scheme, even a cursory inspection of the historic figures—not the accounts prepared a few months before the negotiations on the pension scheme, but those running back for several years—would show that there is not a chance of the £55 million pension debt being met. The merest glance would show that.

The Minister will know from correspondence with colleagues who are here today that the APW trustees were faced with a choice of accepting a compromise or seeing the company become insolvent. On the final day, 5 November 2004, when the company was still allowing discussions and the guillotine was about to fall, the trustees could not know of the Minister's subsequent decision to allow companies that became insolvent after May 2004 to be eligible to join the FAS. That decision had still not been announced when the APW scheme was wound up in the High Court on 17 November. I do not blame the Minister for that; that is how the sequence developed. However, the trustees for the APW scheme were trying to negotiate with both hands tied behind their backs because that information was not in the public domain.

It seems likely that only a limited number of schemes will be in the position of the APW scheme, so there will be a limited number of genuine candidates for inclusion in the FAS. I thank the right hon. Member for Southampton, Itchen (Mr. Denham) for his suggestion that it would be perfectly fair to ensure that, as a result of the compromise, no member of the APW scheme is worse off than they would have been if they had been eligible to join the FAS. That is a telling and valid point. I ask the Minister to call on his officials to explore that suggestion in detail. It should be possible to establish how many firms would be involved and the liability that would therefore fall on the FAS.

In that context, the Government announced on 8 February that they had had an unexpected windfall of £6.2 billion in 2002–03 through unclaimed benefit entitlements. That gives rise to the suggestion that diverting even a small percentage of that largesse—an unexpected treasure—to bolster the £20 million annual funding of the FAS would make a huge difference.

Still on the subject of funding, is there any reason why the FAS could not be run in the way that it is proposed that the Pension Protection Fund be run? Could not the FAS take assets of schemes that qualify and that have not yet distributed all their assets to members? Thus the FAS fund would not amount simply to £20 million a year; it would be substantially more. For the record, the APW fund alone was worth £33 million. PPF fund moneys could be invested in the same way, and benefits could be paid to members on reaching the age of 65, possibly through the state pension system.

It is clear that the APW pension collapse has raised many questions among scheme members, many hundreds of whom live and work in my constituency. I conclude my speech this morning by recounting just a few of their questions. There are many more questions, but time will not allow me to put them on the record. If a firm avoids insolvency by winding up its pension scheme, why could it not claw back contributions when it returns to profit? That would be a perfectly logical thing to do. Why have the Government not yet followed European legislation that provides better protection for pensioners and their pensions? When will the Government review information issued in booklets and leaflets by OPRA, by the Department for Work and Pensions and by the FSA to ensure that they do not give a false sense of security to pension scheme trustees and members? This is a plea from people on the front line who are trying to make these things work, not from those of us sitting comfortably in Whitehall, as we often are. Did the DWP and the Treasury receive actuarial advice that scheme members should be told that full funding on minimum funding requirements did not mean that all liabilities could be met if the scheme were wound up? Finally, my constituents want to know whether the Government are aware that pension scheme members throughout the country have little confidence in their ability to protect and preserve the investments that employers are making for a decent retirement.

I congratulate the hon. Member for Eastleigh (Mr. Chidgey) on seizing the opportunity to use this Adjournment debate to set out in detail the ramifications of the APW case. Like several other hon. Members in the Chamber, I have a number of constituents who have been dramatically affected by the collapse of the APW pension scheme, although their number is relatively small . They were based at the Uxbridge site, and the hon. Member for Uxbridge (Mr. Randall), who has to go to a Statutory Instrument Committee, has taken up a larger number of cases. His constituents worked with constituents of mine, and they, too, have been dramatically affected by the collapse of the scheme. I am grateful to my constituent Mr. Alan Harwood for contacting me, for bringing together those of my constituents who have been affected and for providing me with briefings and advice throughout our discussions with Ministers.

The cases that have been brought to me are all equally heart-rending. They involve people who have invested in the scheme for years, who have properly saved for their retirement and who will now receive a relatively trivial amount as pensioners. Some—this is easy to say but difficult to describe—will face straitened circumstances and, in some instances, real poverty. The problem has arisen when they least expected it: they thought that they were in a secure scheme, and they were preparing for their retirement by contributing in exactly the way that successive Governments had advised them to do. They also placed their faith in their trustees. To be frank, the trustees have acted on the basis of legal advice on every occasion, and they have even taken action to put their legal advice and judgments before the courts, which have judged their actions to have been legal throughout.

When we debated the legislation that the Government introduced to protect pensions, hon. Members throughout the House welcomed the fact that the Government were seeking to ensure that none of our constituents would be further disadvantaged by the collapse of pension schemes. During those debates, no one, as far as I can remember, raised the issue of the compromise settlements that were being enforced, particularly after takeovers. In welcoming the new legislation, however, we undoubtedly thought that it would give adequate protection to most of our constituents and that we were redressing a wrong that many of them had experienced.

However, this is a special case, and I plead it as a special case. Our constituents have been affected because they have been caught in a specific time frame. After the legislation was enacted, the guidance was not made available as promptly as we would have hoped. As a result, scheme members have been denied access to the protective mechanisms that the Government's new legislation introduced. At the same time, they have no redress against their trustees, because their trustees acted legally and in good faith; indeed, the courts have judged that they acted legally.

The case before us is an example of a specific problem; I am not sure how many other examples there are, but I doubt that there will be many. In the very specific period before the new advice and guidance were given, trustees were left having to exercise their best judgment, based on legal advice. In this instance, it would have been better if they had allowed insolvency to occur. That is certainly true for my constituents, who would then have been protected under the new legislation. However, the trustees reached a judgment—quite rightly, in the light of the legal advice that they were given—to make a compromise agreement to avoid insolvency and keep the firm going. In doing so, they thought that they were looking after the fund's long-term interests.

I think I understood the hon. Gentleman to say that the trustees would have done better to force the company into insolvency because scheme members would have got something better in those circumstances. However, it is important to put it on the record that that is not necessarily true, because none of us knows what they would have received under the financial assistance scheme, although we know that the FAS does not have enough money in it. Scheme members might have got practically nothing.

It is a matter of judgment and we are not clear. Every indication that we have received so far—in statements, representations and discussions—is that pensioners may well have been in a more secure position, particularly with regard to the moral duty that would have been placed on the Government to ensure their protection. There is a moral duty on the Government to act. Trustees acted without that guidance—properly, legally and, they thought, in the best interests of pensioners—and now many of our constituents find that they face penury in their old age, or at least significantly reduced pensions.

The solution is fairly straightforward. We should deal with the situation as a special case and consider applying the legislation and guidance in such a way as to give the members of that pension fund access to the protection that we had thought would be available in cases of insolvency.

I have also received representations about the advice and information that was given in the various booklets that successive Governments published. Most of our constituents felt that they were protected by past legislation and past assurances or by the new legislation, which most of us supported. Many feel that their hopes were raised by the initiation of the new legislation on pensions protection, and that they were misled by that information and by successive Governments, who persuaded them to buy into those private pension schemes, so that they could have secure futures.

I therefore urge the Minister to consider how we can interpret the new legislation and guidance to deal with the situation. I do not believe that that will open the floodgates. There may be one or two small examples that are similar, but the moral onus is now on the Government to act. The delay in publishing the guidance has meant that the trustees, acting properly and legally, have disadvantaged our constituents in a way that the Government should redress.

On that basis, I hope for a sympathetic hearing of our constituents' pleas. However, if the Minister cannot give us firm commitments, he should at least not close the door and should allow us to come back with further detailed suggestions about how to deal with individual cases. The deemed buyback route was open to a number of our constituents. However, as has been mentioned, the delay in implementation will not satisfy even them, so a special measure and specific guidance may be needed. I would warmly welcome the Minister's consideration of that proposal.

There can be little doubt about what has happened to company pension schemes in the past few years. The volume of assets in such schemes was one of the great success stories of the British economy and the sheer amount of funded pensions was something on which we did much better than comparator economies. That success has almost become a disaster area. I have no doubt that the crisis was precipitated largely by the decision to tax the pension funds so heavily, with a £5 billion-a-year tax, the effect that that had on the savings market, and the knock-on effect on the value of the stock market. In effect, that hit the pensions industry with a double whammy.

Of course, there is the question of how far that merely expedited a trend that was discernible elsewhere. The withdrawal from defined-benefit pension schemes has been measurable in other Anglo-Saxon economies, and they have not had our tax whammy. We must consider whether pressures would have built up, although perhaps at a slower rate, on company schemes, such as that of APW, anyway, given that people are living longer and causing a greater drain on companies' resources.

What happened at APW seems to be of a different order, however. The sharp practice that was involved is breathtaking, and it is intolerable that the trustees should have been put in such a disgraceful position. In effect, a gun was held to their head and a timetable—a guillotine—was set within which they had to reach a decision. We must examine the means by which such pressure on trustees can be avoided.

My suspicion is that the trustees made the right decision, certainly in respect of what they knew at the time. It was an awful decision to have to take, but I believe that they made the right one. However, difficult questions of public policy will arise if, when the precise terms and arrangements of the FAS become clear, it seems that the trustees would have done better for their members and beneficiaries had they taken the other decision and forced liquidation. As we do not want to provide a perverse incentive, perhaps the Minister should consider the incentives that we need to build into the system to encourage trustees who are put in a similar position to those at APW to come to a decision that is collectively of benefit to the trustees, but also takes account of the greater public good.

I want to highlight something that my constituents who have suffered from the APW situation have put to me. Their request is for urgency and certainty, although I am not sure that the two are compatible. They want to know quickly where they stand, and they emphasise that the ongoing discussions and considerations of Ministers should be expedited. When I face them in my surgery, I question whether it would not be better to wait and let the thing take its course rather than to force a quick decision, because the outcome might be better. Nevertheless, as one would naturally expect, people who are in the middle of their working life, and many are approaching the end of their working life, are worried. They have made contributions, but they suddenly find that certainty has been taken away. They want quick redress, and I hope that the Minister will take on board the sense of urgency that our constituents properly feel about the matter.

The hon. Member for Eastleigh (Mr. Chidgey) clearly set out the background. I wish to re-emphasise his point that MPs on both sides of the House will work together on this issue. There has been a meeting with the Minister, the hon. Gentleman and I met trustees in my office in Southampton, and several of us attended a meeting organised by one of the trade unions involved. It is important to make progress so that we take some positive news back to constituents who have been affected.

Among the many cases that have been publicised is that of one of my constituents. He was due to retire seven days after the winding up of the scheme was confirmed. His pension of less than £10,000 became a pension of less than £2,000, and the 25 per cent. lump sum disappeared. He is in the unfortunate position of suffering from a degenerative disease, so he does not have the option of seriously looking for work into his late 60s and 70s to put the situation right. It is difficult for most of us to comprehend exactly what it would feel like to find ourselves in that position a week away from retirement, but we are talking about such people today.

I thank the Minister for his interest and, through him, a number of his officials, who have been very helpful in talking me through some of the more technical details. I appreciate that enormously. I have two points to make about the history of the situation. The first is that when we look back at our debates, we sometimes realise that there was a missed opportunity. When the Pensions Act 1995 went through Parliament, there was a proposal for a central continuation fund into which the funds of schemes, such as the one under discussion, would have been paid. That would have been run on an ongoing basis. Much of the real deficit in the APW scheme comes from the fact that it has been closed. The deficit in the MFR is quite small on an ongoing basis, but once a scheme is wound up and annuities must be bought, the deficit becomes huge. Had that proposal been adopted back in 1994–95, we would not face many of these problems.

The second point, which supports the comments made by the hon. Member for New Forest, West (Mr. Swayne), is that the trustees were put in an impossible position. My initial reaction was to be highly critical of them, but having gone through the circumstances in some detail, I feel that they do not have a strong case to answer. Even at this late stage, the Minister might want to consider whether trustees could be protected against being forced into compromising on such disadvantageous terms. Such proposals have been floated in previous meetings with him.

There are two main ways in which we can make progress. Deemed buyback was included in the 1995 Act but has never been implemented. If APW members were to gain access to deemed buyback, it would be a historic first because it has never been available to any other set of members. I believe that is the case, but I can be contradicted if wrong.

Essentially, deemed buyback means that people who contracted out of the state earnings-related pension scheme are treated as though were in it. For most people in a final salary scheme, they would not get as much as they would have done, but it could be significantly more than is currently available.

I have been provided with one calculation of how the scheme might affect somebody who has recently retired. I use the figures with some caution because every case is different and it would be wrong to generalise that the proportions or figures arising from a specific case would apply to any other scheme member. However, they illustrate the possible difference. For an individual being paid a pension of £1,848 a year at 20 per cent. of what he should have got—£9,240 a year—deemed buyback could pay him £5,512 a year. I suppose the conclusion that we draw from that depends on how we look at the figures. That amount is substantially less than £9,000 and, from that point of view, probably pretty disappointing. On the other hand, it is substantially more than is currently on offer.

Calculating deemed buyback has been difficult because the relevant actuarial tables have not been made available. I understand that some progress may have been made on that, and that my hon. Friend the Minister may have played a role in it. The hon. Member for Eastleigh referred to that. No one would be forced to take deemed buyback, but for some members it looks as though it could be a significant improvement on what is on offer.

I want to reinforce two points made by the hon. Gentleman. First, with the scheme under way, it would be important that members knew their position and could take a decision as quickly as possible. It would be unfortunate if it took three years to resolve the scheme's position and to offer advice to each member. I hope that the Minister will examine that.

Secondly, the Department has suggested that even if the scheme took three years to resolve, there would be no backdating of the pension payment. That would not be acceptable and I cannot understand the legal position for it. Will the Minister confirm whether backdating would occur, even if he has to get back to us at a later date? The timing would then be a problem only for those people whose pensions are just about to be in payment.

There seems to be a query, which I cannot understand, about whether deemed buyback would be available to those whose pensions are in payment—either those who have just come into that position or those who had been in it for some time. Again, I cannot understand why that should be the case, and I hope that it can be quickly resolved. Nobody would suggest that deemed buyback is some sort of knight on a white horse coming over the hill to rescue all scheme members. People are facing a pretty desperate situation and a number of longer-serving, lower-paid employees, who are least likely to have other retirement savings and pension provision, could benefit most. If the Minister can build on what he has done so far to move that along, that would be helpful.

To reinforce what has been said, I want to address the issue of the financial assistance scheme, the second main way in which we can make progress. I understand why any Minister would be concerned about opening the floodgates of support to schemes when the parent company is still solvent, still trading and appears to have walked away from its liabilities. The dangers of the Government stepping in and saying that they will underwrite all schemes in such circumstances are obvious. I do not think that any hon. Member would advocate that.

A close examination of the APW scheme suggests that that scheme and only a fairly small number of other schemes fall into a category of schemes that need attention. Those schemes were forced into making a compromise between the time of the announcement of the financial assistance scheme last May and of the Minister's announcement last November that schemes that went insolvent after May would be eligible for the financial assistance scheme.

Such schemes are in a special category because, however hard they tried, the trustees who took the decision to compromise could not possibly have known whether their scheme members would be eligible for the financial assistance scheme. They might have guessed at it, as they did in the APW case, and taken their best shot at working it out. However, in practice, they had to go to the High Court and wind up the scheme before the Minister's decision. As the hon. Member for Eastleigh said, there is no doubt that the trustees were explicitly told that if they did not agree to the compromise, which brought extra money into the scheme, the company would go insolvent and there would be no extra money.

I want the Minister to consider that argument and see whether he can ring-fence not just the APW scheme, but the relatively small number of schemes that got into the same difficulty over that period of time. That would be helpful. As people—in particular, our constituents—will read this debate, it is important not to try to mislead anyone. None of us should pretend that the financial assistance scheme will solve all the problems for all scheme members. The Minister set out clearly in writing that that scheme will be targeted—we do not yet know by how much—at those scheme members who are nearest to retirement, whose needs are greatest, and who have the least opportunity to adjust and make further provision for the future. Even if we were to get the APW scheme into the FAS—I hope that we do—I do not want to pretend that it would solve everyone's problems.

Looking at the available tools, it seems to me that a combination of the rapid implementation of deemed buyback and the extension of the financial assistance scheme to the APW scheme would make a considerable number of people better off. It is not about restitution. No doubt the campaign for that will continue in other ways and in other places. I wanted to focus on those two aspects of the scheme because it is within the Minister's power to deliver on them.

Most of the people who have spoken before me know far more about this area of policy than I do, so I shall talk about what it means in human terms, to four of my constituents, that their pensions have, effectively, been stolen from them. Mr. Andrew Kellaway, Mr. T.N. Snelgrove, Mr. Alan Harding and Mr. Graham Henley all wrote to me independently towards the end of last year, and I will, with the indulgence of the House, read an extract from Mr. Henley's letter.

Mr. Henley said that he and his wife were "shattered" to receive a letter from APW Electronics Ltd., informing them that it had wound up the company's defined benefit pension scheme in deficit. From their point of view, the company had

"held secret negotiations with the trustees to this end back in August."

Mr. Henley says that he

"like thousands of others in this country believed that this was not possible. That changes in the law since the Robert Maxwell pension fund scandal had sorted this out, and that pensions were now safe."

He relates that he and his wife

"have two sons and have a mortgaged home"

and that they have both worked very hard to bring their sons up

"as respected members of the community and are proud of the result."

He continues:

"We have borne the cost of their education and upbringing and have never . . . received any financial assistance. On three occasions during my manufacturing engineering career my job has become redundant".

It is only because he has lived a prudent lifestyle that he has been able to plan for retirement effectively.

I am sure that constituents of all the hon. Members who have spoken so far would be able to repeat such moving and extremely disturbing facts ad nauseam—a catalogue of misery that has been inflicted. As the right hon. Member for Southampton, Itchen (Mr. Denham) has pointed out, that has engendered a great deal of cross-party support, precisely because of the injustice done to so many people.

I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Eastleigh (Mr. Chidgey). He has spearheaded the campaign relentlessly. However, I also pay tribute to Mr. Roger May of Blake Lapthorn Linnell, the professional team that acted as legal advisers to the trustees of the scheme. Over and above what they tried to do to help the work force, they have taken an interest in the issues on principle, and have gone to a great deal of trouble to analyse what has gone wrong in the case.

I refer now to a short memorandum that was circulated to us in the meeting with the Minister in December. The specialist advisers point out that the guidance from the regulatory authority, OPRA,

"is not working."

Trustees of the relevant pension funds

"can follow the OPRA guidance to the letter, and still end up in a situation where the members lose 70 per cent. or 80 per cent. of their promised pensions."

The key to the situation lies in the fact that the parent company is a foreign company and that the foreign company has, as it were, the first charge on the assets of the domestic company. It can happen that the domestic company is technically insolvent—it would normally go out of business, when, at least, its work force would come under the protection of the financial assistance scheme—but is kept alive on a form of life support by small injections of cash from the parent company.

