My Lords, the House will have heard this morning of the resignation of the Foreign Secretary, Lord Carrington. On behalf of these Benches, and I am sure all parts of the House, I should like to pay a tribute to the noble Lord for all his work as a Member of your Lordships' House. Obviously this is not the moment to comment at all upon the events which have led to his resignation.

What I want to say is that this is a sad day for your Lordships' House. Irrespective of party, we have all greatly admired him. He has been a Leader of the House as well as Leader of the Opposition. Apart from the war years and his service as High Commissioner in Australia, he has been an active Member of the House for over 40 years and has served us with distinction. Although, of course, we have often joined battle with him politically, we want to express our warmest thanks and best wishes to him. We hope that we shall see him here in the future. He can be sure of a most genuine welcome from all of us, whichever Benches we occupy.

My Lords, it would of course be quite inappropriate to comment at this moment upon the unhappy events of the last few weeks. It is right that I should join with the noble Lord, Lord Peart, in saying that this is also a sad day for the Liberal Peers. This is a sad day, first, because the country has lost the services of a most distinguished and able Foreign Secretary. It is a sad day, secondly, for your Lordships' House because we have lost for the moment a representative in one of the higher parts of the Government who has, by his very position there, caused such esteem to follow upon your Lordships' House.

It is a sad day also for all the Members of your Lordships' House who, as individuals, have always found in the noble Lord, Lord Carrington, a person of such friendship, charm and courtesy. I am sure that all your Lordships' House will hope that the time is not far removed when the noble Lord will be able again to resume his position in the higher counsels of our state for which he is so well qualified.

My Lords, my sorrow at the events of the last few days has been compounded by the loss to this country and to this House of Lord Carrington. I had much experience, as did my noble friend Lord Shepherd, of working with him as we have to work in your Lordships' House. The fact is that he has followed the great British tradition (and I wish it had not been so in his case) that, feeling he was the responsible Minister, whoever else may have been to blame—and we will not even discuss this—he must go.

His services here have been almost immeasurable. Not long ago I had occasion to speak at the Oxford Union on the future of the House of Lords. I was defeated on the simple ground that my chief opponent, a Left-wing Member of the Labour Party, said: "If only they abolished the House of Lords, Lord Carrington could he Prime Minister". We think of his humour, his wisdom, his quickness and his skill as a speaker. I remember on one occasion my daughter had heard us debating. She said, "Daddy, you made a very good speech", and then she said, "I wish you could be a bit more like Lord Carrington".

He brought a wisdom, and he brought a caring for the House. It was possible to deal with him as a man of great honour; a man of humour; a man of understanding. He served this House both in Government and in Opposition, and we all deeply regret his departure.

The message of every Member of your Lordships' House, and certainly of previous Leaders of this House, is one of thanks to him and of appreciation, and we hope he will in the future have an opportunity to continue the great service he has already given to this country.

My Lords, as one who worked closely with the noble Lord, Lord Carrington, both in Government and in Opposition, I should like from this Bench to endorse everything that has been said in tribute. His resignation is highly regrettable on personal grounds. The noble Lord has been, I think many people would agree, one of the best Foreign Secretaries of recent years, irrespective of party; nevertheless, his resignation is worthy and indeed characteristic of the man we know and respect. I should like to leave this thought with your Lordships today, as we react to the sudden news of Lord Carrington's resignation, that it is by acts of selflessness of this sort that the British parliamentary system, confused though it often is, maintains its honour.

My Lords, on behalf of my colleagues on this Bench I should like to add a brief word. When history is written I am sure that the name of Lord Carrington will go down as one of the outstanding Foreign Secretaries of this country. We have the highest regard for him. We are sorry that we are losing him as Foreign Secretary, but I am sure the whole House will agree with me that he has proved to be what we always knew him to be—a man of very high integrity and great honour.

My Lords, I was the Member of this House who defeated my noble friend Lord Shackle-ton on a Motion of the Oxford Union suggesting that if the House of Lords were abolished, the noble Lord, Lord Carrington, would be Prime Minister. I simply wish to comment that even the severest critics of this Government deplore his resignation, how much we regret that the suggestion was made in another place and that we feel confident that, in the present situation, his advice would have been able to solve the situation in a peaceful way. We deeply regret his resignation.

My Lords, I am sure I speak for all the Members of this Bench in saying what a shock and sorrow it has been to us. We were not only interested but in prayer for him during the winning of the glittering prize of the Zimbabwe long discussions. It is with great sorrow that I echo, on behalf of my brother bishops on this Bench, everything that has been said in all parts of the House. We wish him well.

My Lords, I believe it would be the wish of some of my colleagues on the Cross-Benches that our voice should not be silent on this sad occasion. Naturally, I shall not go into the reasons which have led to the present very sad state of affairs; it is our tradition that it must be so, but it is sad to feel that at a time of national emergency, the Government should lose one of its staunchest and best members. We cannot have it both ways. As a friend, I deplore his going on this occasion.

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Peart, and all other noble Lords who have paid tribute this afternoon to my noble friend Lord Carrington. As noble Lords have said, this is not an appropriate moment to dwell on the immediate issues concerning his resignation, but I have been deeply moved at the real sense of expression of the great loss of my noble friend, who will be greatly missed in all parts of your Lordships' House.

As noble Lords will know, my noble friend is not in his place today because he is reading the lesson at the memorial service to the late Lord Butler. I think it right to say that it is rare indeed to find a man who commanded such respect and affection in all parts of your Lordships' House and who has done so for so many years. He was a man of international stature and he will not be forgotten for his part in the settlement and giving of independence to Zimbabwe, and in that work the whole of your Lordships' House basked in some of his reflected glory.

That is not surprising, for my noble friend Lord Carrington put this House very high on his list of priorities. I am sure noble Lords will recall that only last Tuesday he returned from Brussels to make a Statement to your Lordships' House, and I am glad—I think we all must be—that the House sat on Saturday that he might have an opportunity to speak to your Lordships from the Front Bench.

I am particularly pleased that so many of your Lordships have paid tribute to his great personal qualities. He was a very good friend to me. We all know his kindness, his friendship and, above all, his great sense of humour. I feel it a personal loss that he, who always called me the "bossette", should not be able to do so again. But it was, I think, in the selflessness of his going that he was true very much to his own sense of duty and honour.

My Lords, I beg leave to ask the Question which stands in my name on the Order Paper.

My Lords, the unintended profits referred to are believed to have been made mostly on spectacles containing single-vision lenses. From the overseas trade statistics and information from the industry, it is estimated that the United Kingdom imports roughly 35 per cent. of such lenses used.

My Lords, may I be assured by the Minister that, under the disciplinary powers conferred on the General Optical Council under the Act, they in fact exercise those powers to prosecute their own members if necessary, where they are guilty of fraudulent practice?

I feel I should set the matter in some perspective, my Lords. The noble Lord is concerned about the £6 million which had been unintentionally overpaid to opticians. On the other hand, the department owes the optical industry something like £70 million for underpayments, of which about £191/2 million has now been paid. Negotiations are proceeding on both counts.

My Lords, does the Minister recall that on 18th February he told the House that the Director-General of Fair Trading was examining the whole position and that talks were going on with the Optical Whitley Council because many of your Lordships felt that a fee of £4·50 for examination and £4·20 for dispensing was rather inadequate and perhaps a temptation to find expenses in other ways? It would reassure many of us who are concerned with the matter if the Minister would say what point the talks have reached.

My Lords, I feel sure that the noble Baroness knows that new fees have been fixed since 1st April. The fees that are now being fixed are interim fees while the negotiations are going on for a full settlement of all the outstanding issues.

My Lords, is the noble Lord aware that many of us who are interested in this subject are not specially critical of the opticians for making too much money? We are critical of the Government for allowing them to have a monopoly. Is the noble Lord aware that the glasses that I am now wearing, and through which I see extremely well, cost 10 dollars in New York across the counter? Why should the British public be deprived of this perfectly reasonable outlet for their money in order to improve their sight, or to make it worse, as they prefer?

My Lords, it might be going a little far to say so, but one might hope that when this large amount of money is repaid to opticians—and £70 million is a lot of money—there will be a fair chance that the charges for private spectacles will not go up, or possibly may come down.

My Lords, following what the noble Lord, Lord Donaldson of Kingsbridge, has just said, can the Minister confirm that there is no legal impediment whatsoever to the sale of simple reading spectacles on board cross-channel ferries outside the 3-mile limit? If that is the case, would not such an innovation on the one hand help the consumer and on the other hand help the strained financial situation of the British Rail Sealink subsidiary?

My Lords, I feel that the noble Lord is ranging a little widely.

My Lords, may I ask the noble Lord what is the difference between cheap imported lenses and non-imported lenses?

My Lords, the difference lies in the fact that the cheap imported lenses make it possible for the opticians to make a profit. That is really where the problem has arisen, and where the opticians buy their lenses has nothing to do with the department.

My Lords, can the Minister tell us what is the present situation regarding the Office of Fair Trading, to which the Government have made a reference?

My Lords, unhappily, I cannot give a precise answer to that point. The Office of Fair Trading has promised to report during the course of this year.

My Lords, I beg leave to ask the Question which stands in my name on the Order Paper.

My Lords, it is an unfortunate fact that major improvement measures to busy roads that will ultimately benefit traffic flow and safety can cause problems while under construction. Every effort is being made to keep those problems to a minimum at Perivale. The Metropolitan Police and the London Borough of Ealing are both co-operating closely with my department to achieve this.