Then, when the point is reached where the parent company wants the conglomerate to walk away from its obligations to the work force, it suggests a compromise in which the UK pension scheme is wound up and a small amount of money is paid into the scheme. Originally the parent company, with magnificent generosity, proposed to offer 1 per cent. of the debt that it owed in respect of pensions to its own work force.

Bearing in mind that it remains possible and legal for a foreign parent to put the UK subsidiary into liquidation and then buy the business back from the liquidator, leaving behind the pension liabilities, we have a couple of recommendations from those specialist advisers. They have suggested that there ought to be a ban on

"pension scheme compromises where members will lose more than (say) 30 per cent. of their pension benefits. The compromise would not be allowed to go ahead unless the scheme actuary certified that all scheme members would receive at least 70 per cent. of their promised scheme benefits."

The advisers also recommend that schemes where the employer—that is to say, the British domestic employer—

"only remains solvent because the scheme trustees have compromised the buy-out debt, and where the members have lost"

a large percentage of their benefits, should become eligible for financial assistance from the Government.

I was not happy with the meeting that we had with the Minister in December. I felt that he was focusing far too much on the fact that the company was still trading, even though the only reason that it was still trading and had not become insolvent was that a gun had been held to the heads of the trustees of the work force, in that they had been told that the company would go insolvent unless they allowed 80 per cent. of its pension funds to be—I make no apology for using this word—stolen from them.

At that meeting with the Minister I was able to remind him that, from time to time, there had been talk of the Chancellor of the Exchequer using the unclaimed assets of dormant accounts in banks and building societies for various good purposes. I was able to point out that the spokesman for my party in this area had pledged that, as a result of tens of thousands of people having done the right thing by paying into a company pension scheme, but having lost their savings when the company became insolvent, the Conservative party would use the unclaimed assets in dormant bank and building society accounts to rebuild the pension funds of wind-up victims. That is a practical proposal. It would also meet the situation where, even when the financial assistance scheme goes into effect, it might be found that it would not make up the shortfall to anything more than a limited degree. That shortfall could be met by a policy of that sort. I did not get a clear answer from the Minister at the meeting, so I ask him again whether he will match that pledge to the victims of what has happened in this and other cases.

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Eastleigh (Mr. Chidgey), who spoke out powerfully, knowledgeably and effectively on behalf of the APW pensioners. I bumped into him at breakfast this morning, and it was the only time that I have discussed deemed buyback over my fried egg. [Interruption.] Strange but true.

It was not only my hon. Friend who stood up effectively for his constituents. The right hon. Member for Southampton, Itchen (Mr. Denham) also brought a great deal of knowledge and experience of the area. His colleague, the hon. Member for Southampton, Test (Dr. Whitehead), who chaired the meeting that I attended with APW pensioners, and Members from throughout the House have worked together on behalf of the group. Regrettably, there have been too many similar cases. There has been a macabre procession at Work and Pensions questions every month, whereby an hon. Member whom one has never seen before at Work and Pensions questions has suddenly discovered the intricacies of pension wind-up because, tragically, it has happened on their patch.

One of my reflections about this episode is that, when the financial assistance scheme was announced last summer, we welcomed the £20 million a year that was offered but pointed out that solvent firms were excluded. We tabled amendments to try to get solvent firms included and were opposed by the Government. At the time, there was a sense of euphoria—that there had been a campaign, that the campaigners had won and that everything would be fine. Nobody was willing to listen or to say, "Hang on a minute. The emperor may have a few clothes, but not nearly as many as we are being led to believe."

A problem with the financial assistance scheme, as the right hon. Member for Southampton, Itchen hinted, is that it is like a cake that was baked last summer. More people have laid claim to a slice of it since then, and there is a danger that they will end up with only crumbs because the Government have refused to make it bigger. The £20 million that has been allocated is wholly inadequate, and even if we succeed in getting the APW workers into that scheme, a few of the hardest cases—the right hon. Gentleman cited a very poignant one—may receive a reasonable amount of compensation, but many others may get precious little.

One source of redress that has not been mentioned, perhaps because it is not in the gift of the House, is the parliamentary ombudsman. Several hon. Members have spoken today about misleading literature and the fact that people read leaflets and trustees were sent information that talked about "guaranteed" minimum pensions, which in fact were not guaranteed, and that discouraged people from opting into insecure personal pensions because their company pensions were safe. So much of the literature, advice and culture of the time gave people an inaccurate sense of certainty. I contacted the parliamentary ombudsman last spring, as did several other hon. Members. She is investigating the position of these workers, and given the Government's unwillingness to offer more, she may be the best hope for some of the workers about whom we are talking today.

Several points were made about solvent wind-ups. The Government's constant refrain has been that it is the company's job, not the taxpayers', to put in the money. As has been said, however, what happens when the company will not put in the money and cannot be made to do so? That is the important point. Will the Minister comment on the power of the regulator in this context? Under the Pensions Act 2004, the powers of the new pensions regulator will be backdated to last April to pursue, for example, parent companies to put in money if there is a shortfall. Will the Minister say whether that might be relevant in this case? Can the APW workers hope that the new regulator will tell the parent company that it must put in money before the taxpayer even thinks about doing so? Does the regulator, who I believe has a backdated power in that respect, have the power to do such a thing?

I am sure that APW scheme members will read the record of our deliberations today, so will the Minister clarify precisely what we mean by deemed buyback? Are we talking about returning some of the balance of the scheme to the Government, in return for which people will be treated as if they had been in SERPS and the state second pension? Given that the power has been on the statute books for 10 years, will he explain why it seems to have been used so little? Will he explain in layman's terms what the problem is?

The right hon. Member for Southampton, Itchen rightly pointed out that when the decision was taken to accept the compromise agreement, the trustees could not have known that they might fall within the scope of the FAS. Indeed, they still might not do so. Even if the Minister was to make that announcement today, there is no moral hazard because no one can act in the future on the basis of a decision announced today. Will he at least consider the suggestion that schemes that have already been the subject of compromise agreements might fall within the scope of a properly funded FAS?

The hon. Member for New Forest, West (Mr. Swayne) made an important point about incentive structures. Compromise agreements may be in the greater public interest if they keep the firm running, particularly if the firm then became profitable again, so why should there not be a claim on the future profits of the firm? Moreover, given that presumably the Government want employment rather than unemployment, and that the taxpayer must foot the bill for unemployment, might not the taxpayer want there to be compromise agreements in some cases? If the Government tell a company that members of its scheme are stuffed if it implements a compromise agreement and the firm is still solvent, why would the trustees do it? Surely we should give trustees the right incentives for the greater good, without penalising scheme members. I am not convinced that the current incentive structure does that.

My hon. Friend the Member for Eastleigh referred to the treatment of AVCs. Will the Minister clarify this point? There has been a suggestion recently—I had heard it from other sources, including my hon. Friend— that in order to meet the shortfall in the fund, claim might be made on the AVCs that people had put in, instead of ring-fencing them and saying that that was essentially personal saving that happened to be done individually through the scheme, and that that should not be used to reduce in any way the Government's or taxpayers' liabilities. Can the Minister clarify the position on that?

A number of the issues that have been discussed relate to the coverage and adequacy of the financial assistance scheme. Again, the hon. Member for New Forest, West presented the point well. The impression that I got from the members at the trade union-sponsored meeting was that they very much wanted to know where they stood. However, here we are, many weeks later, and they still do not—indeed, it might be a matter of years before they know where they stand on deemed buyback. Scheme members want certainty.

I wonder whether the Government are stalling until the end of March. If I were in their position, I might be tempted to do the same. Once we get to the end of the financial year—the Minister smiles broadly at this—nothing else can go into the financial assistance scheme, because the Pension Protection Fund will be up and running. Have the Government been stringing us along all this time, so that they can announce the rules of the financial assistance scheme in April, because they know what the price tag attached will be? That would be understandable but makes life even more difficult, not only for the APW workers but for many others in similar situations. Can the Minister at least assure us that on 6 April—assuming that the House is still sitting then—he will tell us how the FAS will work and who will be in and out, and at least put an end to that uncertainty? I might have the dates wrong, but I can see why the Minister would want to do that on the first day of the new financial year rather than the last day of the previous one.

We have heard of the powerful human side of such tragedies, which were preventable. Interestingly, the right hon. Member for Southampton, Itchen mentioned the failure of the Pensions Act 1995 to introduce a central discontinuance fund. That is correct, but the Government could also have set up the financial assistance scheme on that basis. In a sense, the opportunity has been missed again, because had the financial assistance scheme taken over the assets rather than simply making hardship payments, it could have been more generous, even with the same level of Government funding. History almost repeated itself only last year—the previous Government failed to grasp the nettle, as did this one, unfortunately.

We are united in wanting to stand up for workers who have done the right thing—worked hard and saved hard—and yet have had the rug pulled from underneath them. I hope that the Minister will do more than say that the firm should have found the money and that he cannot say any more for many more weeks to come.

I begin by congratulating the hon. Member for Eastleigh (Mr. Chidgey) on securing the debate and apologise for missing the first couple of minutes of his speech, owing to the weather.

The subject is important and, as the hon. Member for Northavon (Mr. Webb) said, we keep returning to it. The reason is not simply that such tragedies occur fairly regularly, but that there is still massive uncertainty over compensation. I recently had the opportunity to meet some of the APW workers affected, when they came to lobby us. As we know, many of them—perhaps most—look to lose some 80 per cent. of their pension rights. Our hearts go out to them, particularly those in the cases that various hon. Members have mentioned.

It is heartening that this debate has been so well attended, with contributions from hon. Members in all parts of the House, including the hon. Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell), my hon. Friends the Members for New Forest, West (Mr. Swayne) and for New Forest, East (Dr. Lewis), the right hon. Member for Southampton, Itchen (Mr. Denham), and the hon. Member for Eastleigh. My hon. Friend the Member for Uxbridge (Mr. Randall) would have liked to participate, but, as has been said, he has other business in the House.

The FAS has, to put it mildly, a chequered history. In a letter in The Times today, that redoubtable campaigner and former Government adviser Dr. Ros Altmann describes it as being responsible for a "cruel deception". As time goes on it becomes difficult to disagree with that judgment. In his opening speech setting out the background to the APW issue, the hon. Member for Eastleigh described the real effects on real people in yet another failed scheme of the vagueness—I think that that was his word—around the rules for the FAS.

The hon. Member for Northavon may or may not be right in accusing the Government of stalling over the FAS, but the Minister cannot argue that the Government have been quick to set out the eligibility criteria for taking advantage of it. As we know, it had a troubled birth: it was produced in a hurry in May 2004, when the Government were in a tight corner on the legislation. However, one would have thought that, by now, we would have significantly more detail about how the scheme will operate.

The hon. Member for Northavon talked about the price tag, but that is one issue that we cannot lay at the Minister's door. Although this is a dynamic and ongoing situation, with schemes failing as time goes on, the price tag is, bizarrely, already known. It is the only thing that has been clear from day one, because the Chancellor coughed up £400 million—not a penny more—to provide for the financial assistance scheme. That was long before the Government did any research into how many people would be affected, let alone into the ongoing dynamics behind cases such as that of APW.

Of course, one of the paradoxes about the Chancellor apparently coughing up £400 million is that he actually did nothing of the sort. The money was already in the Department's budget, and the Department had to make savings elsewhere in its budget to find the money for the financial assistance scheme.

The hon. Gentleman makes a very good point.

So, the price tag is known, and all the claims, including new claims up to the end of the FAS's time scale, will have to be squeezed into the £400 million.

We have had a variety of statements about the FAS—we had one in June 2004 and another in December—but they have not shed much light on how it will work. It was indicated that the Government would be in a position early this year to announce indicative assistance levels and the like, and I hope that the Minister is in a position, finally, to give us some clear rules for how the FAS will operate.

As I said, the figure of £400 million was woefully inadequate from the start. When it was produced, we already knew that 65,000 to 70,000 workers had lost pension rights. Since then, we have had Turner and Newell, APW and other, perhaps less publicised, failures. As my hon. Friend the Member for New Forest, East said, Conservative party policy has consistently been that we should use unclaimed assets as happens in other countries. The Government had set their face against that until the Chancellor decided that he would use unclaimed assets, although for other purposes, in his recent Budget.

So, what have Ministers desperately been trying to do? One slightly feels for them because they were given the price tag at the start and have since been desperately trying to fit it round the worsening situation. They have tried to start limiting the eligibility criteria; they have been talking down the likely level of compensation; and they have started to stress, as one of their departmental mantras, that the FAS offers not compensation but assistance, which will be pitched at a much lower level than that available under the PPF. When even that began to stretch the money far too far, they suddenly announced, very late in the day, and contrary to everything that they had said during the passage of the Pensions Bill, that the PPF could be retrospective in certain circumstances. I am a little hazy on the chronology as regards APW, but would the trustees have decided to enter into the compromise had they been clear that, given the right sort of act of insolvency, they could have benefited from the PPF when it opens its doors in April?

On the face of it, that is no help at all to APW. Indeed, if one reads the Library note on all this, as I am sure you have, Mr. Deputy Speaker, one sees that the position is very clear:

"Moreover, schemes will only be able to enter the PPF if the sponsoring employer has experienced an 'insolvency event' . . . It appears that the compromise agreement has prevented APW from having such an event."

So, as regards the PPF and the FAS, the compromise has had a potentially disastrous effect on the rights of pensioners and deferred pensioners. I have great sympathy with those involved. The right hon. Member for Southampton, Itchen said that it is easy to start with the view that they got it wrong, but as people say in America, they were caught entirely between a rock and a hard place, as we have heard. It is unfortunate that a combination of the Government's vagueness over a long period about the way in which the FAS will operate and a very late announcement that the PPF could be retrospective, may well have prejudiced the decision taken by the trustees, with all the effects of which we have heard. As I have said before in these debates, the distinction between solvent and insolvent wind-ups is wholly artificial. The workers have no input or control over the wind-up; they are merely the ones who end up losing out.

We have heard about the compromise, but we and the workers need to hear from the Minister whether the compromise has had the disastrous effect that—from what we have heard—it may well have done, and will shut out the workers from any help from the PPF or the FAS. It is, however, interesting and mildly encouraging to read recent comments in the Daily Echo, which I believe is a Hampshire newspaper.

And a very good one.

God's own newspaper.

A good one, I am told from two sedentary positions. The paper obviously has good information, as it says:

"The Daily Echo has learnt from a well-placed source at Westminster that pensions minister Malcolm Wicks is 'sympathetic' to the APW victims."

Later, it says:

"However, it is understood that the Financial Assistance Scheme is being looked at again regarding eligibility criteria."

As they used to say in Private Eye, and for all I know still do, I think we need to be told.

I begin by thanking the hon. Member for Eastleigh (Mr. Chidgey) for securing this debate on a very important topic. It is not a subject of mirth; we are all sympathetic to the plight of that group of APW workers. We have had contributions of differing kinds. There was an authoritative contribution from my right hon. Friend the Member for Southampton, Itchen (Mr. Denham), and a useful contribution from my hon. Friend the Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell). There was a more political contribution from the hon. Member for New Forest, West (Mr. Swayne), a useful contribution from his hon. Friend the Member for New Forest, East (Dr. Lewis), and helpful contributions from the Front Bench.

As has been noted, I have had meetings with many Members whose constituents have been affected by the wind-up of underfunded pension schemes, some of which have been due to the insolvency of the sponsoring employer, and some where a scheme has started to wind up with a solvent employer. The APW situation has been clearly described, and I recently met several hon. Members to discuss it. I actually thought that there was one dissenting voice, but it was a thoughtful and serious meeting. It was also helpful that some of the workers affected were at the meeting.

In the time allocated to me I want to describe generally the situations that we have had to consider in developing the FAS and addressing issues about solvency and insolvency. I then want to say as much as I can about APW Electronics Ltd. specifically, and if time allows I shall say something about deemed buyback.

At the meeting I have described and at meetings with members of other schemes who find themselves in similar circumstances, I have always been struck, as any of us would, by the distress and anxiety that those very difficult circumstances have caused members and their families. The issues are often complex, involving the financial and retirement futures of our constituents, the legal position of the trustees of the scheme and how they interpret their responsibilities, and the position and attitude of the sponsoring employer. As colleagues know, because of the concern generally we have legislated through the Pensions Act 2004 to establish the Pension Protection Fund, which I am pleased to say will be opening its doors from April. It will bring immense security to people in defined-benefit or so-called final salary schemes. There were, however, groups of workers who were already in debilitating circumstances due to their pensions, hence the establishment of the financial assistance scheme. We have been working hard to reach a point where we could provide more information about eligibility for help under the financial assistance scheme. In my first statement to the House I noted the milestones to be reached in advancing the principle of the FAS towards practice when the scheme opens in spring, with payment of benefits thereafter. We have kept to those milestones and the FAS will be open in the spring.

On that very point, it has been drawn to my attention that today's Order Paper shows that the Minister will provide the House with a written statement on the financial assistance scheme. I do not want to steal his thunder this morning, but how many schemes are likely to be in the list of those that the FAS may be able to help? What percentage of the value of the pensions will be awarded as an assistance package? Most importantly, will APW Electronics be one of the firms on that list?

I shall deal with the specific circumstances of APW a little later in my speech, but I was about to say that it would have been a difficult situation for me, particularly if it was a little later when we said more about the FAS. Obviously, it would have been more convenient for the purpose of this debate if we had been able to issue our statement yesterday. However, that has not been possible; it will be available soon in the House of Commons.

The hon. Member for Northavon (Mr. Webb) lapses into cynicism from time to time—on most days—saying that we have been stringing things along to delay the statement. Well, a further statement about the FAS will be available soon; it will cover 380 schemes. That shows the size and complexity of the task, and I make no apologies for the fact that we have been working through the details, collecting information. Although hon. Members understandably often talk about the scheme with reference to their own constituencies, it is a big and complex issue. There may be a chance in the uprating debate this afternoon—if Mr. Speaker will allow it—to consider some issues relevant to the FAS, but I am anxious to deal with the particular subject of the debate: APW.

Among other things, the statement includes a list of potentially eligible schemes; APW Electronics is not on that list. That is the situation at the moment. The list is a long one, of 380 items, but is not necessarily exclusive. In some circumstances others could be added to it.

I realise that an explanation for what is not on the list will be cold comfort to those who, through no fault of their own, have lost out. Nevertheless I think it is important that people understand why we are where we are. We consulted widely on the definition of employer insolvency and came to the conclusion that for financial assistance scheme purposes we should go with a general definition that captures schemes where the sponsoring employer no longer exists and where the insolvency may have occurred some time after winding up started. That definition will be similar to the definition of insolvency used by the Pension Protection Fund.

We shall also include some companies that have undergone members' voluntary liquidations, where a declaration of solvency was made at the time of wind-up but the company is now no longer solvent so no employer exists to support the scheme. I hope hon. Members will agree that the definition is entirely in keeping with the intentions that I outlined to the House on Second Reading of the Pensions Bill.