My Lords, is the noble Lord the Minister aware that the road works now taking place at Perivale, in Middlesex, are part of a massive programme, which 1 am sure will aid everybody in the end, but that, for example, when the flyover was being constructed a few miles away at the Greenford round-about, there was not merely massive congestion, but also a threat of danger to life and limb which would not have arisen had there been sensible and close liaison among the council, the GLC and the Department of Transport? Will the Minister please consider urging that there should be close liaison and that the views of local associations should be taken into consideration so that nothing in the way of a serious accident or unnecessary congestion occurs?

My Lords, I shall be very glad to pass on the noble Lord's comments to those concerned. He may be interested to know that I understand that the contractor will soon be making available a third lane at the Perivale signals. This should come about within the next few weeks.

My Lords, may I thank the noble Lord the Minister for the serious manner in which he has treated this matter? The people who live in the area—and I am one of them—will be most grateful to him.

My Lords, I beg leave to ask the Question which stands in my name on the Order Paper.

My Lords, as from November 1982, mobility allowance will rise to £18.30 a week, tax free, compared to its May 1979 level of £10 a week, subject to tax. Over 217,000 people now receive the allowance.

My Lords, is my noble friend the Minister aware that this really is a most welcome increase, and that freeing the allowance from tax will benefit very many disabled people who go out to work and have other taxable income? Is he further aware that in this previously deprived area the rise means that by November the mobility allowance will have been increased by over 80 per cent. under the present Government, though, sadly, deprivation remains for those debarred the scheme on grounds of age?

My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend for her comments about the allowance which has, I think, received particular help from the present Government.

My Lords, we are very grateful for the increases which the noble Lord has announced, but can he relate them to the increases in costs of motoring which have taken place over the period in question?— bearing in mind that the costs of motoring, such as petrol and licence fees, have gone up by far more than the cost of living generally.

My Lords, I understand that the transport and vehicle group component of the retail price index has risen by 42 per cent. since May 1979; the mobility allowance has increased by 65 per cent.

My Lords, is the Minister aware that those old age pensioners who are disabled do not receive the benefits of cheap travel on buses and trains which other old age pensioners receive?

My Lords, it is true that mobility allowance does not give a passport for free travel, but I am not sure that I quite see the drift of the noble Baroness's supplementary question.

My Lords, perhaps I can make it clearer by asking the noble Lord whether he is aware that old age pensioners do not receive the mobility allowance? If they have a disability they are also at a disadvantage compared with their peers—other old age pensioners who are not disabled—since they cannot receive the benefits of cheap travel on buses and trains which other old age pensioners have. Perhaps the noble Lord is not aware that I have received many letters from old age pensioners who have disabilities.

I apologise, my Lords. The position is that when the last Administraton brought in mobility allowance it was on the basis of pension age as the upper limit—60 for women and 65 for men. Since then, gradually, the age limit for women has risen from 60 to 65, and both sexes who become eligible for the allowance before the age of 65 can continue to be eligible for a further 10 years, up to the age of 75. But at this stage it is not possible to scrub the limit altogether, because the cost of that would be £400 million pounds.

My Lords, may I support the noble Baroness, Lady Masham of Ilton? I do so in no party sense, because these rules have been accepted by successive Governments. I find that there is an increasing sense of unfairness among people who receive the mobility allowance; they fear that when they reach pension age it will be taken away. If the noble Lord will confirm that it will not be taken away, so that the only people who will be deprived by the rule will be those who apply for it after pension age, that would be of interest to many people in this House.

My Lords, the noble Baroness has put the case absolutely correctly. Anyone who qualifies for and receives the allowance before the age of 65 will continue to receive it until the age of 75.

My Lords, is there not something rather unfair in a situation in which a person who breaks his back in a traffic accident when aged 64 years can go on receiving the allowance up to age 75, whereas someone who sustains a broken back in a traffic accident at age 651 receives nothing whatsoever? There seems to be no equity in that particular proposition.

My Lords, what the noble Earl says is perfectly true.

My Lords, as one who many years ago passed the age of 75, may I ask the noble Lord whether it is unfair that the allowance should stop at age 75?

My Lords, at the moment those who are eligible will continue to receive the allowance until the age of 75. As I understand it, it will be seven or eight years from today that the first of those people will become 75. Perhaps between now and seven or eight years hence it might prove possible to whichever Government are in power to extend the limit from age 75 to, say, age 76.

My Lords, does it not appear to the Government at present in power that this injustice should be remedied?

Not at the moment, my Lords?

My Lords, I beg leave to ask a Question of which I have given private notice.

My Lords, with the leave of the House, my noble friend Lord Trefgarne will answer this Question in the form of a Statement at a convenient moment after 3.30 p.m.

This will be followed by my noble friend Lord Gowrie repeating a Statement to be made in another place, on the political development in Northern Ireland.

My Lords, may I ask the Minister one question? Do the Government anticipate that these measures will have an immediate and significant effect on the economy of the Argentine?

My Lords, I think that the noble Lord should ask that question after my noble friend has made the Statement that he will be making at about 3.30. That will be the appropriate time to put it.

My Lords, is the noble Baroness aware that I, too, sought to raise a private notice Question on the Falkland Islands task force and the noble Baroness has indicated that that Question was not in order? In these circumstances, I will seek to ask the Question in another way on another day.

My Lords, I beg to introduce a Bill to abolish local authority resolutions assuming parental rights and make provision for the making of care orders in cases where a child is already in the voluntary care of a local authority; and for connected purposes. I beg to move that this Bill he now read a first time.

My Lords, I beg to move that the House do now again resolve itself into Committee on this Bill.

moved Amendment No. 125:

The noble Baroness has made a strong case in self-operated laundries and the Government agree with the case that the noble Baroness has made. But local authorities have sufficient powers, I think, under the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974 and the Health and Safety (Enforcing Authority) Regulations 1977 (No. 746) to ensure that self-operated laundries are safe and without risk to the health of members of the public who go to them and to any staff who may be visiting the premises and, pursuant to the speech of the noble Baroness, to any children who may be on the premises.

The regulations enable local authorities to enforce the 1974 Act in self-operated laundries and in respect of coin operated dry cleaning units in lauderettes and similar premises. Among other things, lauderette operators have a duty under the 1974 Act to maintain the plant, machinery and installation in a safe condition, and local authorities have more appropriate and effective powers in the form of improvement and prohibition notices under Sections 21 and 22 of the Health and Safety at Work Act to deal with problems than an application to a magistrates' court for a closure order, which is the road down which the noble Baroness has gone in drafting her amendment.

I therefore would not want, on behalf of the Government, to agree that we should simply duplicate one public Act, the Health and Safety at Work Act, together with the regulations by putting a major provision in another public Bill—namely, this one. I would question, on the merits of the case, whether any thought has been given to weighing the costs and benefits to be derived from provisions such as those in this clause. There could be a quite significant cost to a local authority in operating a certification scheme which could more profitably be used elsewhere.

For all those reasons, although I do not agree with one word of what the noble Baroness said about the desirability for seeing that safety is adhered to meticulously in laundries and self-operated launderettes, I think that the powers are to be found in the 1974 Health and Safety at Work Act and also the 1977 regulations.

Could the Minister or the proposer of the amendment say whether they have any statistics as to the number of explosions or other harmful occurrences that have taken place in these laundrettes?

I wish to support the amendment. If I could reply to the noble Lord, Lord Hawke, the extent of the problem can be demonstrated by the following actions under the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974 in the city of Manchester. There, there are 101 premises in operation; prohibition notices had to be issued in 26 cases and improvement notices in 66. About three-quarters of the number of premises had to have action taken about them.

The benefit of our amendment is that it puts the onus on the launderettes to see that they have the certificates. I do not understand what the Minister meant about putting costs on the local authorities. I should have thought that, if anything, it might have reduced costs. If it is the launderettes which have to get certificates and produce them, that is their job. The local authority would have to act only if they failed to produce those certificates every 14 months or so. In the event of them not being able to do so, then there might be a court case.

I should have thought that there were a great many benefits in this. We know from the lists of mishaps with which we have been supplied that there have been a great number of accidents. I was told by my daughter recently that she had a great shock one day when she opened her washing machine and the cat jumped out. This was not in a public laundrette. So, strange things can happen. Coin operated laundrettes function very often without anybody being in charge. Also, a number of authorities have felt that they needed these powers. As recently as last year, East Sussex achieved these powers. That matter was presumably debated at some length. So I ask the Minister to think again about this amendment, and maybe take it back and reconsider his answer.

May I add one word before the noble Baroness, Lady Ewart-Biggs, decides what is best to do about this amendment? I am certainly very ready to look at the cost point which the noble Baroness, Lady David, made. I feel I have not made the case as well as I should have done on that aspect. If the noble Baroness decides that she is prepared to withdraw the amendment, I certainly would be very happy to look at that. So far as the illustration of the noble Baroness, Lady David, is concerned, I remember many years ago on a foreign holiday turning on a tap in a hotel bedroom and a frog came out of the tap. It is true that unusual things can occur when you either open doors or turn on taps.

But the advantage of the existing powers under the Health and Safety at Work Act legislation over the line taken in this amendment would be that there is greater speed. An inspector appointed at the moment by an enforcing authority—meaning the local authority in a case of this kind—has power under the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974 to issue a prohibition notice if he considers that there is a risk of serious personal injury from the way in which a self-operated laundry is being carried on; and he also is empowered to issue an improvement notice if he considers that relevant statutory provisions are being contravened. To enact provisions to deal with similar situations through a magistrates' court, when immediate corrective action can be taken by a local authority under existing legislative powers, would be doubtful as to advantage.