It is our judgment that we cannot provide what would in effect be a blank cheque to help all those who have suffered pension losses. I also said that we would need to consider in detail the implications of any definition of insolvency that we could use, and that it was also our intention that people would not be ruled out on technicalities.

rose—

I am reluctant to give way, because of the range of issues on which I want to speak; is the matter really pressing? Hon. Members want answers to their questions.

If the FAS does not include APW Electronics, what is the prospect of redress through any other route? That is the key question.

May I continue? On Report of the Bill in the House of Lords, Baroness Hollis emphasised:

"The Government's starting point is the principle that solvent employers should be responsible for the occupational pension schemes they provide."—[Official Report, House of Lords, 15 November 2004; Vol. 666, c. 1243.]

She went on to say that the blanket term "solvent employer" covered an enormous variety of different circumstances.

Part of the purpose of the consultation and research that we have undertaken to inform the development of the financial assistance scheme was further to understand the different circumstances. We considered whether sensible and workable distinctions could be drawn while protecting the principle that the taxpayer cannot be expected to stand behind employers' pension promises. The criteria for employer insolvency that have been outlined in today's statement are sensible, workable and prudent. By moving beyond the definition used for the Pension Protection Fund, including members' voluntary liquidations, and by allowing schemes to qualify if employer insolvency occurs after the start of winding up, assistance may be provided in circumstances where employers no longer exist. That general definition helps to ensure that members of schemes connected to such employers will not be ruled out of the financial assistance scheme on a technicality.

I realise that my hon. Friend wants to make progress, but he seems to be saying that APW would be considered for the scheme if it were to go bankrupt now, but would not if it did not. However, from the point of view of the scheme members, APW has no intention of putting any more money into the fund. His objective is to stop companies walking away, but the company has walked away. The question is whether the Government can offer support to the members of the scheme.

Let me make some more progress. The case has been made forcibly today that, through no fault of their own, members of the APW Electronics scheme face losses. However, assistance in such cases would go beyond our intention of ensuring that people are not ruled out on a technicality. Such assistance would provide help where there is an ongoing solvent employer, and that would not be appropriate. It would go against the fundamental principle that assistance from the scheme should be given only in cases of insolvency. Abiding by that principle means that difficult decisions will have to be made, and wherever such lines are drawn, people who fall outside the scope of the scheme are bound to feel aggrieved.

Returning to today's statement, I wish to stress that the list is of potentially eligible schemes. It is an indicative list that is based on the information that is currently available to us, which in turn would have been based on the position when the information was submitted. If new information comes to light, or if, for example, the solvency status of a sponsoring employer changes, we would want to reconsider the situation. That applies to APW as well as other schemes.

Let me be perfectly clear. I am not saying that APW is in or out of the FAS. In reply to my hon. Friend the Member for Hayes and Harlington, the door is not closed. However, it is only right that hon. Members and those whom they represent should understand the basis on which those who have the relevant authority will take decisions in due course. Of course, any Member of Parliament may believe that their scheme is a specific case. I have discussed various schemes with many Members, and nearly always their scheme is a "specific case". I am not being cynical about the situation—I do understand it.

In the data collection exercise for the FAS, some 200 returns were received for schemes that do not appear to be eligible. Furthermore, a significant proportion of them are likely to be cases in which compromises were reached with solvent employers. Those are special cases in some respects, but they certainly are not unique. The real danger is that the state will be seen to be underwriting companies that are having difficulties with their pension schemes. They would like the taxpayer to write a cheque to bail them out, but that is a slippery slope towards the nationalisation of risk, which we must resist.

Let me say something about deemed buyback. If APW's circumstances do not change, it does not necessarily mean that the employees would be left completely high and dry. As we heard, APW employees may qualify for deemed buyback, which is an existing provision that gives certain scheme members the option of having some or all of their state scheme rights restored.

Deemed buyback is one of the more technical areas of pensions legislation and I have no intention of going into all of its complexities today, nor do I have the time to do so. Basically, scheme members who were opted out of the state earnings-related additional pensions are given back those rights in exchange for the limited funds that they have left in the scheme, which is their share of remaining scheme assets. For example, a member could agree that £10,000 of pension scheme rights be paid into the national insurance fund and they could, in return, be reinstated into an additional pension worth, say, £80,000. They will therefore derive some recompense from the state scheme that would mitigate their loss.

Deemed buyback is one of a number of options available to a member for securing their accrued rights. Another approach is that a member could transfer their rights to another scheme. Another option is that the loss in the APW scheme is not sufficient to trigger the deemed buyback process. That would mean that the remaining assets would provide a greater return than could be had from the state scheme. The final decision on which option to use is taken by the member, not by the scheme. I cannot say what would be the best option for APW scheme members. That decision must be based on knowledge of the individual circumstances of each member. However, there is the potential to offer significant help to employees at APW. I will facilitate the process as best I can.

I realise that hon. Members were hoping for a clear outcome. I hope, however, that the possibility of deemed buyback and an assurance that the position of APW will be reconsidered if its solvency status changes will provide some comfort.

I am grateful to the Minister for Pensions for finishing early and look forward to an expanded explanation from the Minister for Housing and Planning, who has responsibility for London. I am glad to have this opportunity to discuss the issue and know that my constituents are grateful that I have the opportunity to raise it on their behalf.

You may not know much about Beckenham, Mr. Deputy Speaker. I am not sure that the Minister does, although he represents a south London seat—one needs to take out one's passport to come to Bromley. I will describe my constituency so that he appreciates the pressures that it is under.

Beckenham is part of Bromley borough, the largest borough in London in terms of acres—or should I say hectares. Bromley's slogan has long been "Green and clean", and half of it is designated as green belt. Beckenham is primarily suburban, with the area around Crystal Palace more like an inner city. The area developed from villages that were surrounded by large estates into an area of primarily large Victorian and Edwardian suburbs, with large family houses on large plots. Those are typical of late 19th and early 20th century buildings. Some of the gardens were sold off to become smaller family houses in the 1920s, 1930s and 1950s. Many of the mansion houses were turned into flats. Obviously, there was bomb damage in the second world war.

Since the 1960s, there has been further development of those Victorian and Edwardian plots into town houses and blocks of flats, which have met the increasing demand for one or two-bedroomed properties as families have fragmented and our parents have lived longer. Alongside the privately owned houses, there is a lot of social housing that is indistinguishable from the surrounding buildings. There are large areas of substantial four to six-bedroom houses as well as many semi-detached properties.

In recent months, residents have voiced their concern to me, to councillors and to the local papers that the pace of development has speeded up. They feel powerless and without a voice, despite the best efforts of their many vocal residents associations. They believe that their environment is changing irrevocably. They do not like that and feel that neither they nor the council can do anything to stop it. Yesterday I received an e-mail from a constituent who lives in the same road as I do. It reads:

"I am appalled at what is happening to Beckenham with regard to more and more single family homes being torn down and replaced with apartment buildings. The new builds are not providing off-street parking. The volume of traffic has increased, and commuters park in the streets around Beckenham Junction making it miserable for those of us who live in these streets. I enjoy living in Beckenham—but only just".

That is the authentic cry of despair of a local resident.

Residents also criticise Bromley council for not preventing developments although, in fact, many planning applications are overturned on appeal, so it is not the council's fault. Indeed, Bromley has one of the highest rates of appeal to the planning inspectorate. Bromley council has a historic commitment to provide 8,650 units between 1992 and 2006. Its current agreed housing target, set out in the unitary development plan, is for 11,450 units between 1997 and 2016, with an average annual target of 573 units. It is sad to call houses units, but that is a quick way of describing a wide variety of dwellings. Originally those figures, derived from the London housing capacity study of 2000, were regarded as capacity figures, as opposed to minimum targets.

It would be remiss of me not to make it clear that the borough has a waiting list for social housing—just in case the Minister gives that as the reason for the imposed minimum targets. In my surgery, second only to immigration cases are appeals to be housed, and I am sure that I am not alone in finding that. Bromley is on target to provide 2,300 houses by 2016, and with the reduction to 15 in the number of units that would need to include social housing, we expect a higher density to be achieved.

I am obliged to Stuart McMillan, the chief planner, and Claire Glavin, the planning policy planner, at Bromley council for advising me on the technicalities that I am about to describe. They tell me that the capacity figures have become minimum targets because section 38(2) of the Planning and Compulsory Purchase Act 2004 defines the development plan in Greater London as

"the spatial development strategy and the development plan documents (taken as a whole) which have been adopted or approved in relation to that area."

Section 38(5) specifies that if a policy contained within a development plan—including, for example, the London plan and the UDP—conflicts with another policy in the development plan, the conflict must be resolved in favour of the policy contained in the last document to be adopted. That sounds like an obscure mathematical formula, but I am sure it is not. The London plan is considered to be the last up-to-date adopted plan because the revised deposit UDP is still progressing through to adoption. That appears to be how the capacity figure has become the minimum target.

One of the excuses for changing the capacity figure to a minimum target is that housing completions are falling short of the planning permissions given by the council. That is no consolation to my residents, but it appears to be the basis on which the housing inspector, in her part-report on the UDP dated 25 August 2004, has insisted that the borough is 1,000 dwellings short in addition to the agreed total of 573 units each year. She has therefore gone back to the bad old ways of predict and provide, rather than taking the Government's preferred approach of plan, monitor and manage. If developers think that they can sell only 76 per cent. of the 573 units, even when they have been given planning permission for 110 per cent. of those units, then the inspector is challenging the market—not an approach that this Government allegedly espouse.

In a recent application form for a conference on historic suburbs run by the Institute of Historic Building Conservation and supported by the Government's own English Heritage, it was said that suburbs are

"an integral and equal part of great towns and cities and have a crucial role to play in regeneration and development. They can engender fierce loyalties and intense civic pride yet their conservation is often misunderstood or sidelined."

Bromley council well understands the needs and aspirations of its suburbs. Its policy on housing design states that it

"will resist designs which are out of scale or character with the surrounding area."

On residential density, it states:

"on sites of 0.4 hectares or more, the council will normally expect schemes not to exceed the existing density of the immediately surrounding area except on sites within town centres and on sites where the immediately surrounding area has no readily identifiable residential character."

Where possible, the council is already giving planning permission using brownfield sites to allow development of higher densities, often against the wishes of local residents who actively prefer the lower densities in which they have opted to live.

In the town centres in my constituency, including Beckenham and Penge, buildings tend to be up to five storeys high, and hence are denser, in compliance with the council's own planning guidance. In the tree-lined residential streets, buildings are not more than four storeys high, or roughly up to the tree line. We have some very pleasant streets and wonderful trees, and the streets often have wide grass verges in addition to pavements.

However, Beckenham faces a new threat from density. Close to Beckenham Junction station, and defined as being in the town centre, the British Railways Board built a seven-storey block of offices back in the 1960s which has lain empty for some 10 years. In the seven years or so that I have represented the constituency, its dereliction has been of more and more concern to residents and council alike. It is now being developed into flats, which is welcome, but the problem is that it is seven storeys high.

As someone who lived on the 39th floor of the Barbican in the City of London for seven years, and within the Barbican in other properties for a total of 10 more years, I cannot be accused of not enjoying high-density living. However, people do not move to the suburbs to enjoy high-density living. They move there because they like to be surrounded by space, enjoy and are proud of their gardens, and appreciate a degree of peace and quiet that is missing from city centres. I can confirm that Beckenham during the week is quieter than the City of London at the weekend.

A major change seems to be on the way because the seven-storey precedent has been set. Already, within 50 m of the block of offices, another seven-storey residential building is under construction. However, it is in a pleasant residential street, where Bromley borough council's own planning guidelines suggest that it should be no more than four storeys high. If I were to be nimbyist about this, I would not admit that it is the street in which I live, but it is. I live within 50 m of that new development, and if my worst fears and those of my constituents are realised, I can well understand and sympathise with neighbours who are unable to resist the siren call of their bank accounts when approached by developers seeking to build yet another seven-storey block. Once the precedent has been set, we have discovered in our borough that it is extraordinarily difficult to resist such developments.

In Shortlands, another area of Beckenham, a developer has assembled a series of back-garden plots where none has been developed before. So far, the council has resisted that development. We hope and pray that it will continue to be resisted, but it is extraordinarily difficult. Developers may go to appeal and be turned down, but they go away, rethink their case and return to have another go. They persist until the precedent is set, and once it is set, we will lose control over the development of a street. I am surrounded by examples of that in Beckenham. When one Edwardian or Victorian house is sold—I do not blame the people who sell their houses, because it is difficult not to accept a bonus on the value of one's house—the rest fall like dominoes and the whole area changes.

It is not beyond the wit of any of us to understand that the pressure will soon be on to build more tall buildings in that pleasant residential area which are well over the level of the tree line, despite the council's insistence that in residential streets the height of buildings should be only up to the tree line. Within a few years, the whole complexion of the area could change dramatically. Yes, it will provide higher-density housing, but the character of the surrounding area will have been destroyed. The council's carefully thought-through policies will have turned to dust and the pressure on schools, roads, rail transport—Bromley is well provided with rail links and I think I hold the title of the MP with the most railway stations in a constituency, with 13—and health services will be intolerable.

A new senior school has just been built in Bromley to meet the demand for high-quality education in the borough. If the borough has to follow the demands of the inspectorate, the Mayor's London plan and the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister's figures, the infrastructure is also needed. However, there is no land because of the demands imposed by housing. My hon. Friend the Member for Orpington (Mr. Horam) raised that point with the Under-Secretary of State, Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, the hon. Member for Pontefract and Castleford (Yvette Cooper), in his Adjournment debate on 1 February. He pointed out that the Environmental Audit Committee, of which he is a distinguished member and was the first Chairman, has been astounded that no Department has carried out an environmental impact assessment of the house building targets that are being imposed not only in Beckenham and the wider borough of Bromley, but all over the country.

The inspector at the unitary development plan inquiry recommended releasing some sites from the green belt, metropolitan open land, urban open land or employment designations after carrying out a sequential test. As a Scot growing up in Scotland in the 1950s, I witnessed what happens when housing is built without any care for the impact on the environment. I saw Easterhouse being built. Everybody uses it as an example of what happens when house building goes wrong. Houses were built, but there were no shops, no pubs, no churches, no community facilities and no schools. The reverberations on the families trans-shipped there by Labour-run Glasgow council are still being felt today, 50 years later. Although I do not for a minute expect such a drastic change of character in Bromley, it is an awful warning of the impact of ill-considered housing changes.

It is important to my constituents that they live in a green and clean borough. When representatives of the Copers Cope area residents association heard that I had secured this debate, they rang me up to say how glad they were that I would be raising their concerns. The London borough of Bromley residents federation wonders how we can build a better Bromley when the density of housing imposed by the Government and the Greater London authority is being increased.

The council is so concerned that, despite its overwhelming Conservative majority, a cross-party select committee—almost unique in the history of the Conservative-run Bromley borough—is being set up to inquire into the threats posed by the new residential developments proposed by the Mayor and the Government. Will the Minister assess the harm done to the democratic process when the Government impose housing targets without the agreement of the local community? He should look again at the imposition of targets, rather than agreed capacity levels, ensure that one Department or another carries out an environmental impact assessment of the imposed new housing, and give control over planning back to local councils.

The backlash that I am witnessing as a local MP to the changes to the suburbs and constituency of Beckenham causes me grave concern about the health of the body politic. It should concern the Minister, too, as a democrat. I seek his assurance that he will look again at the change from a capacity figure for housing to a minimum target, and ensure that Bromley looks forward to being in control of its own housing policies.

I congratulate the hon. Member for Beckenham (Mrs. Lait) on using this opportunity to secure a debate on overdevelopment in Beckenham. I note that three weeks ago the borough of Bromley debated a motion that more or less rejected the housing target in the London plan. The motion disputed that there is such housing need and asked for it to be reviewed.

The borough's attitude to housing provision concerns me. Housing figures are not made up out of thin air. They are based on real people's needs. If we deny those needs, we harm only ourselves, our families and our communities. Part of my understanding of community is the importance of maintaining family links, which means at least allowing for the possibility of families living reasonably close to each other. If we reject the case for new housing in a locality, our sons and daughters will not get on the housing ladder locally. Why deny them that opportunity? The need for new housing means that the problem of affordable housing will grow, as will homelessness. The economic vibrancy of our towns will also be stifled.

Housing figures are not imposed—if that is what the hon. Lady suggested—by Government or regional bodies such as the GLA. That is a myth. The starting point for working out our housing needs are population and household projections, which are policy neutral. Population projections are carried out by the Office for National Statistics, whose expertise and impartiality are beyond question. Those figures enable us to get a grasp of the scale of what we face in the future. Experience has shown them to be fairly accurate, and they have proved useful for decades to get an idea of future regional housing needs. Indeed, the Opposition supported that methodology when they were in government.

Local authorities then work out what their area can sustain. Their housing capacity studies enable them to identify supplies of potential brownfield sites over the next 10 to 15 years. Each authority then agrees those capacity figures. The last set of figures was assembled by the London boroughs in 1999, and published by their representative body, the London Planning Advisory Committee, in 2000. Regional planning bodies use all that information to apportion housing figures between authorities. In London, those figures were subject to a wide-ranging public examination in 2003 and endorsed by an independent panel.

Bromley supported the last housing capacity study. It was even on the steering group. It included the housing figures for those capacities implied in its plan, and then consulted on them and took them to an inquiry. Clearly, the inspector's report on the UDP raised some important questions for the borough. She did not say that the green belt should be built on, but prompted Bromley to demonstrate the site supply that it said was available. She suggested that the borough should face up to its affordable housing needs, and proposed that density levels could be increased to reduce the threat to greenfield sites.

It is for Bromley to decide what to do now. It cannot pretend that its housing-needs problem and the London plan do not exist. Its members cannot pretend that they are not part of London or the south-east—a region that is commonly recognised to be under a great deal of housing pressure.

Bromley has always agreed to the capacity plan. It is working on the basis of 573 units and is providing extra social housing. It is the increased targets to which it objects—the increase of units to more than 573 and increases to the housing association list.

I appreciate the hon. Lady's point, but I shall go on to argue—if there is time—that it is imperative that Bromley proceeds to meet its commitments on housing capacity, because there is no point having local plans that have been properly consulted on and independently tested sitting on the shelf and not put into practice.

The Government are keen to make home ownership more widely available and to ensure that sufficient affordable housing is provided. We are considering how to respond to Kate Barker's recommendations on increasing housing supply. In the meantime, all current commitments to housing supply must be honoured. The Government, the GLA and the Association of London Government have launched a housing delivery plan for London, part of which involves looking at the areas in which housing completions have fallen, and working out what measures various parties can take to deal with that. Bromley was such an area from 1997 to 2001, and I am glad to say that the council has been most co-operative in considering what can be done. It worked with the Government office for London to produce a housing action plan, which examines how to overcome obstacles to new housing so that the problems that Bromley claims exist can be addressed. The Government are using this process to ensure that all the wider infrastructure issues that the hon. Lady identified, such as health, education and transport, are co- ordinated with the borough's housing needs. What we need now is for Bromley to start putting that housing action plan into practice.