The social significance of launderettes is probably lost to many people. They are of paramount importance to women who have to work. After the end of a day's work, they use these places. Sometimes my housekeeper has had to take laundry to a launderette. She has found vandalism and machinery which is tattered and torn. May I ask whether the local authority has what the noble Baroness has built into this amendment?

Let me read what I consider is relevant. This is on page 2. The Committee can follow me and correct me if my argument is incorrect. I am paraphrasing. It says that if, before the expiration of 14 months and 14 days, in the case of premises used as a self-operated laundry before the specified date, the occupier of the premises—and I am referring to paragraph (c), and these are the relevant words—fails to send a certificate of inspection to the council, or a certificate of inspection that is sent to the council fails to show that the plant and machinery upon the premises are so fitted and maintained—and now here comes the relevant part about the council—then the council may make application by way of complaint to a magistrates' court which may order the closing of the premises or a fine not exceeding £200 and a daily fine not exceeding £20.

My point is: How much power has a local authority to close premises that are vandalised, unhygienic and neglected and looked upon from a money-making point of view? I am grateful to the noble Lord for saying that he will look at the cost, because of the social significance to working mothers and single men, widowers, and others, of the modern launderette. It is important that these necessary domestic machines are available hygienically, are not vandalised and are safeguarded by local authorities.

If I was in the unfortunate position of having to use these places, I would far sooner have the existing system than the one proposed by the noble Baronesses. In the existing system, the inspector from the council can visit at frequent or infrequent intervals, just as often as he likes. Apparently in Manchester he has been round quite often and declared closed quite a number of premises which seemed to be working all right. But to leave it to the proprietor to get a certificate so that when anybody complains he will wave a certificate at them and say that it is valid since it is 13 months and 29 days since its last inspection, is really not good enough. The person who has to inspect this equipment is a service engineer employed by the owner, and so long as he is going round there it will be kept in reasonable order; but to leave it to a certificate from some insurance inspector at 14-monthly intervals is I think quite frankly a hit of a nonsense.

I wonder whether the noble Baroness can tell us why she has chosen the period of 14 months rather than one year? It seems to me that the latter would he rather more sensible.

I must be quite honest and say that this was an amendment put down in the other place which we have put down again. I did rather wonder about 14 months myself; but I suppose it is a regular period and that is really what matters. I am very grateful for what the Minister has said about this so far as the cost is concerned. I wonder whether he is also able to make an offer to meet the Health and Safety Executive to discuss the merits of the proposed amendment. I understand there was a meeting with them about the ultra-violet tanning amendment which we put down earlier. The meeting about that had a quite satisfactory outcome, so I wonder whether he might consider a meeting on this aspect as well as considering the cost. Perhaps I may also say to the noble Lord, Lord Hawke, that Manchester had within its Bill the amendment we have put down.

Certainly I will take into account anything that the Health and Safety Executive have to say on the subject.

I should like to thank the noble Lord the Minister for the assurances he has given both as regards looking at the cost and as to arranging for a meeting between his department and the Health and Safety Executive. In those circumstances I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

I said that I would take into account what they have to say. That means I should be very ready to get in touch with them to see what their views were. I think it is a matter for the local authorities to get in touch with the Health and Safety Executive if, on their side, they want to.

moved Amendment No. 125A:

After Clause 34, insert the following new clause:

The noble Lord, Lord Underhill, is seeking to present this amendment as a choice which will enable local authorities to think again about their rules and regulations on the zoning of where taxis may operate in their local authority districts. I know the noble Lord would agree with me that we must think about the consumer in this. If I may say so, I do not think that this amendment will benefit the consumer. This is a proposal to empower additional restrictions on the taxi trade which would limit its ability to respond to public demand and to provide the service that the public wants. We are being asked to accept a really quite far-reaching change to the general law on the basis of difficulties that, I understand from the noble Lord's speech, have arisen in Bradford; and with that I agree. The noble Lord also mentioned Leeds. I have certainly heard that mentioned in preparing for this afternoon's debate, but I am not aware that the Home Office has received any direct notification that Leeds takes that view as well.

I shall not go over the basis for the difficulty, as the noble Lord sees it, because he explained that very clearly. But I should like to refer to the situation in Bradford, and say that Bradford City Council passed its resolution to enable taxis to ply for hire throughout the whole of the Bradford metropolitan district in August 1980. This was confirmed, as it had to be under the law, by my right honourable friend the Home Secretary in October of that year, after he had considered objections.

The main argument put forward by the noble Lord, Lord Underhill, is that taxis from outlying parts of the district are tending to gravitate to the centre of Bradford, if I may use that as an example, and are less easy to obtain in the outlying districts. They are presumably doing that because they are doing better business by acting in that way. The amendment would have us over-ride the principles of supply and demand, and would allow the district council to confine certain taxis to areas where there is less demand.