The hon. Lady specifically mentioned what she terms "overdevelopment". I hope that she will accept that that expression can be both unclear and somewhat subjective. Government guidance is very clear about how authorities should plan for new homes. The guidance on planning for housing—planning policy guidance note 3—establishes that the first aim is for authorities to focus new development, wherever possible, on brownfield sites. That is the most sustainable choice. In London, some 90 per cent. of all new development is on brownfield sites. That is a fantastic record. That also holds true in Bromley, where the figure is about 93 per cent.

PPG3 says that greenfield development is allowable, but only where brownfield sites are completely unviable or simply not there. It is also clear that authorities should be developing policies in their plans to ensure that the most effective use is made of existing brownfield sites. Opportunities for new development should not be wasted with low-density schemes, especially when those are in accessible areas. Not only will low-density developments not work towards building sustainable communities, they will exacerbate the need to release greenfield sites.

Unfortunately this is one area where Bromley could do much better. Average London densities are around 53 dwellings per hectare. In Bromley the rate is only about 28 dwellings per hectare. Bromley seems unwilling even to achieve the average for outer London boroughs, which is 40 dwellings per hectare. This means that Bromley itself is causing a lot of the pressure on greenfield sites. It should not blame the Government or the GLA for that.

I hear what the hon. Lady says about some of the recent developments in Bromley being ugly, or out of scale, and that densities in the town centre are unacceptable. I cannot comment on individual cases, but I would not seek to deny that some developments have left much to be desired. However, there is a positive and creative way to address that. Good design can help to ensure that higher densities blend in and even enhance an area. Some of the most attractive and valued parts of London, such as Chelsea, are at surprisingly high densities. Planning guidance is clear that new developments should be in scale with their surroundings and design qualities should be of a high standard. It is open to local planning authorities to reject applications on grounds of scale and design. Indeed, as Planning Minister I have frequently drawn attention to these powers. There is some evidence to show that planning authorities are increasingly willing to use them. Ministers have also been willing to sustain those judgments.

The Government have produced many excellent good practice examples that show what can be done without compromising or damaging the character of an area, which is the usual criticism of density. Authorities should not dismiss higher densities in a knee-jerk reaction. They need to explain to their communities what opportunities are available. There is a leadership role to consider.

The hon. Lady also raised the threat to the Bromley green belt. I have already pointed out that through the housing capacity study, and its plan, Bromley has maintained that it has sufficient brownfield sites over the lifetime of the plan to accommodate the future housing needs of its own community, but if Bromley now concludes that it cannot do this, and needs to release greenfield or green belt sites, it will be for Bromley to make the case for it. It should happen only once other options have been fully explored, such as increasing the number of high-quality design and greater-density homes. Only then should greenfield sites in the most sustainable locations be released.

The Government are very supportive of the green belt policy, as set out in PPG2. Indeed the policy remains unchanged from that of the previous Conservative Administration. There are no proposals to relax it and it is as strong as ever. Indeed, our target is for each English region to maintain or increase the current area designated as green belt in local plans, even in regions containing housing growth areas. Between 1997, when the Government came to power, and 2003, the size of the green belt nationally increased by more than 19,000 hectares, with a further 12,000 hectares proposed in emerging plans. Under this Government, the amount of green belt land being developed has fallen when compared with that allowed for under the Conservatives in the 1980s and 1990s, and we propose to strengthen the green belt policy even more. We will shortly be consulting on a new green belt direction, which will require inappropriate planning applications to be referred to the Secretary of State.

The London plan was adopted last year and, as programmed in that plan, a review and another housing capacity study are under way. The Greater London authority is hoping to consult on the emerging strategy next year and we understand that Bromley is contributing to the new capacity study. However, the new plan is for the future, and boroughs need to respond to the existing London plan, which addresses today's needs.

We face serious affordable housing problems and we should not play petty politics with people's need for decent homes. There are some fantastic opportunities and we should work together to address London's housing needs in a way that protects greenfield sites and promotes sustainable development. I sincerely hope that the hon. Lady will encourage her local authority, Bromley, to face up to its responsibilities.

Hon. Members will be aware that this is a highly charged issue. I understand that certain legal proceedings are in play, and I ask hon. Members to be sensitive to that fact when making their contributions.

The Minister advises me that, given the importance of the issue, he needs a full 15 minutes in which to reply, so I shall take account of that in determining the time at which I call the Front-Bench contributions.

I am pleased to have secured the opportunity to raise several issues arising from the service volunteer programme at Porton Down, particularly about what happened there in the 1950s. In doing so, I am relieved to have a little more time than the three minutes that I managed to squeeze into the short debate on 10 January, which was secured by the hon. Member for Poole (Mr. Syms), who brought to the attention of the House matters relating to his constituent Mr. Douglas Shave, who was a Porton Down service volunteer.

I am pleased to see the hon. Gentleman in his place today, and my hon. Friend the Member for Linlithgow (Mr. Dalyell), who served this country as a Royal Armoured Corps national serviceman between 1950 and 1952—a time that is highly relevant to the matters I shall raise today. I look forward to hearing his contribution. I am also pleased to see present the right hon. Member for Maidstone and The Weald (Miss Widdecombe), my hon. Friend the Member for Mitcham and Morden (Siobhain McDonagh), the hon. Members for Bournemouth, East (Mr. Atkinson) and for Southport (Dr. Pugh), and others. I look forward to hearing their contributions.

As I said on 10 January, I come to this issue through a constituent of mine, Mr. Peter Parker. He joined the RAF and national service, and served as an aircraftman between 1951 and August 1953. He recalls hearing an officer announce that volunteers were required to attend the Chemical Defence Experimental Establishment at Porton Down. He recalls that the advice he received thereafter and some written information relating to it was clear that the process he faced as a volunteer posed no risk to his health. He recalls being told, and certainly believing, that he was participating in a programme of research into the common cold.

Mr. Parker was assisted in his decision to volunteer by an offer of a 48-hour pass and 15 shillings. He attended a gas chamber on 4 May 1953, where 200 mg of the nerve agent sarin GB was applied to a piece of cloth on his forearm. Sarin was then known to be the most toxic of the poisons brought to the UK from Nazi Germany. It gave him a terrible headache for many hours, from which he thankfully recovered. He did not know that a potentially lethal nerve agent had been applied to him. Neither could he have known that two days later, at the same place, service volunteer aircraftman Ronald Maddison would die as a result of a similar process. Mr. Parker did not know any of those things until approximately three years ago, when he received a telephone call from Wiltshire police under Operation Antler.

Thanks to my constituent, I have made contact with other people who are concerned about those issues. I mention in particular Mr. Ken Earl, who is a leading light in the Porton Down Veterans Support Group, which consists of over 550 veterans, Mr. Alan Care of Thomson Snell and Passmore, who represents my constituent, and Llias Craik—Ronald Maddison's sister.

I thank Peter Parker, Ken Earl and Alan Care for their assistance, courtesy and good humour. They, and others, have helped me to understand the wider picture, which is that well over 20,000 people have participated in the service volunteer programme in the 80 years following the first world war, and that much of the work, such as assisting in the development of protective clothing, was, and is, uncontroversial. Indeed, although the scale of the programme is much reduced, I note that it continues to this day.

Many of the participants who are still alive have no issues about their experiences as volunteers. Between the 1950s and 1980s, however, some of the activities at Porton Down included studying the effects of nerve agents on human subjects. The veterans support group believes that many people who were volunteers in the 1950s later suffered unusual patterns of health problems and early death. To be fair, the Ministry of Defence has taken those suggestions seriously since the police investigation began in 1999. It has been open to making available to former volunteers information about what was done to them, including the opportunity to examine the records for themselves.

In May 2001, the Government announced that the MOD would carry out a comprehensive historical survey, supervised by Professor Ian Kennedy of the Porton Down service volunteer programme. Professor Kennedy is acknowledged as one of the country's foremost medical ethics experts, among other things. I note from a letter dated 7 August 2001 to me from the Minister of State, Ministry of Defence, my right hon. Friend the Member for East Kilbride (Mr. Ingram), the Minister who was responsible for such matters at the time, that the survey would be published. The Government went on to fund an independent epidemiological study, led by researchers from Oxford university and overseen by the Medical Research Council. I understand that it is due to be completed next year, and I trust that it will be published. If claims are to be made on the basis of the outcome, I believe that the War Pensions Agency is the correct body to deal with them.

My hon. Friend mentioned two ongoing studies, and it may be helpful if I talk briefly about the historical study to which he referred that was commissioned in 2001. That work is now complete and is being proof-read, so we can publish the research as soon as it is practicable to do so. I anticipate that it will be published within the next three or so months.

That is most helpful, and answers a question that I wanted to ask at the end of my contribution. I shall refer to it again later for the sake of completeness.

Several people, including the veterans support group, have called for a public inquiry principally into the health issues, but I do not believe that such an inquiry is justified if the epidemiological study is sufficiently broad. It is, however, important that the study into the possible long-term effects of exposure to a nerve agent does not confine itself to the incidence of cancer, but includes mental illnesses.

My key concern is the quality of the consent that the volunteers gave before participating in the trials at Porton Down. For such consent to be wholesome and meaningful, it must surely be informed. I believe that there is prima facie evidence to suggest that it was anything but informed. My constituent, Peter Parker, believes that he was deceived, that he was not told the truth, and that he was not provided with the information necessary for him to give informed consent. His belief is shared by hundreds of other former volunteers.

My hon. Friend the Minister has dismissed several times the widespread claims that volunteers were recruited on the pretext of common cold research, citing the fact that the Chemical Defence Experimental Establishment at Porton Down never carried out work on the common cold and that that work was actually done at the Medical Research Council unit at Harnham Down near Salisbury, which closed in 1989. I accept all that, although that does not prove that people were not misled into thinking that they were assisting common cold research when they volunteered.

My hon. Friend has also stated that after Operation Antler, the recent five-year investigation into the Porton Down volunteer programme, Wiltshire police found no documentary evidence of a centrally organised campaign to recruit volunteers on the basis of common cold research. He has said that the Wiltshire and Swindon coroner at the recent rerun inquest into the death of Ronald Maddison confirmed that. However, although documentary evidence may not exist—or has not, at least, been found—the words of those who were there at the time and who bore witness to these events surely counts as evidence. One way or another, they picked up this message from their military units around the country, and it simply will not do to gainsay that.

I do not dispute the outcome of the police investigation or the coroner's statement, but the inquest, which sat for 64 days last year and considered hundreds of pages of documents, revealed important facts about the recruitment information made available to potential service volunteers. As I mentioned, Porton Down has been in use for military research purposes since the first world war, and I believe that it opened in 1916. The inquest turned up a letter dated 30 July 1925 from the War Office, which referred to the need for volunteers to take part in studies of the treatment of men who had been contaminated with mustard gas. It states:

"The tests will involve only slight discomfort to the individual, and consist simply in subjecting a small place on the arm to the action of certain chemicals. They will be carried out under expert medical supervision of the staff of the Physiological Department, Porton, and under such conditions that the risk of injury to the individual is negligible".

By 1953, the wording had become even more reassuring. In February 1953, a notice calling for volunteers at an RAF unit said:

"The physical discomfort resulting from tests is usually very slight. Tests are carefully planned to avoid the slightest chance of danger".

After the death of Ronald Maddison on 6 May that year, a Treasury solicitor, in a memo marked "Secret" and dated 15 May 1953, stated:

"I suggest that the wording of the information to be brought to the attention of personnel to encourage them to volunteer ought to be altered. The sentence 'Tests are carefully planned to avoid the slightest chance of danger' has proved misleading. Indeed it is difficult to see how it was ever possible to say truthfully that tests with lethal gases did not contain 'the slightest chance of danger'".

As a result of his advice, Ministry notice board information calling for volunteers was altered to state:

"The tests carried out at CDEE are carefully planned and are arranged so as to eliminate all foreseeable danger."

In 1964, after a note from Porton Down referred to that wording as "unfortunate" because it probably deterred some potential volunteers, the official wording was altered again to remove the word "foreseeable". In other words, it reverted to the pre-Maddison wording, if I can put it like that, and said that there was no danger.

Even if there is no documentary evidence of volunteers being recruited on the basis of common cold research, the written evidence that does exist is far more damning. It claims variously that there was not

"the slightest chance of danger",

that there was no "foreseeable danger" and then simply that there was no danger. At the very least, we have a prima facie case of volunteers not being told the truth—of their being lied to about the danger that at least some of them faced at Porton Down. That strongly suggests that they were not in a position to give informed consent.

The Adjournment debate of 16 October 1996 was secured by the hon. Member for Bournemouth, East in order to raise issues relating to a constituent, Mr. Michael Paynter, one of the service volunteers at Porton in 1954 and again in 1955. Replying to that debate, the hon. Member for Mid-Sussex (Mr. Soames), then Minister of State for the Armed Forces, emphasised that over the past 80 years, experiments on humans at Porton Down had always followed best practice. Furthermore, he stated that since the inception of the 1947 Nuremburg code of ethics on medical research, which resulted from the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps, the principles laid out in the code have governed all work relating to human subjects at Porton Down. He went on:

"The code emphasises the essential voluntary nature of the consent to participate and states that volunteers must be made aware of the nature of the study, its duration, its purpose, the method and means by which it is to be carried out, all inconvenience and hazards that can reasonably be expected and any likely effects on their health that are known to those proposing the study."—[Official Report, 16 October 1996; Vol. 282, c. 790.]

That does not accurately describe the circumstances that were experienced by my constituent and many others.

At the inquest last year, many ex-servicemen gave evidence that they believed that they had attended Porton Down for research into the common cold. They certainly believed that nothing would be done that put them in danger. They also explained that the dominant culture of the time was to do as one was told and not to question authority—a culture that may not square with the more modern concept of informed consent. Indeed, some will doubtless question the status of that concept in the United Kingdom, and point out that the Nuremburg code has not been incorporated into domestic law. But is anyone saying that a person about to be exposed to a nerve agent voluntarily should not be fully apprised of what a nerve agent is, what it is designed to do, and therefore the risks that may be faced? Put like that, of course, one may conclude that few if any would consent. That is the point, is it not?

Taken together, I do not believe that much credence can be attributed to the official position of the Ministry of Defence on the matter. I do not believe that the consent granted by a large number of volunteers can fairly be described as informed. I do not accept that best practice has been followed for many years. I do not believe that the principles of the Nuremburg code have been applied since 1947.

I think that a sufficiently robust case has been made and that the Government would wish to set the record straight by setting up an independent public and judicial inquiry. Surely that is the least that those who served their country deserve. Why not? Those matters occurred in the main 50 or so years ago. They are not the outcome of current Government policy. It would be the right thing to do.

It is important to acknowledge that the present Government have been co-operative and helpful in a number of ways. The understandable desire by service volunteers for information about what happened to them at Porton Down has been met much greater openness than that encountered in 1996 by the hon. Member for Bournemouth, East. The volunteers' concerns about possible unusual health and mortality effects have been taken seriously, and studies continue. After the then chief constable of Wiltshire, Elizabeth Neville—now Dame Elizabeth Neville—took the enlightened and courageous decision to launch Operation Antler, the then Home Secretary, my right hon. Friend the Member for Blackburn (Mr. Straw), agreed to contribute £870,000 towards costs of about £2.4 million.

Sadly, there are mixed messages from Government. It has taken them 51 years to apologise for the death of Ronald George Maddison, and to indicate that they would pay compensation to his family—even though the Treasury solicitor recommended the latter in 1953. At the same time, they appear to be going in the opposite direction because of the MOD's decision to challenge the inquest's unanimous verdict of unlawful killing by way of judicial review.

I conclude by asking my hon. Friend the Minister the following questions. Will he outline the nature of the epidemiological study to which I referred and specifically confirm whether it includes mental health? Will he explain why the 2001 comprehensive historical survey of the Porton Down service volunteer programme has not yet been published? He has stated that it will happen in the next three months. Does he agree that it is highly unlikely that a significant number of service volunteers were in a position to give informed consent before they participated in trials at Porton Down during the 1950s? Does he agree with his predecessor that the principles of the Nuremberg code applied to the service volunteer programme since the inception of the code in 1947? If so, does he believe that those principles were properly implemented throughout the 1950s and beyond? Will he explain why the Ministry of Defence is prepared to spend possibly large sums of public money by challenging by way of judicial review the process and outcome of the recent inquest? Does he agree that an independent public and judicial inquiry into the service volunteer programme should take place in order to establish whether volunteers were misled? If not, will he spell out why not?

This year sees the 60th anniversary of Victory in Europe day. It also sees the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps. There will not be another occasion for a major celebration and commemoration of this nature, simply because the generation who carried the torch will no longer be around. It would be fitting for the men and women who served this country at war and in national service that this year at last the full story of Porton Down be told.

rose—

Order. It is worth my reminding hon. Members present about sensitivity to judicial proceedings.

This is an appalling story of an arrogant state and innocent young men; a story of a state that believed it was acceptable to experiment on its own citizens without giving them proper information to enable them to agree to what was going on; and a story of utter innocence and trust. As the hon. Member for Bedford (Mr. Hall), who very ably opened the debate, reminded us, it was an age in which people implicitly trusted authority. That trust was betrayed.

I would like to speak principally on behalf of my constituent Ken Earl, and set out the picture that emerges from what happened to him, initially in his own words. In a letter to me he says:

"When I was called up for my National Service in January 1952, I was a student actor with a repertory company in Folkestone. I was eighteen years old and had been educated at the Harvey Grammar School, also in Folkestone . . . I had decided that it was to be an actor's life for me and I was a reluctant conscript when summoned to the RAF. Since the age of fourteen I had been an enthusiastic member of the . . . St. John Ambulance . . . so after my recruit training, I decided to be a 'medic' for two years. Unlike some others, I had not received any gas instruction during training, had not been issued with a gas mask and as a 'medic' at an RAF hospital I did not do guard duty. I was eventually stationed at Wroughton RAF Hospital, Swindon, Wiltshire. I enjoyed my job and soon I was flying from RAF Lyneham to the Middle and Far East to pick up wounded and other sick patients. I was happy where I was and I did not have any urge for a change. However, sometime in April 1953, I saw an item of interest on our Hospital notice board . . . 'Volunteers wanted to help find a cure for the common cold. Those participating will receive extra pay and a weekend pass'. The extra pay and the leave were what made me decide to apply. I was not worried about the cold as I seldom caught one. However, National Servicemen were always hard up, we received far less money than the regular airmen and when I did get a pass, I had to hitchhike all the way home to Maidstone and then do the same for the return. I had a girlfriend in Maidstone, who I eventually married, and I wanted to get home to see her. That in a nutshell is how a young country boy came to go to CDEE, the Chemical Defence Experimental Establishment at Porton Down. I hadn't read many newspapers in my life, I had never seen a television programme and like the other lads with me I was extremely naive. On 2 May 1953 I walked through the gates at Porton where I met nineteen other airmen from different units and all between the ages of 18 and 25. I was a senior aircraftman, I was the heaviest of all the men there, I was extremely fit and well and at that time I played rugby for my station and I was a keen weightlifter. We were all put in one billet, a wooden hut . . . 2 May was a Saturday, and is remembered as the day of the Stanley Matthews Cup Final. Nothing happened on the Sunday . . . Monday . . . we were split mainly into groups of six and taken to a building for what can only be described as anthropometrical tests. This is a comparative study of the sizes and proportions of the human body. Not a medical . . . in my job I had helped carry out plenty of medicals. The tests involved taking measurements: height, weight, body shapes, a lung capacity test . . . We had a series of rubber patches stuck on one of our upper arms and a blood sample was taken. My group, there were six of us, were then marched to a low brick built building with glass panels to one side. There were two men in charge of the test and they were wearing white coats. They told us to roll up our left battledress sleeve to the elbow, and then they tied two pieces of khaki material, one on top of the other, to the inside of our forearms. We were then issued with respirators and instructed to put them on and told not to remove them until they told us to do so. We entered this building, which I now know to be a gas chamber, and the doors were sealed. The two technicians who I thought at the time were doctors entered with us, they too were wearing respirators. We were seated at a small table in the centre of the chamber and I am now aware that my place in the middle was seat number 4. One of the technicians then proceeded to drip . . . a colourless liquid onto the material on our left forearms. I now know that we each received 20x10 mg drops which I thought at the time and in my ignorance was a cold virus or vaccine but I now know was 200 mg of the lethal nerve agent sarin (GB). Today this chemical is known as a weapon of mass destruction! I had not been told anything and did not give my informed consent to this contamination. Never having worn a respirator before I became very hot and claustrophobic, of course the sarin was playing its part too and the climatic chamber was heated. How I lasted half an hour in this state I will never know and I still cannot travel on the underground to this day without a feeling of panic. After half an hour we were released gasping and spluttering into the open air. It was a beautiful May morning. We had the material taken from our arms, were told to run around a bit and then to remove our respirators. A second blood sample was taken.

*

Two days later on 6 May another six young airmen entered this chamber and sitting in my seat that day was LAC Ronald Maddison. He died an agonising death within 45 minutes of being contaminated.

*

My red blood cholinesterase depression was 34 per cent., Maddison's was 99 per cent. at post mortem.

*

The Porton scientists believed before his death that 100 per cent. depression would be fatal and they had already had cases of over 80 per cent. who had been hospitalised.

*

Oliver Slater, a man in the chamber with me on 4 May, had a 90 per cent. depression and this critical figure was ignored by the scientists. They went ahead two days later and killed Maddison.

*

Only twelve were tested with 200 mg that week, my group and Maddison's group and of those twelve only five of us have reached three score years and ten. The other seven have died prematurely.

*

Only ten days before we arrived at Porton, a young soldier had collapsed in an experiment with 300 mg of sarin, his breathing stopped but he was resuscitated. He was still very ill in the Station Hospital and on the day that Maddison died, his cholinesterase depression was still 85 per cent.

*

I was not told what the scientists were doing or whether there could be any long-term ill health from this so-called cold test.

*

Before I went to Porton, I had never heard of the place.

*

I did not receive a Medical examination at my parent unit before leaving for . . . Porton.

*

I did not receive a Medical on my arrival at Porton.

*

I did not have a medical after leaving Porton Down seven days later on 8 May.

*

I was not medically examined on my return to my parent unit.

*

Neither my service record or my service medical record shows an entry of my attendance at Porton.

*

I didn't have a medical check or follow up in the years following my contamination, we were just left to our own devices.

*

I didn't find out what had really happened to me at Porton until I read in a newspaper in 1999 about the Police Inquiry . . . My health since that time has often been poor unlike the rest of my family. I believe my nervous and immune systems have been damaged. I have suffered urinary tract problems since 1954, the year after the experiment.

*

I suffer from numerous skin problems. I believe these have been brought on by the skin contamination with sarin. These include: Seborrhoeic eczema—Scalp scaling—Nasal rash—Pitted nails—Erythema—Pruritis—Scaly areas on hands—and a Basal Cell Carcinoma on the opposite side of my forearm to the sarin application which has been surgically removed.

*

I have been diagnosed with Ankylosing Spondylitis and as a result, two areas of my spine are seized up.

*

I need to have constant colonoscopies to remove Tubulo-Villous Adenomas. Luckily benign so far but only because these are removed regularly. The problem is ongoing.

*

My right leg is dead to the knee joint and I walk with the aid of a stick.

*

I have calcaneal spurs with associated Planter Faciitis, making walking difficult and painful.

*

I have had a major operation for the removal of Prostate Cancer.

*

I have to take Warfarin to thin my blood.

*

I have multiple hepatic cysts."

That is the story of a young man of 18 who was reluctantly conscripted to national service, who began to enjoy the work and who was comprehensively betrayed by his country and by those who ran its armed services and the experimental centre at Porton Down. I am outraged when I am told that there is no documentary evidence that the subjects thought that they were going to get a common cold. If they were not told that they were going to get a common cold, we have to conclude that they are all lying, that they have formed some large conspiracy in which they have agreed to falsify what happened at that time and that in concert with one another they have fabricated evidence in order either to claim compensation or to receive an apology. That seems an extremely serious allegation.

If there is no such allegation, we must accept the individual statements from witnesses that they thought that they were participating in cold research. Why did they think that? They are clear that it was in the notice. They may have picked up a great deal by rumour. However, it is extremely clear that no proper explanation was given to the young men when they went to Porton Down. It is a disgraceful story and a disgraceful episode in our past. Now, only a handful of Porton Down veterans remain. Surely the time has come not merely to apologise but to compensate for what was done.

Even if they have suffered no ill effects—although clearly they believe that they have—what was done was so unacceptable that compensation should be paid by way of an apology. I deeply regret the attitude of the Government, although they are not the only ones involved in this and I would not suggest that they were, in trying to maintain the fiction that those people did not believe that they were going to assist with research into the common cold. There are times when Governments should say, "Wrong was done," even if the matter was in the past. If living beings are still affected by the wrong that was done, they should receive justice. All we are asking for is a common courtesy, the sense of fairness for which this country used to be renowned and, above all, a recognition that innocent young men, who trusted authority, were betrayed.

I should like to make a short contribution on behalf of my constituent, Arthur Ashley of Legion court in Morden. When he was 18 years old and working as a signalman on HMS Vanguard, he received a signal from the Royal Navy asking for volunteers to take part in tests for smog and the common cold. Despite many years of searching, there are still no records of any signals having been sent. That point has been replicated in all the contributions so far. My constituent passed the signal to his comrades and, like many of them, decided to take part in the trials.

He says that he is

"one of the lucky ones",

because the ill effects of the trials have not been as bad for him as for his comrades. He was 18 at the time of the trials. He is now 68. At the time and in the immediate aftermath of the test he felt a burning sensation in his eyes and had a sore chest and problems with his skin. In the 50 years since the test, he has suffered from continual skin complaints. He has also suffered dizziness, chest complaints and ear problems.

Irrespective of the health effects of those tests, which may or may not be fully attributable to the Porton Down tests, what makes Mr. Ashley most upset is that he loved the Navy. He joined at 15 and rose through its ranks to become a lieutenant. He feels betrayed by the service that he so much loved. Like so many others, Mr. Ashley feels that the MOD should compensate veterans for the pain that they have suffered and that there should be a public inquiry into what happened at Porton Down. It was wrong to ask young men to take part in trials without telling them what was to be involved. Mr. Ashley feels that he has been duped and that that was not right.

That all happened 50 years ago. One of the happy truths that has emerged from the Porton Down campaign is that it could never happen now. Our attitudes have changed: we no longer operate in a cold war environment and society is much less servile. Irrespective of compensation or whether there should be a public inquiry, I hope that we can do the right thing and say that it was wrong to dupe those men into taking part in those tests. I hope that we can walk away today agreeing that duping servicemen to take part in tests was wrong and I urge the Minister to apologise for the actions of a different set of officials under a different Government in a different age. It will help constituents of mine, such as Mr. Ashley, to move on.

I commend the hon. Member for Bedford (Mr. Hall) on his initiative in securing the debate on what really went on at Porton Down. It enables me to raise the experiences of two constituents, one of whom has sadly died, whose health was undoubtedly and permanently impaired as a result of the service volunteer programme.

In his reply, I hope that the Minister will go further than when he addressed the House earlier this year in response to the experience of a former constituent of mine, Douglas Shave, which my hon. Friend the Member for Poole (Mr. Syms), who is in his place, raised in his Adjournment debate on 10 January. In my view, Wiltshire police and the doctors of St. Thomas' hospital have now collated enough evidence of ill health and premature death to support an independent public inquiry without any further delay.

It was such a public inquiry that my constituent, Mrs. Maureen Rossiter, sought when she came to my surgery nearly two years ago. She is adamant that her husband, and servicemen like him, were duped into going to Porton Down, where they were subjected to horrendous, outrageous experiments and then discarded. Her husband, Vernon Rossiter, volunteered to research the common cold for two weeks at Porton Down in 1958. He arrived on 14 April. He was fitted with a respirator, given an antidote for nerve gas, had his chest punctured by needles, which led to a collapse of his lung, was hospitalised and was sent home on sick leave a week early. He suffered health consequences for the rest of his life and died in 1985. A post mortem examination found that both lungs were overweight, with one grossly so.

Mrs. Rossiter pursued her own investigation with the Ministry of Defence, which she found a frustrating experience because of the negative attitude that she encountered, so she sought my help. In his letter to me of 23 July 2003 the Minister referred to an invitation that Mrs. Rossiter had received to visit Porton Down, check her husband's record and discuss her concerns with staff. She attempted to take up the invitation but was told that such visits had been suspended. She has since learned from others that such records are incomplete or non-existent.

In response to her suggestion that her husband had responded to notices calling for volunteers to research the common cold at Porton Down, the Minister told me that no evidence to support that exists, despite in-depth searches by the Ministry of Defence and the Wiltshire police. It is suggested that former volunteers may be confusing the notices they claim to have seen with those calling for volunteers to attend the common cold research unit located at Harnham Down. No. That does not wash.

It would, of course, be surprising if notices and posters calling for volunteers had survived the abolition of conscription in 1958. However, the memories of those who responded to the notices remain clear. It was to go not to Harnham Down but to Porton Down, and those who have returned to Porton Down to check their records recognise it as Porton Down and not Harnham Down. A former assistant secretary in Mr. Speaker's Office, who has now retired, recalls typing such a notice calling for volunteers to research the common cold at Porton Down.

A letter appeared in The Daily Telegraph of 12 July 2003, from Lieutenant-Commander P.J. Grigsby RN, about the apparent lack of evidence. It stated:

"I was surprised to note that 'the essential piece of evidence—the poster' has not been found. I remember them well, and saw them frequently during my time in the Royal Navy . . . They were issued as Admiralty Fleet Orders (AFOs), later to become Defence Council Instructions (DCIs), designed to promulgate to the fleet information that needed to be acted on early. The calls for volunteers at Porton Down were classed as temporary, but appeared regularly. They all had a reference number starting at 1 on the year of issue (e.g. AFO 1/54), and a binder was supplied for each year's issue. Somewhere within the public records at MOD historical branches there will be complete sets of AFOs/DCIs. The detectives should look again."

Thus I hope that the Minister will be more positive today on the subject of the call for volunteers to research the common cold at Porton Down.

I shall not dwell for long on the experience at Porton Down of a second of my constituents, Michael Paynter. In May 1954 and again in March 1955, as a conscripted national serviceman in the RAF, he volunteered to be the subject of research into the common cold at Porton Down. On both occasions that involved going into a gas chamber without any protective clothing apart from a gas mask. He has not enjoyed his previous robust good heath ever since.

I described his symptoms in my Adjournment debate of 16 October 1996. It was possibly the first such detailed reference in the House to what went on at Porton Down and was responded to by my hon. Friend the Member for Mid-Sussex (Mr. Soames), the then Minister of State. He stressed that neither of Mr. Paynter's visits and studies involved his exposure to any chemical warfare agents and said that the programme of work in which Mr. Paynter participated was part of the Government's research programme to investigate the causes and effects of London smog.

It must already be clear from this debate that a great many questions about Porton Down remain unanswered. However, thanks to Operation Antler and the outcome of the inquest on Ronald Maddison, which found that his death was unlawful, we are slowly but surely getting to the truth. It would be a credit to the Government if they were to admit the truth, which is that past Governments have allowed conscripts to be used as guinea pigs to research the effects of lethal gases such as sarin, by encouraging them innocently to volunteer for research into the common cold and London smog at Porton Down, that as a consequence those young men's lives were damaged or destroyed and that that is a great national scandal. It deserves a public inquiry and compensation without any further delay.

In a press release of Tuesday 25 April 1995 entitled "Labour highlights human experiments at Porton Down" the then shadow Defence Minister, the late Derek Fatchett, said:

"The Labour Party is calling for the Government to act over claims that soldiers who volunteered for experiments at Porton Down have suffered serious damage to their health.

We are very concerned at claims by some ex servicemen that they were not adequately informed of the risk involved in testing, and that they have suffered long term damage to their health.

Other Governments are beginning to acknowledge that their testing programmes may have put the health of service personnel at risk. It is time the British Government did the same and investigated the claims of the Porton Down volunteers."

Nine years after Derek Fatchett's statement, that is precisely what the House should today call on the Labour Government to do.

What could be more powerful, more moving, than the testimonies that we have heard from the right hon. Member for Maidstone and The Weald (Miss Widdecombe), my hon. Friend the Member for Mitcham and Morden (Siobhain McDonagh) and the hon. Member for Bournemouth, East (Mr. Atkinson)? Please forgive me if I stick to one issue. I personally support the plea of my hon. Friend the Member for Bedford (Mr. Hall), who initiated the debate, for a public inquiry.

I was the last Member of the House of Commons to have the miserable experience of appearing at the Bar of the House as a result of a decision of the Privileges Committee. It was in 1967, and it was to do with Porton Down. I shall not bore the Committee with all the background, suffice it to say that it was a cause célèbre that the then Home Secretary, James Callaghan, decided that he would not vote. For a Home Secretary not to support the Privileges Committee raised all sorts of questions. Other Cabinet Ministers also declined to vote on that occasion. It is of little consequence that I was nearly expelled. It is of far greater consequence that justice should be done to those who were victims at the time of my national service.

Some years later, a very honourable Conservative, the late Sir Harry Legg-Bourton—I held him in high esteem, as I believe his colleagues did—came to me apologetically and said, "I ought to tell you that it was friends of mine in the Ministry of Defence who put me up to telling the Chairman, the late Arthur Palmer, that he should raise what had appeared in The Observer after the Select Committee's visit to Porton as an issue of privilege." For some years, I thought that that had been done in vengeance, as I had been a terrible nuisance to the Ministry of Defence in respect of the Borneo war, east of Suez, variable-geometry aircraft, Aldabra atoll and several other issues. Later, I discovered that it was not vengeance at all. To use a Scottish expression, it was to put my gas on a peep—to stop my messing around with Porton—in case I should stumble on the terrible things that happened in the '50s and probably into the early '60s.

Harold Wilson told me after he had been Prime Minister for the second time that I was on his conscience. I asked if that was because of Porton, and he said that he would tell me one day. That never happened, as poor Harold Wilson got Alzheimer's, but I am absolutely convinced that the Ministry of Defence at the time had decided to hide the dreadful, shameful thing that it had done. Incidentally, I gave my volumes of papers to the Wiltshire police and Detective Superintendent Luckett, and I have discussed the matter with Ken Earl and many others.

The issue is not a matter of party. My hon. Friend the present Minister cannot be blamed and current officials cannot be blamed. Indeed, I told Mr. Luckett that I strongly agreed with him that there should not be prosecutions, because anyone being prosecuted would be in their early 80s at least and most would be pushing up the proverbial daisies. However, my hon. Friend the Member for Bedford is absolutely justified in asking for a public inquiry and for justice. For the people I have met, justice—a recognition that a wrong was done to them—would be more important than monetary compensation. I therefore strongly support the plea that has been made.

For nearly 22 years it has been my privilege to represent Porton Down in the House of Commons. I know of nobody at Porton Down who is not deeply troubled by what happened 50 years ago and, indeed, more recently. I know of no scientist who would sign up to the accepted norms of behaviour then or who would claim that what is done today is not very much better. I have always thought that it would have been far better to hold a public inquiry than to have the matter referred to the coroner's court in Wiltshire. I support the hon. Member for Bedford (Mr. Hall) in that respect and I am glad that he has secured this debate.

The testimony of my colleagues is surely enough to move deeply anybody who was not aware of what went on at Porton Down in the past and to persuade them that there is still a lot of ground to be covered. The issue is not over. The coroner's court has made its decision and the Ministry of Defence, for legal reasons that are perhaps obscure to the layman, will pursue its judicial inquiry, so we shall not muddy those waters. However, it is my job, on behalf of my constituents, to make it absolutely plain just how important the work of Porton Down is.

What we have heard is one side of the story. However, I shall not rehearse the other side of the story, because I have no mandate to do so—I was eight years old in 1953 and have no recollection of what happened. The Father of the House is right that there should not be prosecutions of the old men who were operating under orders 50 years ago and that what is needed is an apology for the things that happened, which is even more important than any monetary compensation.

If Porton Down did not exist, it would have to be invented, and very quickly indeed. In the minds of many people the place is shadowy and mysterious—a home of the dark arts likely to generate extravagant language. Locally, however, we are proud of Porton Down. Without it, the United Kingdom would be a more dangerous place in which to live, and Her Majesty's forces globally would be undoubtedly be at greater risk. Indeed, the lives of thousands upon thousands of British servicemen and women have been saved because of the work at Porton Down over many years.

As the hon. Member for Bedford said, the issue goes right back to 1915, when chemical weapons were first deployed against British troops and the carnage was appalling. In 1916 work started at Porton Down, and by 1918 anti-gas defence and respirator development was established, as well as work on the dissemination of chlorine, phosgene and mustard gas. By 1991, however, the Chemical and Biological Defence Establishment had emerged, still in the Ministry of Defence. Next door, the Centre for Applied Microbiology and Research, which was split off in 1979, has become part of the Health Protection Agency, under the Department of Health, and the old CBDE has evolved into the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory, in the Ministry of Defence.

Back in 1956, Britain abandoned any sort of chemical or biological warfare capability, and restricted work to hazard assessment and defence. Work continues today on developing the means of prophylaxis, therapy, rapid detection and identification, decontamination and protection of the body against nerve agents, which attack through the eyes, skin and respiratory tract.

It is important to remember that the science at the two Porton Down establishments is world class. Following the 9/11 attacks in the United States, the Science and Technology Committee, of which I am a member, undertook an inquiry into the scientific response to terrorism. We took evidence in the White House, the centre for disease control in Atlanta and the Laurence Livermore laboratories in California. Everywhere we went, Porton Down was praised for the quality of its science and the expertise of its staff. Most of the research is published and peer reviewed. Links with academia and industry are increasingly important. Spin-off applications are growing—such as the fabric coatings that were developed to protect Her Majesty's forces and are now used in aerospace, health care, sports wear, overalls and consumer and electronic goods, as well as by the military—and, recently, the development of the polymerase chain reaction process by the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory that is leading to rapid in-the-field testing for diseases such as foot and mouth, tuberculosis in cattle, genetic modifications in food at the point of sale, and tests for pathogens such as salmonella, listeria and E. coli.