I appreciate the concern which the noble Lord has expressed. Nevertheless, I do not think that this is the way to go about solving the problem. If the real problem is that there are too many taxis in central Bradford, for instance, and not enough elsewhere, this should be resolved by market forces and not by restrictions imposed by the local authority. If, on the other hand, the problem is a shortage of taxis, then surely the answer is for the local authority to increase the number of licences. The Government are committed to doing everything we can to remove unnecessary controls and restrictions, especially over small businessmen and transport undertakings, and, with respect, this amendment would have the contrary effect.

There are just two more points which weigh against this amendment. First, although I understand that the intention behind the amendment is to allow a local authority to divide its district into separate zones, it would, in fact, empower councils to attach whatever geographical restrictions they chose to individual licences. Local authorities could restrict vehicles to very small areas or even to individual taxi ranks. They could even create a two-class trade—half restricted and half unrestricted. I would almost go so far as to say that I do not think that that is the intention of the noble Lord, Lord Underhill. To that extent, I think that, in a way, this amendment is defective, because I do not think that it is carrying out the intention of the noble Lord.

The second point which weighs is that, even although the amendment would make it possible to limit the area in which taxis might ply for hire, they would be compelled to accept hirings to any part of the district at a controlled fare. Therefore, having completed such a hiring, a taxi would have to return to its own limited area before it could seek another hiring. I do not think that that would be particularly popular with either the taxi drivers or the general public, because nothing is more irritating—and it occasionally happens at railway stations in the metropolis—than to find a taxi coming in, depositing a passenger, and then, for some reason which is probably a valid and necessary one to the driver, going off without picking up another fare.

Finally, may I just add this: The Home Office has been conducting a review of taxi law. It has not been entirely easy—there are difficulties of detail and some difficulties of principle—and I would ask that the outcome of that review should be awaited. I ask that in the context that, as I have said, so far as my right honourable friend's department is concerned, we have not heard of any problem in a district other than Bradford, and that is with over three-quarters of the 300 or so district councils which license taxis now having decided that what they want is a single system of control applying throughout their districts. It is on those grounds that I ask the noble Lord, Lord Underhill, to agree to reconsider this amendment.

I am disappointed with the Minister's reply. I must clear up one point, because in his opening remarks the noble Lord said that we must think of the consumers. In case that implies that I am speaking on behalf of the taxi trade, let me make it absolutely clear that on this occasion I have had no contact at all with the Taxi Drivers Association. I have not been asked by them to raise the matter and I have not checked it. I was asked to raise this matter by one of the local authorities concerned who are very troubled about the situation.

The noble Lord said that this would not give consideration to the consumer. But that is the situation now, because under the 1972 Act a district council can have the option of de-zoning or of continuing the previous zoning. Therefore, it is there already. So I am not proposing to introduce anything at all new. I am not even suggesting that there should be de-zoning or that there should be zoning. What this amendment is endeavouring to remove is the situation where, once you have made the decision, you cannot alter it. That is what the law provides. The noble Lord has not dealt with that position. Surely, it is a ridiculous position that, if the 1972 Act gives you an option, the decision is irreversible. That seems to be nonsensical from all practical standpoints, particularly the standpoint of local government. In this amendment we are endeavouring not to favour zoning or de-zoning, but to give authorities the option of reconsidering what they may already have decided. That seems to be most sensible.

I hoped that if my amendment was defective the Minister might have taken a look at it and introduced one on behalf of the Government. But I repeat that, from a local government standpoint, it seems absolutely nonsensical that once you have taken a decision you cannot change it. If the Minister will not accept the amendment, I shall read very carefully the report of what he has suggested and see what might be done at Report stage. But I will consult. I mentioned Leeds, because Leeds was mentioned to me, and this morning, before I came here, I checked with a councillor at Bradford who assured me that Leeds is also having problems. But I will make further inquiries about Leeds, if I decide to do anything at Report stage. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

moved Amendment No. 128A:

moved Amendment No. 129:

moved Amendment No. 129A:

Page 83, line 31, leave out paragraph 7.

This is probably the appropriate moment to resume for the Statement. I beg to move that the House do now resume.

My Lords, with your Lordships' permission, I will now answer the Private Notice Question tabled by my noble friend Lord Balfour of Inchrye by repeating a Statement that is being made in another place by my right honourable friend the Secretary of State for Trade. The Statement is as follows:

"It was announced on 3rd April that the Government had frozen all Argentinian financial assets held in this country, that ECGD would not provide new export credit cover for Argentina and that exports of military equipment and arms to Argentina had been prohibited. Other economic measures are being urgently examined, and we are consulting our European Community and other allies. British citizens are advised not to travel to Argentina, and British companies to withdraw their non-essential British staff. British firms must decide what action they should take in relation to existing commitments in the light of the present circumstances, the measures which have so far been announced, and of the terms of their own individual arrangements with Argentinian firms. They are advised not to enter into new commitments.