All of that began with the processes that have developed at Porton Down since 1916, and none of it would have been possible without the help of volunteers from the very early days. As knowledge has increased, risks have been identified and protocols developed to protect volunteers and staff alike, and working practices have changed. For many years, no studies involving service volunteers have been conducted without the approval of the independent ethics committee, in line with the 1964 Helsinki declaration on the ethics of human experimentation. That committee has just two MOD members and nine representatives of the medical, legal and academic professions, plus lay people.

Porton scientists are at the cutting edge of blue skies research, as well as industrial innovation and clinical application. Their first duty is to Her Majesty's forces, but long before 9/11, they were Britain's front-line response to homeland defence too. When emergency service exercises take place, Porton-trained police, fire crews and ambulance staff are first on the scene, followed swiftly by scientific response teams from Porton Down. Back home, the laboratory staff work overtime, analysing suspicious substances, while their DSTL partners develop security scanners and intercept equipment such as that through which we pass at airports every time we travel.

In order to understand how chemical and biological agents wreak their havoc, and how to defend the human body, we have to understand what agents disrupt, and how nerves work. Therefore, it is not surprising that Porton scientists are also at the forefront of research into Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's and other diseases.

Partly because of the blanket secrecy in bygone ages, there has always been confusion about four local institutions. The oldest chestnut—and, my goodness, have we heard it here today—concerns Harvard hospital, not Harnham Down, that is something quite different. Harvard hospital, which was Britain's common cold research unit, received thousands of volunteers, mostly civilian, who contributed to our knowledge of virology. It closed in the 1980s, having failed to cure our colds, but not before it had made a major, if unexpected, contribution to treatment for HIV/AIDS. There is no evidence that Porton Down ever undertook any work on the common cold.

In addition to DSTL Porton, and the Health Protection Agency Porton Down, there is the army camp at Winterbourne Gunner, at the western end of Porton ranges. Generations from all three services have been trained there, in nuclear, biological and chemical defence. The defence centre has now been joined by the police national chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear centre. Thousands of police, ambulance and fire personnel, from every force in the UK, are now fully trained first responders in their communities, and journalists working with troops on dangerous deployments, whether in Iraq or elsewhere, are briefed there too.

Who wrote all that?

I did, based on 22 years of experience as Member of Parliament for Porton Down. This is my work, and I am very proud of it. I have to read enormous scripts of rubbish written by journalists about Porton Down, and even when one hears the BBC talking about Porton Down, it is always "the Government's top secret germ warfare establishment." I wish that people would snap out of it, get real and move into the 21st century. At the heart of Porton Down—that web of security—there are many thousands of highly motivated scientists and support staff who are part of our community in south Wiltshire. It is not some secret, behind-the-wire, white-coated colony of aliens. They are real families who shop at Tesco, sing in our choirs, join in our sport and leisure activities and bring to our local schools a high profile for science education.

That is the reality of Porton Down today. I do not for one moment detract from anything that my hon. Friends and hon. Members have said about what may have happened and what did happen in the past. I have said that I would support a public inquiry. It is infinitely preferable to the coroner's inquest, which was an inappropriate forum. An apology is due for what went on 50 years and more ago, but please do not confuse history with the reality of the modern defence of our homeland and Her Majesty's forces.

This has been an emotional but fairly well reasoned debate, and I congratulate the hon. Member for Bedford (Mr. Hall) on having initiated it.

I pick up from the previous Adjournment debate introduced by the hon. Member for Poole (Mr. Syms). As I understand it, the ministerial response went something like this: most people know Porton Down and therefore when going there have certain expectations; most probably knew the nature of likely tests conducted there; and, so far hitherto no clear connection has been established between the health problems that have subsequently shown up among veterans and the exact treatment that they received at Porton Down.

I got into the issue through a constituent, Mr. Kenneth Burns, who was an Army chauffeur and one of those who thought that he had volunteered to assist with common cold research. He certainly did not know what Porton Down was for, and he certainly did not know the nature of the research conducted on him. When asked to put on a gas mask, he was apparently told, and I believe him, that he was there to test whether the masks chafed—not because it was a necessary part of the experiment. None the less, a bigger dose of sarin was inflicted on him than killed Ronald Maddison. Mr. Burns described to me the departure of Ronald Maddison and the suspicious way in which his corpse was disposed of.

If I accept that over a period the causal link between the tests and subsequent ill health is difficult to establish, that the intentions of the people at Porton Down were honourable, that the risks were expected to be low, the research worthwhile and the wider benefits considerable, that the volunteer programme was justifiable, and that the current Government act in good faith when commissioning epidemiological studies and providing information, it remains the case that my constituent and others' constituents were exposed without their consent to a process that could have killed any one of them and certainly killed Ronald Maddison.

If anybody other than a Government put at risk the health of an individual in that way, there would at the very least be a case for damages, and in all probability a criminal prosecution would not be out of place either. As the right hon. Member for Maidstone and The Weald (Miss Widdecombe) pointed out well, Porton Down can be defended against that specific charge, and I have made it as specific as I can, only by branding as liars hundreds of serving soldiers who were informally briefed if not formally told that they were in fact engaged in cold research.

I met my constituent almost by accident. I was just out canvassing that day. He did not seek me out with a thirst for compensation, and I believe his side of the story. It may be said that veterans have a motive for telling their story in their way, but it may equally and probably more forcibly be said that the Ministry of Defence has a bigger motive, because behind Porton Down may lie other stories related to different incidents—Korea, the Gulf war and so on. We may be on the verge of opening an ugly can of worms. Why else would the Government challenge an inquest decision arrived at fairly?

Being casual with the lives of soldiers belongs to the past, and we all agree on that. However, there may be something worse than that, which is pretending to maintain better standards, and in doing so, stringing out investigations while awaiting the death of the complainants.

It has already taken 50 years to get the truth about the Maddison death, and there can be little excuse for further delay. The Government can either make restitution and acknowledge errors or brand a host of perfectly decent veterans as liars—there are no comfortable choices left.

I join the hon. Member for Southport (Dr. Pugh) in congratulating the hon. Member for Bedford (Mr. Hall) on bringing this matter before us. Like the hon. Member for Linlithgow (Mr. Dalyell), we have all heard the moving testimonies about the plight of hon. Members' constituents. Although I represent Aldershot, I am fortunate in that none of my constituents has come to me as a result of having participated in the volunteer programmes at Porton Down. However, I understand the strength of feeling that my hon. Friends and other hon. Members have described.

Like my hon. Friend the Member for Salisbury (Mr. Key), I pay tribute at the outset to the work done by the DSTL, whose headquarters are in my constituency. As he said, it does a vital job. Indeed, its work has never been more important than it is today, with the free world facing a real threat from biological warfare agents, and we must acknowledge that. I have visited Porton Down, although I suppose that I did so with some trepidation, being armed with all the warnings that one receives and aware of all the adjectives that are applied to it, which my hon. Friend mentioned. Nevertheless, I and my colleagues on the Defence Committee were impressed by the work that was being done there. The tests that were carried out in the past were essential, as are those that continue to be carried out today, and all hon. Members will want to express their gratitude to the 20,000 volunteers who, over the past 50 years or so, have assisted a programme that is extremely important to the defence of the realm and to the security of our armed forces and the wider British public.

However, veterans deserve to be told the truth, particularly now that the cold war is over. In particular, we need to know whether the scientists were acting within the bounds of the knowledge available then. To what extent were they aware of the risks to the lives and health of volunteers? To what extent were they prepared to take risks in that respect? As my hon. Friend said, the same people who work at Porton Down go shopping at Tesco, and none of us has any real basis on which to doubt their honourable intent. Were their predecessors, however, working within the bounds of available knowledge, or did they press ahead deliberately, knowing that sarin could fatally injure their volunteers? I noted from the reports of the inquest into Ronald Maddison's death that Professor Sir Ian Kennedy—as has been said, the Ministry of Defence has asked him to write a chapter on the Porton Down historical survey—said that scientists at the time were

"acting on the edge of their knowledge"

when they exposed volunteers to the "uncontrollable danger" of sarin. We therefore need to know whether the scientists were deliberately putting their volunteers at risk.

The hon. Member for Bedford made an interesting point about internal memos produced in the 1950s, which warned that the advice given to potential volunteers was misleading. That is very serious because it suggests that some people at the top realised that risks were being run, but they were not prepared to own up to them to the volunteers who were participating.

Another problem appears to be that the records were either incomplete or have since disappeared. We need assurances from the Minister that a rigorous record-keeping process is now in place. Although the Wiltshire police force concluded that there was no evidence that the volunteers were told that they were to participate in tests for a cure for the common cold, it appears from the testimony that we heard today, which is widely available, that the volunteers were under the impression that they were participating in such a test. The onus is therefore on the MOD to answer that accusation. It cannot be that all those individuals, from a range of disparate sources, have collectively imagined those defence council instructions on their vessels and thus all provide the same testimony, even if the Wiltshire police could not find those DCIs.

We welcome the Government's funding of a medical assessment programme and an epidemiological study, conducted under the auspices of the Medical Research Council. We believe that it is right to await the outcome of that research, which, as the Minister revealed, has been concluded. The Minister indicates dissent.

To recap, there are two studies: the historical study, to which I referred in my intervention on my hon. Friend the Member for Bedford (Mr. Hall), and the other study, to which he also referred, which will be finished in 2006.

I thank the Minister for that intervention, which is helpful and has put the matter on the record, but swift action will need to be taken once those findings are available. These people are in advancing years, and we owe it to them to ensure that the Government make the findings available as soon as they have been reached. I hope that that Government will be Conservative, and if I should chance to be Minister, I undertake to ensure that that material will be published forthwith and that action will be taken.

It is hard to resist the calls for a public inquiry, but we should await the results of the studies that are being undertaken, and seriously consider holding a public inquiry, if such an inquiry appears appropriate in the light of findings that further work needs to be done. It is very easy to promise public inquiries when in opposition, as the Labour party did, but it has not delivered on that promise in government. The easiest thing for me to do as Opposition spokesman is to call for a public inquiry, but I will not do so until those reports have been published. If they do not answer the questions that have been posed today, however, a public inquiry is the right answer.

Will the hon. Gentleman distinguish between the health and mortality study and the quality of the information that was made available to volunteers? Those are two distinct issues. There is a study into one of them, but not into the other.

The hon. Gentleman is entirely right to make that point, which I take on board completely. It is of great concern that full information about what happened has not been forthcoming, regardless of the medical issues.

My own view is that those who contribute to the defence of the realm need to be compensated properly if and when they sustain injury in the course of their service. The volunteers gave every bit as much service to the nation as those in uniform on the front line. Furthermore, we need to be prepared to err on the side of the claimant. All too often, the MOD seems to want to make life so hard for claimants that only the most persistent win through. My hon. Friend the Member for Bournemouth, East (Mr. Atkinson) referred to that as a negative attitude, which I have noticed is prevalent at the MOD. That culture should be changed.

I understand from what the Minister said in the Adjournment debate secured by my hon. Friend the Member for Poole (Mr. Syms) on 10 January that only 1,000 of the 20,000 volunteers have approached Porton Down since the free helpline number was initiated in 1998. That is only 5 per cent.—a very small proportion. We are therefore not talking about a vast raft of people who are claiming that their health has been impaired as a result of the service that they gave, but about a very small number of people, and we owe it to them to err on their side rather than on the side of the Treasury. We must be willing to view their concerns sympathetically.

The war pensions system provides a means of assessing individual cases with recourse to an appeals procedure. Mr. Michael Paynter, an ex-Royal Air Force clerk, took his case to the war pensions appeal tribunal last year. It ruled that his eczema and chronic fatigue were attributable to exposure to sulphuric acid and what was called fake London fog. The system is therefore in place, but it does work. The tribunals need to be seen to be the ex-servicemen's friend, not an agent of the Ministry of Defence. That is a duty that the House should expect them to assume.

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Bedford (Mr. Hall) on securing this afternoon's debate. It has been a good debate, with contributions from my hon. Friends the Members for Mitcham and Morden (Siobhain McDonagh) and for Linlithgow (Mr. Dalyell), the right hon. Member for Maidstone and The Weald (Miss Widdecombe), and the hon. Members for Bournemouth, East (Mr. Atkinson), for Salisbury (Mr. Key) and for Southport (Dr. Pugh). I shall try to refer to their views as I proceed.

I join the hon. Member for Aldershot (Mr. Howarth) in praising the work of Porton Down staff. It might help if I inform the House of Porton Down's remit. Indeed, part of its remit was covered by the hon. Member for Salisbury—who, I am pleased to note, writes his own speeches, despite provocation from others on such matters.

Porton Down provides safe and effective protection for the United Kingdom and its armed forces in the event of chemical or biological weapons being used against them. That area of research was recognised as being vital to our scientific response to terrorism by the Science and Technology Committee in its 2003 report; that, too, was mentioned by the hon. Member for Salisbury. We should not forget that although the service volunteer programme is an integral part of the overall research programme, it is only one aspect of it. Many of the technologies developed at the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory at Porton Down have applications in the civilian sector, such as in vaccines and bacterial detection systems.

It is against that background that the service volunteer programme has operated at Porton Down for almost 90 years. Volunteers have been involved in research and development that has underpinned the United Kingdom's chemical and biological defence capability, in both detection and protective measures. As recent events in the middle east and closer to home have shown, that research is as relevant today as it was when the service volunteer programme began in 1916. Since then, around 20,000 volunteers from various parts of the services have participated in the studies, with many participating more than once. I mention that because it sets in context some of the numbers that have recently been quoted.

I accept that the number of participants was highest during the 1950s and 1960s, decreasing to a total of around 5,000 over the past 30 years. Currently, between 100 and 150 volunteers a year participate in the programme. They are involved in tests aimed at ensuring that the protective measures issued to our troops to counter the threat posed by chemical and biological weapons are safe and operationally acceptable before being introduced into service.

Historically, and particularly in the 1950s, volunteers were involved in studies to evaluate the effect of small amounts of chemical warfare agents on the ability of unprotected personnel to operate normally. Other volunteers were involved in trials to develop effective clothing and medical countermeasures to protect service personnel, or in assessing the ability of personnel to function with new equipment. Some 8,000 individuals took part in studies involving mustard gas, and some 3,000 in studies involving nerve gas. However, it is important to understand that many of those individuals would have acted as controls and therefore would not have been exposed to chemical agents, and that the majority of the studies concerned the assessment of protective clothing, which would have protected the individuals from exposure to the agents.

As I said in the Adjournment debate secured by the hon. Member for Poole (Mr. Syms) in January, that work is essential. It is equally important that such measures are evaluated in the safety of a controlled environment, with full medical and scientific back-up. I remain in no doubt that our knowledge and technology in the complex field of chemical and biological defence would not have advanced without the contribution of volunteers participating in trials as part of the programme.

I am pleased to tell the House that the vast majority of volunteers who participated in the service volunteer programme are quite unconcerned about their attendance. Given the ongoing level of publicity and media coverage about Porton Down volunteers, including the establishment of the free helpline, which was set up in 1998, the House may have expected the Ministry of Defence to have received a large number of requests for information, but that has not happened. The helpline has received just over 1,000 requests so far.

The hon. Member for Bournemouth, East suggested that visits have been suspended, but that is not the case. I undertake personally to ensure that his constituent can visit Porton Down.

Inquiries are motivated by different reasons—out of curiosity, or because of publicity or health concerns—but, whatever the reason, when they are received, staff at Porton Down begin the painstaking search of numerous experimental record-book entries describing the studies in which former volunteers were involved. The resulting information, which is sometimes complicated and often difficult to interpret, is then explained in the clearest possible manner and sent to the inquirer with an invitation to visit Porton Down to view the original record books and discuss any concerns with current members of staff. Quite a few former volunteers have accepted such invitations, and some have made several visits.

When former volunteers visit Porton Down, they may be accompanied by their political representatives—I suggested to the hon. Member for Poole in the January debate that he might like to carry out that function for his constituents—legal representatives, families or friends. Such visits have been successful, not least because we have given inquirers details about the services offered by the MOD, including the mechanism for former service personnel to obtain pensions if their health was damaged as a result of their time in service. That no-fault compensation is provided by the war pensions scheme. All former members of Her Majesty's forces who demonstrate that their ill health is attributable to service will benefit from such a compensation scheme.

I am aware that many former Porton Down volunteers are concerned about the way in which the trials were conducted. This point was raised by both my hon. Friend the Member for Bedford and the hon. Member for Aldershot. The key theme that I took from both of their speeches is that it comes down to the question of whether consent was obtained: it was obtained—in accordance with the practice and procedures of the time, which was well over 50 years ago.

I can confirm what the Minister says. I have spoken to the man who was in the gas chamber with Ronald Maddison who says he was aware of exactly what he was doing and that it had nothing to do with the common cold. He signed the consent form and went through with the trial.

There are views that that is the case, but I do not want to comment specifically on the Maddison case for reasons of which the House is aware. I will come on to why we are taking the action that we are in a moment.

Volunteers were drawn principally from the three services, and were recruited through notices posted at military establishments. It appears, from surviving records, that in the 1950s and 1960s, volunteer intakes were requested from individual arms of the services at specific times of the year. The precise mechanisms for recruiting volunteers were arranged by the services themselves, not by Porton Down.

I know, from the letters that I have received from hon. Members on both sides of the House, and from former volunteers, that many veterans recall volunteering to participate in studies at Porton Down to find a cure for the common cold. However, the chemical and biological defence organisation at Porton Down never carried out work on the common cold. As the House is aware, that research was undertaken at a Medical Research Council unit at Harnham Down, on the other side of Salisbury. Extensive independent searches by Wiltshire police during the five years of Operation Antler did not locate any documentary evidence to indicate that Porton Down recruited individuals on the pretext of common cold research. In fact, during the recent inquest into Ronald Maddison's death, the Wiltshire and Swindon coroner stated that there was

"no documented evidence of any campaign orchestrated by Porton Down, or directed by them, as to the recruitment of volunteers for common cold research."

Will the Minister give way?

I hope that the hon. Gentleman will forgive me for not doing so. I need to say a number of things and I do not have much time in which to say them.

The investigations by the police located documentary evidence that demonstrated that, from the 1940s to the 1960s, thousands of volunteers from the RAF and the Army participated in trials run by the Medical Research Council to assess the effectiveness of various flu vaccines.

I referred to the inquest about the late Ronald Maddison. It concluded on 15 November 2004. On 21 December, I announced to the House that I had written to the Maddison family apologising for the fact that Ministry of Supply employees at the then Chemical Defence Experimental Establishment at Porton Down proceeded with a test involving Ronald George Maddison on 6 May 1953, which led to his unfortunate death, and that the test was undertaken despite the fact that an identical test two days earlier had resulted in an adverse blood test result in one servicemen.

In my statement, I also said that the Ministry of Defence intends to challenge the inquest verdict of unlawful killing by way of judicial review. I confirm that, earlier this month, we applied to the administrative court for permission to proceed with a claim to judicially review the verdict of unlawful killing relating to the death of Ronald Maddison. The grounds of the application are the coroner's legal rulings and his summing up and directions to the jury. I also confirm that copies of the relevant paperwork have been sent to the interested parties.

I have noted the comments made by my hon. Friend the Member for Bedford and others about a public inquiry. I do not believe that such an inquiry would answer their specific concerns. I share that point of view with the hon. Member for Aldershot. Wiltshire police has spent five years conducting an independent and comprehensive inquiry into the conduct of the service volunteer programme, which resulted in a number of cases being put to the Crown Prosecution Service.

On that point, I want to reflect on what the Father of the House, my hon. Friend the Member for Linlithgow, said about prosecutions. That is an issue that I will reflect on following the debate. I do not believe that a public inquiry could address the key question of whether there are any unusual patterns of mortality or cancer incidence among former volunteers: only epidemiology can do that. For that reason, we are funding the study that has been referred to, conducted under the auspices of the Medical Research Council. The study will track mortality and cancer incidences among former volunteers and a matched control group. It will conclude in 2006. As I said in the January debate, we will publish the results of that research because there will still be a Labour Government at that time.

My hon. Friend the Member for Bedford also asked whether we will include mental health in the study. The Medical Research Council advised before the study commenced that it would not be possible to study any other health issues, as those are not recorded centrally in the way that cancer incidence is recorded by the NHS cancer registry.

Another issue concerning former volunteers is that of compensation. Some veterans are under the misapprehension that the United States and Canada have issued apologies and paid compensation to participants in their test programmes. What those countries have done is acknowledge the service of test participants and express appreciation to their veterans. We have done that for our servicemen and women for many years and it is right that we should. It is correct that Canada is making one-off payments to those who participated in chemical warfare trials. That payment is in recognition of their service and not on the basis of ill health. I believe that our policy of paying compensation in cases where injury or ill health can be shown to be attributable to service or the Ministry of Defence's negligence is the right approach.

To illustrate the debt that we owe to the many thousands of servicemen and women who have participated in the volunteer programme through the years, imagine what would have happened if, during the first Gulf war, Saddam Hussein had used the large amounts of nerve agents that his armed forces possessed. It is probable that many people would have died, but we believe that relatively few of them would have been British. That would not have been a result of good fortune but a direct result of the contribution to the defence research programme made by service volunteers for a number of years.

My hon. Friend the Member for Bedford also asked me about the Nuremberg code and its application to scientists in the 1950s. During the inquest, the coroner accepted that the Nuremberg code had not been incorporated into domestic or international law and an expert witness gave evidence that scientists in the UK in the 1950s did not believe that the code was aimed at regulating their conduct, as it was felt that they already complied with the principles fully.

Order. We must move on to the next debate.

I thank Mr. Speaker for granting me this debate. We take the issue of fire services very seriously in the west midlands. My hon. Friend the Member for Coventry, North-West (Mr. Robinson) will speak for about 10 minutes, and my hon. Friend the Member for Coventry, North-East (Mr. Ainsworth) also supports us. It is recognised that he cannot take part in such debates because he is a deputy Chief Whip, but that is not generally understood outside the House, which is why I wanted to make that point.

There is considerable concern in Coventry about the West Midlands fire and civil defence authority's proposals, known as integrated risk management policy. Our town looks as if it will bear the biggest brunt in the reductions in the levels of service provided. I notice that other west midlands MPs are present, and they are probably in a better position to say how the changes will affect their authorities. However, I hope that they will support the Coventry MPs in highlighting some of our concerns.

The issue is complicated, and in half an hour we cannot cover all that we would want to—we could spend two or three hours debating the subject. We want to highlight some of our concerns, and I am sure that my hon. Friend the Member for Coventry, North-West will pick up on some of the points that I make. At the end of the day, it is a team effort from the MPs representing the three Coventry constituencies.

The proposals would reduce the number of fire engines available between 12 am and 8 am, and we have considerable concerns about how cover would be provided or supplemented if there were major incidents in both Coventry and other parts of the west midlands. My hon. Friends and I have had discussions with the fire authority, and although the proposals look good on paper, they are only theory and have not been tried out. I, for one, would like to see that happen. The theory looks okay but, as everybody knows, it is in practice when the difficulties start.

We also had discussions with the firefighters. They are the people on the ground who will have to deliver the service and who really know what effects the proposals will have. We took on board some of their arguments and raised their concerns with the fire authority. As my colleagues and other west midlands MPs know, we have also had discussions as a west midlands group of MPs. That group met not only the trade unions, but the authority and its chairman. I am also aware that Coventry city council will debate the issue tonight and, as I understand it, may reach a conclusion about what it thinks about the proposals. A lot of things are happening as a result of our concerns.

It is also only fair to point out—this surprised me and, I am sure, some of my colleagues—that there had not been any real discussion between the authority and trade unions. My experience tells me that if someone is going to effect change, they have to involve people from the workplace—in this case, the firefighters themselves. Enlightened management often find that people from the shop floor can make a tremendous contribution, pointing out where proposals are workable or not.

The West Midlands fire service is probably one of the most efficient in the country. It is not our intention to knock it in any way. However, it is our intention to represent the concerns and fears of the people of Coventry about the proposals. I hope that when the Minister replies he will bear that in mind. However, we also want assurances that the remaining appliances will not increase the risk to occupants of properties and to businesses and their employees—and, equally importantly, to firefighters and the public—as a result of any implementation of the proposals. We also want to know what effect the removal of the pumps and fire engines will have on standards.

There is also the problem of community fire safety. That needs to be evaluated before any appliances are removed, particularly in high-risk areas. At present, throughout the west midlands, 62 appliances are regularly risk-assessed and tested. That has been done by chief fire officers since 1947 and Her Majesty's inspector, who carried out an evaluation as recently as 1992. The 1985 national standards of fire cover provided higher levels of service than those in the authority's integrated risk management policy plan. We found that interesting because standards seem to have changed.

We are also concerned about the level of service provided in inner-city areas. Brownfield sites have now been used in inner cities, often for high-rise flats. Some cities have had successful millennium bids, such as the millennium proposals in Coventry, which have created not only more flats in Coventry city centre, but a higher density of them. That is one of the things that happens with brownfield sites. We are certainly concerned about those areas.

When we send firefighters into such areas, given the changing circumstances, we have to take on the issues concerning their safety, although nobody wants to be too emotional about that. In fact, the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister stated that fire deaths rose by 6.5 per cent. in the first three months of 2004 compared with the same period in 2003. Fire-related injuries rose by 4 per cent. over the same period and fires increased by about 9 per cent. So the number of fires is increasing, which means that risk is increasing.

The west midlands operational procedure note 23 states that the predetermined attendance for fires in high-rise buildings is four appliances and one pump. Under the current proposals, that would leave Coventry covered by one fire appliance between 12 am and 8 am. There are some serious concerns about how the proposals will affect us. However, I would have thought that other MPs from around the west midlands would listen closely to what I am saying and apply the same tests to the level of services that they might get as a result of the proposals.

I know that the Minister's powers are limited, but I hope that he can reassure us. The situation is serious, and the proposals are being taken seriously. Overall, we need to consider the fact that it would take well over 18 minutes for a vehicle to travel in the night from Hunts Hall, on the outskirts of Birmingham, to Coventry—a lot more than the time that is proposed.

Does my hon. Friend agree that the essential problem is that the proposals are a step into the unknown? I would feel much more comfortable if I could be sure that the rationale for such decisions will be made clear by the West Midlands fire authority, and that they will be subject to regular review and independent scrutiny so that we can find out whether our fears are justified. We need to know whether there are unintended consequences. Would not it be step forward to have a clear rationale, and decisions that are subject to review and independent scrutiny, so that we can see the total picture?

I could not agree more. I do not know whether it would be possible, but, in the light of what my hon. Friend said, there should be a trial run or pilot scheme so that we get away from theory and discover in practice what can and cannot be applied, and how we might change and improve things. He makes an important point.

The hon. Gentleman may know that people in Sutton Coldfield are also extremely concerned about the issue. At present, there is one fire appliance per 43,000 people in the west midlands. If 15 appliances are cut between midnight and 8 o'clock in the morning, there will be one appliance per 57,000 people. Those statistics are from the Fire Brigades Union. I understand that there is one appliance per 26,000 people in Tyne and Wear. Does he agree that it is the concern in our constituencies that has brought the proposals under such close scrutiny?

I could not agree more. In fact, the hon. Gentleman explained the situation much better than I could have. When one considers factors from different authorities, which seem to be doing different things, it becomes obvious that an overall standard has not been applied.

I said earlier that I am amazed that the fire authority has not conducted a proper dialogue with its firefighters. Other fire authorities have done exactly that and have reached some form of agreement.

I, too, am grateful to Mr. Speaker for granting this debate and to my hon. Friend the Member for Coventry, South (Mr. Cunningham) for securing it.

One thing that has been stressed in all the discussions with the Fire Brigades Union and the management association is that this proposal has nothing to do with the overall discussions. Negotiations are still taking place between management and firemen on delivering the productivity deals that were inherent in the original settlement of the dispute a couple of years ago, in which my right hon. Friend the Deputy Prime Minister was so instrumental. Those discussions are ongoing, but we are told that the issue of the night shift from midnight until 8 o'clock in the morning is separate from the productivity negotiations, which inevitably will involve changes to shift patterns and working practices, and delivery of the efficiency savings that were at the basis of the arrangement reached between the Government, the Fire Brigades Union and the Local Government Association.

As my hon. Friend the Member for Coventry, South said, and as other hon. Members indicated in interventions, it is difficult to understand the motivation for interim changes to night cover. It is said that those are purely issues of security, but it is hard to reconcile that with the fact that security performance is extremely good, integrated risk management is an unproven concept, and any change that is made must be done with great care and on substantial evidence. Indeed, the change should be divorced from questions of efficiency, productivity, shift patterns, payment systems and so on, given that it deals with life and death. However, it just does not seem to be correct—it does not ring true—that the two are entirely divorced. It is clear that cost savings are at the root of the proposals for the change in night coverage from 12 till 8 am. If there were not savings, the changes would not have been proposed. Let us not be too coy about this: at the root are cost savings, which may be right or wrong.

The problem, to which my hon. Friend the Member for Coventry, South alluded, is that it is, for various reasons, difficult to have a pilot scheme in, for example, a hospital. It might even get in the way of hospital activities that do not involve acute emergency operations. I accept that a pilot scheme might make sense in some hospitals—I argued, for example, for the change to foundation hospitals.

A pilot scheme might make sense if we could conduct it without risking life and limb, and without putting at risk things that none of us would want to put at risk. If we try to run a pilot scheme that involves changes to night security and puts people at risk, we run the risk of proving that the pilot scheme was wrong and that people have died unnecessarily. I do not believe that anyone in the House, and in particular in this Chamber, would remotely want to be put in that position, so the fundamental question is: how well proven is it that the proposed changes will not endanger life? I do not know, but I would always err on the side of caution. We are assured that it has nothing to do with cost, but we should not embark on a course that drastically reduces night cover without hard evidence and the assurance that such a reduction will not unnecessarily endanger life. That is critical.

Other hon. Members who represent west midlands constituencies are also in the Chamber today, and it makes sense to cover the whole area, but I shall be slightly partisan and restrictive for a moment. I believe that Coventry is particularly concerned about being unnecessarily exposed when it comes to night coverage. I know that illustrations are not appropriate, but the west midlands is largely ham-bone shaped, and Coventry is at the tail end. There is gap between Coventry and the nearest stations—Bickenhill, Sheldon and Solihull—of about 10 miles, which is 15 minutes, and it is clear that Coventry is exposed. That is why we are pleased to voice our concerns in a debate on the wider context of the west midlands.

There was an arson attack last year on Britannia Tyres in my constituency in the early hours of the morning, at about 2 am. It took 18 minutes for an emergency fire engine to get from the nearest centre, which I believe is Solihull. It usually takes only 10 minutes to cover that distance, but such a concept is not easily fixed in stone and cannot be relied on absolutely. There were no deaths, but great financial damage and insurance costs were involved. Nevertheless, lives could have been lost, as they are more often than not. We know that 37 per cent. of fatal incidents occur in this period. That is the situation, but it will worsen if we implement the reductions that will hit Coventry proportionately more than the rest of the west midlands.

I did not intend to argue specifically for Coventry, but for the whole of the west midlands. It is a cop-out for hon. Members on both sides of the Chamber to claim that this is purely a question of safety. At the heart of the matter are the overall arrangements for making cost savings and efficiency gains, to which they have committed themselves. It is putting the cart before the horse to change one part of that.

In many ways, night coverage is the worst, most exposed and most dangerous part of the package, and is separate from the rest of the package that still has to be negotiated. However, if that is what both sides want, my unequivocal view is that we cannot agree to it as parliamentarians until the overall situation is settled, because there are no proven systems behind it and no proof that we are not embarking on a course that could put lives in danger. Perhaps savings can be found elsewhere, perhaps they are not necessary, or perhaps the overall pattern of new shifts and costs can be otherwise arranged, but to prearrange things that affect the most sensitive and delicate of all the things that affect us—that is, human life—is dangerous and quite wrong. Surely what we need to do is to get the package right and, as part of that, ensure that night safety is properly taken care of.

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Coventry, South (Mr. Cunningham), accompanied by my hon. Friends the Members for Coventry, North-West (Mr. Robinson) and for Coventry, North-East (Mr. Ainsworth), on securing this debate. We also heard contributions from my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Hall Green (Mr. McCabe) and the hon. Member for Sutton Coldfield (Mr. Mitchell). Clearly the issue is of concern, and it is right that Members of Parliament have this opportunity to raise their concerns and champion the cause of their constituencies. My hon. Friend the Member for Coventry, North-West should not apologise for standing up on behalf of Coventry—it is his job to do that, and rightly so.

The overriding objective of the fire and rescue service is to save lives. Thanks to the Government's partnership with fire and rescue authorities, as well as with other key stakeholders, the fire and rescue service is changing for the better—better for the communities that it serves and for those who work in it.

Hon. Members will know that the Fire and Rescue Services Act 2004 came into force on 1 October 2004 and is the first substantive piece of fire legislation in the past 50 years. It puts the prevention of fires at the heart of the Government's agenda for improving the fire and rescue service, an important point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Coventry, South. It does so by, for example, creating a new duty to promote fire safety, as well as by providing flexibility for fire and rescue authorities to work with others in the community.

The 2004 Act also gives statutory force to a fire and rescue national framework, which sets out the Government's priorities and objectives for the fire and rescue services and what fire and rescue authorities should do to achieve them. The national framework also sets out the support that the Government will provide. The framework provides strategic direction from central Government, while ensuring that authorities continue to make local decisions. The 2005–06 fire and rescue national framework was published on 6 December 2004.

Integrated risk management plans have been at the core of my hon. Friends' contributions. The idea of prevention and local decision making is also at the heart of the move away from inflexible national standards towards locally determined integrated risk management plans. Since April 2003, the introduction of integrated risk management plans has allowed fire and rescue authorities to target resources to address local risk, as well as to make effective use of their resources in preventing fires. The introduction of integrated risk management plans has given the senior fire and rescue service managers what they have long sought: the flexibility to make decisions about fire cover based on existing and potential risks to their communities, within a strategic framework set by locally elected members.

Integrated risk management plans, including those belonging to fire and rescue authorities in the west midlands, are about reflecting local needs, targeting resources at locally identified risks in a cost-effective manner, and identifying the ways in which a fire and rescue authority can work in partnership with other authorities and agencies to deliver improved public safety. Crucially, that must be a process of consultation. Documents must be published and everyone—Members of Parliament, members of the public, employees and others—must have the opportunity to contribute to the proposals that fire and rescue authorities publish. I understand that the West Midlands fire and civil defence authority completed its consultation on a year 2 integrated risk management action plan on 1 February this year.

I sincerely hope that the views and concerns expressed today have been articulated in that consultation process. I am sure that that has happened. On the basis of the documents put out for consultation, which has now been completed, those issues and concerns will have been heard loud and clear by the West Midlands fire service.

One issue raised was the involvement of trade unions in the consultation process. It is, of course, an important responsibility of the fire and rescue authorities to consult publicly on their integrated risk management plans. It is important that all the trade unions involved, including the FBU and many others, have the opportunity to engage in that consultation. I sincerely hope that the very important opportunity for those organisations to make their views known was taken up.

The Minister touches on something to which I referred. As I understand it, the trade unions have not been meaningfully involved in the process, whether it is called consultation or seeking their views. Their involvement was way down the scale, and not what he implies.

I understand my hon. Friend's concern, but I emphasise that it is a statutory duty for the fire and rescue authority to publish documents, consult, receive consultation responses and make judgments on the basis of the outcome of that consultation. The document on the outcomes of the consultation process that ended on 1 February will be published in April 2005. It will include any approved changes resulting from the consultation. It is important that individuals and organisations had a good opportunity to make their views heard. My hon. Friend's views will be recorded in the parliamentary record for others to see

My hon. Friend the Member for Coventry, North-West is concerned about how risk assessment operates. Risk assessment is not an unproven science. The fire and rescue authorities have tremendous experience in undertaking it. I understand that the IRMP that we are debating is based on six years of incident data and factors. That is the depth of the evidence for the West Midlands fire service, but there will be other IRMPs in other authorities. The risk assessments are taken extraordinarily seriously.

My hon. Friend mentioned an incident in which it took 18 minutes for an appliance to arrive. I understand that there is an investigation into that.

That just shows how careful we must be about using figures gathered over six years. I am sure that they are useful, calculated honestly and with integrity, but whereas they are based on a 15-minute maximum, or 10 minutes in some cases, in the example that I gave, it took 18 minutes for the appliance to arrive. That is the difference between life and death.

My hon. Friend is right, which is why it is important to understand why that might happen. If six years' worth of data are available, and one incident from that data is anomalous, it is important to ask what happened to cause it. That is a combination of longitudinal analysis of evidence and the specific analysis of an incident, which provides accurate risk assessments when such judgments are being made. He is right to say that we need to learn from such incidents.

I want to mention one other item. The West Midlands fire and rescue service has a very good record on community fire safety, and has led the way in tackling many things such as arson and fire safety, in running citizenship courses for young people—that can be difficult—in dealing with people who speak different languages and in engaging with different communities. The West Midlands fire and rescue service has a good track record, and notwithstanding today's debate, I hope that hon. Members will take away the message that we have a successful fire and rescue service, of which we can be proud.