"The Prime Minister told the House on 3rd April of the Government's intention to despatch a substantial naval task force to the Falkland Islands. I should like to take this opportunity to announce to the House that Her Majesty assented to an Order in Council enabling the Government to requisition any vessels that may be needed under the long-standing contingency plans available to meet national emergencies of this kind. The P&O liner "Canberra", whose captain is an officer in the Royal Naval Reserves, is being transferred to naval control this afternoon. Other ships will be requisitioned and chartered as necessary."

My Lords, we on this side of the House would like to thank the noble Lord for having repeated the Statement, the contents of which are quite inevitable following the extremely grave events that were reported to this House and to another place on Saturday. We on this side of the House entirely support the Government in their intention to freeze all Argentinian financial assets in this country. At the same time we should like some clarification of Statutory Instrument No. 512, which we believe was laid before Parliament on 3rd April and which is supposed to come into effect, concerning gold, securities, payments and credits. Perhaps the position regarding those could be clarified.

We note from the Statement that the Export Credits Guarantee Department will not provide any new export credits for Argentina. This raises the question of what is going to happen to existing outstanding liabilities of the Argentine which the ECGD have already insured. May we take it that the obligations of the ECGD up to and including 3rd April will be honoured? And can we have the further assurance that in the event of substantial losses being incurred by the ECGD as a result of these measures, no increase in premium will be passed on to other exporters in order to pay for any deficit that arises? In other words, will the noble Lord give the House an assurance that any deficit on the ECGD fund that arises from this situation will be borne directly out of the Consolidated Fund rather than passed on to the exporters who continue to do business with other parts of the world?

It is quite clear from the Statement that other measures will have to be taken, and the noble Lord has already mentioned some of them. May we take it that there will be urgent consultations not only with our EEC partners, whose joint action will urgently have to be sought in concurring with whatever measures we decide upon in supporting those measures, but also far outside the EEC itself, in conjunction with our allies?

We note that British companies are advised to withdraw their non-essential British staff. The term "nonessential" is of course a little vague and I cannot expect the noble Lord to enlarge upon it, but I should be surprised if British companies employ non-essential people in the enterprises which they are conducting. Will the noble Lord undertake to keep the House fully informed of what further steps are likely to become necessary as the situation develops?

Finally, the noble Lord can be assured that we on this side of the House will support whatever measures are necessary in the economic sphere to bring pressure upon the Argentinian Government, even though some of these may, at any rate temporarily, be to the disadvantage economically of this country. Will he give an assurance that the military objectives so forcefully put forward in the other place on Saturday will in fact be pursued with the utmost rigour, should it become necessary to do so?

My Lords, may I from these Benches say that Her Majesty's Government have our complete support in any action which they may have to take. But in the light of industry generally, can we be assured, in so far as any assurance can be given, that companies which at the moment are heavily committed in the Argentine both in the supply of goods and in construction and other works, will receive some instructions as to how they are to proceed? In other words, are they to carry on, or are they to withdraw? And will they have some assurance as to compensation, or otherwise, for what could in many cases amount to very heavy losses?

My Lords, may I thank both noble Lords, in particular the noble Lord, Lord Bruce of Donington, for his helpful and constructive reception of this Statement. My thanks are no less due to the noble Lord, Lord Mais, although he did not go into the same detail. May I deal first with the points put to me by the noble Lord, Lord Bruce of Donington.

Regarding the noble Lord's question about the statutory instrument, that instrument was made, laid and came into force on Saturday last. It was made under Section 2 of the Emergency Laws (Re-enactments and Repeals) Act 1964. Section 7 of that Act provides that the order may be annulled by a resolution of either House. The order clearly therefore does not require formal approval by your Lordships' House or the other place.

So far as the position of the ECGD is concerned, I understand that the ECGD has firm commitments amounting to £290 million in respect of Argentina, that there are further offers outstanding of £60 million and that applications are being considered for a further very substantial sum. In fact, United Kingdom investments in Argentina amount to about 8 per cent. of total foreign investment in that country. They have a book value of about £200 million but the real value may well be higher. We are unaware of any significant Argentinian investment in the United Kingdom.

The noble Lord also asked me to give an assurance about increases in premiums which may or may not prove to be necessary following these events. I am not in a position to give the noble Lord the blanket assurance that he sought. The noble Lord will recall that it has been the policy of consecutive governments to ensure that the ECGD traded in respect of its credit insurance arrangements more or less in balance on a year-to-year basis. As the noble Lord knows, that has not always proved to be possible, but that has been the target and we would wish to maintain the general principle so far as ECGD is concerned. I certainly take note of the point which the noble Lord has made. Further measures, which were referred to in the Statement, will indeed need to be discussed and agreed with our European Community partners, by and large.