Have you ever been in love, Mr. Deputy Speaker? If so, it is probable that you have experienced all the emotions associated with uncertainty, excitement, attraction and fear of the unknown, because love is a risk and a commitment to emotions, which may backfire in your face. That risk is at the heart of some of the greatest literary, political and cultural achievements of the human race. It is an example of what I am here to discuss: the politics of risk, and why I believe that an obsessive approach to health and safety, coupled with an increasingly litigious culture is contributing to the problems that face our society.

None of us can pretend that either life, or indeed political work, is devoid of risk, yet our political climate seeks to eliminate risk—as if that were even possible. In trying to do so, we are creating a population metaphorically wrapped in cotton wool. It causes problems far greater than a sensible and measured approach to risk ever would. It means that bored children who are denied access to safe and exciting school trips and sports activities seek their kicks elsewhere, and it means that Britain's second largest teaching union, the National Association of Schoolmasters Union of Women Teachers, advises its members not to participate in school trips for fear of litigation. It means also that the outdoor and recreation industries are hampered by rising insurance premiums, choking under unnecessary bureaucracy and struggling with serious volunteer shortages.

The great scientist Professor Heinz Wolff believes that humans have a biological need for risk. I shall return to that point, but trying to eliminate risk can therefore cause harm in its own right. Indeed, juvenile crime, drug use and obesity are probably in part the result of such a futile policy. By contrast, I suggest to the Government that if we seek to manage risk instead of eliminate it, we can truly begin to address those problems sensibly.

I appreciate the Government's new approach to school trips. It is good that they intend to supply to teachers sensible guidelines on school trip safety, negotiate with local authorities to cut red tape, and launch a manifesto in the new school year for education outside the classroom. A champion to oversee their outdoor education manifesto, just as Marc Jaffrey is champion of their music in schools programme, would do wonders for that policy, so my first request to the Minister is for the appointment of such a champion. Secondly, 50 per cent. of school children have parents who cannot afford to fund their school trips and outdoor education, and only 10 per cent. of them get Government funding support. Will the Minister consider the financial shortfall experienced by the other 40 per cent.?

There is a wider problem: by focusing purely on school trips, the Government are treating the symptom not the cause of the problem. The decline in school trips is the tip of a far larger iceberg. Simply upping the required quantity and frequency of school trips without addressing the culture of unreasonable litigation will merely result in more court cases and more confusion. Guidelines for teachers are useful, but on their own ineffective, because the legal profession will just keep fishing for litigation opportunities. Without meaning to be rude to the law, if the law allows it, lawyers will follow the money. We need a cultural change—a shift back towards individual freedom and individual responsibility. Negligence must be held to account, but responsible organisers should not be punished for the mistakes of their clients.

Consider the following case in which a scout group had organised a trip to visit the popular show cave at Gaping Gill. One of the scouts noticed a small cave-opening across a stream, and asked the scout leader for permission to explore it. The leader refused permission, pointing out that caves could be dangerous. The scout moved to where his father stood and repeated the request. His father, who had heard the leader's ruling, gave permission and accompanied the boy into the cave. Inside, the scout slipped and fell 300 ft tragically to his death down a chimney leading into the main chamber of Gaping Gill. Some two years later, once the tragic boy's elder brother had reached 18 and left the group with his chief scout award, the father successfully sued the Scout Association on the basis that the scout leader should have prevented the father from entering the cave with his son, and in failing to do so he breached his duty of care. That is just one example among many of what I consider to be a litigious society gone mad. It was a tragic death, but the scout leader should not have been held responsible for it.

The important thing is the widespread public perception that a compensation culture exists. That perception shapes behaviour in several ways: more spurious legal claims; higher insurance premiums to pay for the larger number of claims; more illegitimate claims settled out of court, not fought and defeated; and more people deterred from organising outdoor activities and adventure activities for fear of being sued. It affects outdoor pursuit centres big time, and I am grateful to Pete Jones of the Red Ridge centre in my constituency for his public and vocal support of our campaign. His excellently run centre had to stop pony trekking due to crushing insurance premiums—another example of many opportunities lost to his business and to the public.

These are powerful trends, and new Government guidelines are not enough to stop them. That is why we need a good legal definition of reasonable risk, so my second question is: will the Government clarify that definition in order to address the compensation culture problem? The definition needs to recognise that accidents can happen without there being contributory negligence by instructors.

Would the hon. Gentleman agree that it is paradoxical that responsible organisers are penalised in that way, including those in my constituency, while at the same time, also in my constituency, we have the Dorothea quarry pool where 21 people have drowned, yet nobody seems to be able to take responsibility for the health and safety of divers there?

The hon. Gentleman is correct. The system does not allow for a proper balance between risk and safety measures. As a result, there are ridiculous regulations for many activities and, possibly, a degree of under-regulation for others. We must find a way to prevent the cost of defending against spurious claims from always resting on the defendant. Volunteers in all their guises, from youth work volunteers to landowners who offer their facilities, must have protection from litigation. We need to take litigation out of our culture.

At the heart of the issue is our approach to risk. I return to the difference between risk elimination and risk management. By not managing risk appropriately, we lose the social, economic and personal positives that reasonable risk-taking can bring. By treating risk as a kind of social asbestos, to be eliminated at all costs, we forget that an element of risk is a good component of all our lives—and outdoor activities are a perfect example of positive risk. In a report published in April 2004, the National Foundation for Education Research found that outdoor activity programmes improved young people's confidence, self-esteem, inter-personal and social skills, behaviour, self-image and fitness. Further, those positive effects were shown to be long lasting. Outdoor activities, therefore, improve subsequent behaviour. Other countries know that. Peadar Cremin, principal of Mary Immaculate college in Limerick, saw that at first hand in Denmark. At one pre-school play group area for children aged from six months to six years, the kids were playing outside on a sort of mini mountain, running up and down in a remarkable fashion. No adult was outside watching over them. Peadar was told that the Danish recognise the benefit of risk as a teaching tool. The Danish believe that that is a good way to help to generate a sense of personal responsibility that will last a lifetime, and I agree. However, in spite of the clear benefits of healthy risk taking, as I said before, the NASUWT, Britain's second-largest teaching union, advises its members against taking students on trips.

I have suffered at the hands of risk. In 1998, I fell 30 m, when my paraglider deflated over a Welsh mountain. I broke my back in 12 places and smashed my ribs, sternum and jaw, and I pay tribute to the NHS and the hospitals in Llanidloes, Shrewsbury and Gobowen hospitals for their life-saving efforts. A local Conservative said after my accident that I was 10 ft short of a by-election. I probably was. Never let it be said that Conservatives do not care. Despite my accident, I absolutely oppose a ban on paragliding. To ban it would deny the right to enjoy the sport, in all probability without the same consequences as mine. Besides, that experience taught me more than I can say. It underlines Professor Heinz Wolff's assertion in a lecture to the all-party group on adventure and recreation in society, of which I am co-Chair, that

"we have a biological need for risk—especially present in young people—but essential to all. If not managed well by society by providing enough legal risk—in schools, sports clubs, the arts and social & family environments—this need for risk will become mismanaged and cause risk-seeking behaviour by individuals—antisocial, criminal or simply unhealthy. A Risk in Time Saves Crime!"

He added:

"Risk prevention for the few means waste creation for all. As resources are finite, society must therefore set priorities based upon which risks are most important. The current attitude of society to many forms of risk is totally irrational, scientifically indefensible, and economically damaging: pre-occupation with safety dissipates a significant amount of national resource."

Rather than spending time and money prohibiting and then policing an activity, why not engage with it proactively and make it safer? By managing risk rather than seeking to eradicate it, we can harness the benefits of adventurous activities.

I welcome Government plans for school trips, but they need to consider the over-regulation of everyday life as a whole. Let us give people back their freedom, accepting that some of it will also mean giving people the right to make a mistake or to have an accident. That is what was promised regarding swimming, where at present in life-guarded pools, four-to-eight-year-olds have to be accompanied by one adult for two children. It means that more kids may drown because they never had the opportunity to learn to swim due to the strictness of those regulations. The Government are thinking the right way; I am asking them to think that way on a wider scale.

Reshaping our attitude to health and safety is to recognise that our world cannot be risk-free. We lose if we sacrifice healthy and beneficial activities for the unattainable goal of absolute safety. It is Professor Wolff's firm view that in the diet of life our Government thinking is causing deficiencies in one vitamin: vitamin R, for risk. Risk, when taken in sensible doses, is the difference between sterile, anodyne and artificial living versus the chance to learn, accomplish, feel alive and even to love. Is the Minister brave enough to give us back our vitamin R?

I warmly congratulate the hon. Member for Montgomeryshire (Lembit Öpik) on securing the debate and on his excellent speech. As his co-Chair of the all-party group on adventure and recreation in society, I enjoy working with him.

I want to make two brief points to underpin my hon. Friend's powerful oration—I like to call him my hon. Friend because he is indeed a Friend. First, it is difficult to exaggerate the sheer scale of the impact that the problem of litigation is having on adventure training. Thirty thousand young people would like to join the scouts and an incredible 50,000 want to join the girl guides but cannot do so because of a shortage of volunteers. The last comprehensive survey on the matter by the Central Council of Physical Recreation in late 2003 showed that of the eight factors that act as barriers to volunteering, the blame culture and the fear of litigation is the first.

Secondly, my hon. Friend gave a striking example from the scouts of a tragic death. I cannot stress enough that this is not about perceptions. Whatever statistics may be produced—no doubt the Minister will say that the number of litigation claims is falling in society as a whole—in this area, a string of ridiculous court judgments have completely undermined the confidence of adventure training organisations. I shall give an example involving a much more minor injury, coincidentally again from the scouts, although we could site many from other organisations. The case, brought two and a half years ago, was Joseph Morrison v. The Scout Association. A scout campsite had created a waterslide on a gentle slope by laying a length of heavy-polythene on the ground and covering it with soapy water. We have all done it for our children using hoses. The supervising adults explained that people should not run or dive on the sheet but simply sit on it. They even produced helmets to use when going down the slide.

A youth leader with a party of non-scout children decided to have a go. He selected a helmet without referring to the scout leaders and dived headfirst down the slope. In the process, his face was badly cut because the helmet did not fit. A British judge—Judge Brownlee at Newtownards—held the scout leader liable. It is not just that money was involved; a British court declared negligent a man who had given many years to scouting. He was publicly derided as being negligent. That sort of message, in case after case, is undermining all those organisations that seek to bring adventure training and sport to our children.

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. We need a change in the law. It must become more difficult to bring such negligence cases. The law must recognise inherent risk, perhaps by raising the bar for negligence cases. The alternative is a growth in obesity, a decline in the spirit of adventure and teamwork, and, I am sorry to say, a growth in antisocial behaviour.

This is a timely debate. I am grateful to the hon. Member for Montgomeryshire (Lembit Öpik) for offering me the opportunity not only to try to set the record straight on behalf of the Government, but to counter the idea that the drift in society that he outlined is Government inspired. The hon. Member for Canterbury (Mr. Brazier) has long campaigned on the issue. Last year, he had a private Member's Bill on the promotion of volunteering, in which this subject would have featured. He will be aware that Home Office Ministers were broadly sympathetic to the overall aims and objectives of his Bill.

We very much wish to endorse the valuable contribution that outdoor pursuits make to a healthy society, to the rural economy and to the well-being of people in the United Kingdom. Indeed, in another debate, the hon. Member for Daventry (Mr. Boswell) and I had a friendly discussion about fast bowling and cricketing, another sport that is not without risk. The hon. Member for Montgomeryshire is known for his passion for dangerous pursuits and he described some of the consequences that can result from them. Indeed, I should like to have considered myself a keen horsewoman. There is nothing like the sheer exhilaration of riding flat out on a horse. It is a potentially dangerous occupation, but none the less exhilarating, and one that I would not have missed for the world.

I am encouraged by the direction that the Minister is taking. At heart, I am saying that there is nothing dangerous about horse riding or paragliding: it is the Minister falling off the horse and my crashing that are dangerous. We should not blame the sports or activities for the misdemeanours of the individuals participating in them.

Broadly, I agree with the hon. Gentleman, but the Government believe that people with a genuine claim for compensation in negligence cases should be enabled to enforce their rights. However, we have made it clear—I am pleased to have the opportunity to say so today—that we oppose the development of the so-called compensation culture. I strongly disagree with the attitude that for every mishap someone is at fault, for every injury someone must be to blame, and for every accident someone has to pay. So far, I agree with the hon. Gentleman and other hon. Members. If I am to take issue with him at all, it is over his point that we have a culture of legislation that favours risk avoidance over risk management. I shall say more about that in a moment.

We all agree that outdoor pursuits have tangible benefits for people of all ages. They promote better physical fitness, contribute to a healthier society and, in cases like mine, when I fell from my horse, knock some sense into otherwise senseless heads. They also help to develop confidence, teach the principles of risk awareness, which is not risk aversion, build social skills and set young people in particular on the path to making a valuable contribution to the life of the UK.

I agree with what the hon. Member for Canterbury said about the important opportunity that young boys can get by joining the scouts and young girls by joining the girl guides. My younger son got a huge amount out of the air cadets. That group took him into circumstances that could be dangerous at a young age, but sensible risk management by the organisers enabled him to enjoy that risk, the element of danger and the adventure. They organised it in a way that left him with enormous lessons that he will have with him for the rest of his life.

While I strongly back the hon. Lady's support for all three wonderful cadet organisations, in my constituency, Whitstable sea cadets, which is right next to the beach and is the oldest sea cadet organisation in the country, is no longer able to sail on the sea. As a result of the fear in our culture that it cannot meet the necessary standards, it can sail only on lakes.

It is disappointing to hear stories of that nature because, as the hon. Gentleman described, they limit the opportunities for young people to grow and to develop their self-confidence. In rural economies, outdoor pursuits can form part of the lifeblood of the community by providing valuable sources of employment and revenue. For example, in Wales, in which the hon. Member for Montgomeryshire takes a keen personal interest, activity holidays are worth more than £900 million to the economy. Adventure tourism alone accounts for £133 million each year. Those are the only statistics that I will quote.

As a result of those strong, tangible benefits, the Government are keen to promote risk and adventure in society. The Prime Minister recently said:

"Everything we do in our everyday activity in work or leisure involves an element of risk. Risk is central to the enjoyment of all adventure activities."

We know that the starting point is, for many, school trips. It is important that the concerns about risk and the so-called compensation culture do not destroy those opportunities and the benefits that they produce. Issues have been legitimately raised about the attitude taken by insurance companies towards outdoor pursuits, most notably the case that the hon. Member for Montgomeryshire quoted about pony-trekking facilities in his constituency.

For that reason, I fully endorse the recent Ofsted report, which the hon. Gentleman might have seen, on outdoor education. It concluded:

"outdoor education contributes to students' physical, personal and social development",

and

"the benefits of outdoor pursuits and outdoor education are far too important to forfeit and by far outweigh the risks of an accident occurring".

Those are important comments from important opinion formers, independent of the Government, in the sector. Teachers who lead outdoor pursuits have a key part to play. Some teachers may have been concerned about the consequences for them if things went wrong, but they should be reassured by the report's conclusions that, if they follow recognised safety procedures and guidance, they will have nothing to fear from the law.

My primary interest is health and safety. A fundamental principle of our health and safety framework is that responsibility for health and safety rests with those who own and manage the risks. That is as true for outdoor pursuits as it is for all other aspects of work. We cannot ignore the risk or the requirement to be aware of it and to manage it. However, we must manage it sensibly. In the case of adventure activities, the challenge is to regulate it sensitively so that we continue to allow those involved to be exposed to and to enjoy a level of risk that does not stifle experimentation and development. That is important.

The Health and Safety Commission is responsible for health and safety at work. It believes that a goal-setting approach is much more flexible and promotes innovation. I pointed out to the hon. Member for Daventry that the chairman of the Health and Safety Commission had an article in the Financial Times yesterday about that precise issue, which might be of interest to hon. Members. The HSC accepts that risks cannot be eliminated from society without disproportionate cost—if ever—and that risk elimination is undesirable except in extreme cases. It seeks instead to encourage sensible risk management and appropriate controls where required.

By virtue of what they are, outdoor pursuits are often high hazard, and should an accident occur, serious consequences may follow. The key to safety is to manage the risks appropriately. An important part of that process for adventure activities is the work of the various national governing bodies. Those organisations, many of them voluntary and with limited resources, have built up a firm base of expertise in risk management and have made a significant contribution to the safety of outdoor pursuits and to standards at both national and international level. I have wanted to get that on the record for some time, and I am grateful for the opportunity to do so.

As I said, I do not necessarily accept that we have a culture of legislation or that regulations favour risk avoidance over risk management—certainly not in the case of health and safety at work regulations. We have a culture of risk avoidance on the rules that people use to implement the goals set in health and safety regulations. Bill Callaghan, who chairs the HSC, hit out in his interview yesterday at just that issue when he attacked the heavy-handed rules covering paddling pools—a point made by the hon. Member for Montgomeryshire—gravestones, games of conkers, which we heard nonsense stories about, and even parish walks.

We need a sense of proportion in assessing hazards and an end to over-zealous red tape. The hon. Gentleman's example of the ratios of adults to children in swimming pools is one such case. There is no specific law or regulation relating to pool safety. The HSC certainly does not stipulate adult to child ratios or how many children under a given age one adult can supervise in a pool.

The dialogue that the Minister is embarking on is exactly the dialogue that the hon. Member for Canterbury (Mr. Brazier) and I are seeking to raise in the political agenda. Is she willing to meet us to discuss specifically the kind of things that we think could make the Government proactive in managing risks? I am not blaming them, but they do have an opportunity to address the problem in that way. From what she says, I am optimistic that we may have common cause.

I would be happy to engage in that. Indeed, we could discuss the legal definition of risk, which the hon. Gentleman mentioned. It is, as he appreciates, a complex issue. There is no statutory definition, but there is much common law. He and the hon. Member for Canterbury are at much greater liberty than I am to comment on decisions that might be taken in courts, but there is common and case law consideration of what reasonable measures need to be taken to reduce risk.

On the suggestion that we might appoint a champion of our outdoor pursuits manifesto, what I have said already shows the breadth of interest across Government on the issue, not least in the Department for Education and Skills. This is not a decision that is mine to make alone, but I will consider it further and discuss it with my colleagues.

The debate has highlighted the significance of risk as an issue of public interest, but unfortunately that discussion is often polarised. At one extreme, there are those who appear to take an excessively risk-averse approach and who want a risk-free society. I regard them as bonkers, because it happily rhymes with conkers, which they want to ban. At the other extreme, there are those who dismiss health and safety out of hand as being an unnecessary infringement of their freedom of action—one might categorise them as critics of the so-called nanny state.

The Government and the HSC recognise that there must be middle ground, and we must work to discover and uncover it. I fully agree with the comments made at the launch of the all-party group on adventure and recreation in society, when it was said that

"risk cannot be eliminated, but it can be managed."

The HSC's strategic framework takes the middle ground. Our goal is to have not a risk-free society, but one in which risk is properly appreciated, understood and managed.

Question put and agreed to.

Adjourned accordingly at half-past Four o'clock.