As for the noble Lord's question relating to the staff of British firms, the Statement made it fairly clear that it would be wise for British firms operating in Argentina to reduce their personnel there to the very minimum. Turning to the final point made by the noble Lord about the military action which we fear may prove to be necessary, I can assure the noble Lord that it is the Government's clear intention to restore control of the Falkland Islands to this Government, as was said by my right honourable friend the Prime Minister and Lord Carrington on Saturday. I believe that I have covered the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Mais, in his supplementary question and I hope that I have been able to clarify the Statement to the benefit of your Lordships.

My Lords, may I repeat the question I asked before? Are the Government satisfied that these measures will have an immediate and significant effect on the economy of Argentina in general? In particular, the noble Lord the Minister did not mention aviation. Can we be assured that the Argentinian aircraft in this country are impounded and will not be allowed the continued service of our aerodromes?

My Lords, as to the effect of these measures upon Argentina, it may be helpful if I say that some 20 to 25 per cent. of Argentinian reserves are believed to be held in United Kingdom banks or by way of stocks and securities held in this country. It is therefore certain, I would say, that this will have a very significant effect on Argentina's economy.

As to my noble friend's second point, about air services, I understand that Airlineas Argentinas, which is the Argentinian airline, normally operates two services to the United Kingdom. The two most recent services were in fact cancelled for reasons best known to the Argentinians. Certainly it is not our intention that any further services should be operated. The operating permit will he suspended if necessary, and British Caledonian Airways have also suspended services to Buenos Aires.

My Lords, will the Government look again at their own wording in this Statement, perhaps later today? Will they put themselves in the position of a British firm and see whether the sentence "British firms must decide what action they should take", and so on, could not be made a little more helpful? Are the Government satisfied that they have continuing arrangements which will make it possible for firms which are truly puzzled about what they should do and in fear of their futures, to get advice quickly in terms which are quite understandable and in terms which the Government will stand by?

Also, on the last part of the Statement, about the taking of the "Canberra" under naval control, are the Government satisfied that there are enough merchant ships left flying the British flag for them to be able to meet their needs in this emergency, given the enormous number which have passed under flags of convenience in recent years? Will the Government in due course draw a lesson from this? Will the Government go further than speaking of "restoring" the Falkland Islands to their proper allegiance and of maintaining them in the Falkland Islands as long as the inhabitants wish?

My Lords, as for advice to British firms, it is not possible to go further than the Statement does in terms of specific advice, because circumstances will vary from company to company. A total trade embargo with Argentina is certainly something that we could consider, but we would need to do that in close concert with our allies in the European Community and elsewhere. In any event, an embargo by the United Kingdom acting in isolation would probably not have any major effect and it is therefore crucial, I believe, to secure the support of our friends and allies in this matter.

With regard to the "Canberra" and the possibility of needing other ships, I can say that one other ship has, I believe, been requisitioned and that a number of others have been chartered for this operation. We have no doubt whatever that an adequate number of vessels will be available as required.

My Lords, my question is directed not at the noble Lord, Lord Trefgarne, but at the Government's Chief Whip. I want to ask this question, because there is a danger that we might be entering into a kind of debate, and this is not the appropriate occasion for that; so many questions have yet to be answered. I should like to ask the Government Chief Whip, is there likely to be another debate on this subject before the Easter Recess? Is the vacation to take place as arranged, beginning on Wednesday next? These are very important questions and we want to know where we are. The House should be in almost constant attendance while we are awaiting events in the Argentine. Will the noble Lord inform us whether there is likely to be an occasion for another debate? Otherwise some of us want to ask some very direct questions.

My Lords, I do not know whether it is proper for me to answer the noble Lord, Lord Shinwell, at this point. This is the kind of matter which is always arranged after discussions through the usual channels. I can assure the noble Lord that such discussions will take place.

My Lords, I should like to ask my noble friend Lord Trefgarne, will Her Majesty's Government constantly bear in mind their strategic principle and eschew all short-term economic expediency?

My Lords, the Government's position with regard to this matter generally was very eloquently and adequately described by my right honourable friend the Prime Minister when she spoke in the other place on Saturday, and indeed by my noble friend Lord Carrington when he spoke to your Lordships on the same day. 1 suggest that my noble friend reads the Hansard reports of those two debates.

My Lords, will the noble Lord, Lord Trefgarne, be good enough to clarify what he said about the European Economic Community? I understood him to say that further measures will have to be discussed with our partners in the Community. What about those measures already taken? Are they to be followed? Will similar action be taken by our fellow partners?

My Lords, I believe that will be a matter for the national Governments concerned. External trade, as the noble Lord will know, is a matter in which the European Community has competence, as the expression goes, and therefore it is right and proper that we should discuss matters of that nature with them. The matters to which the Statutory Instrument refers, and about which the noble Lord, Lord Bruce of Donington, was asking me, fall within our own national competence.

My Lords, there is a technical point about insurance. Would an underwriter's agreement made 24 or 30 hours ago still be legally correct? Would he still be called upon to undertake his underwriting if it was with Argentinian business or with other concerns of Argentina? May we have some information on that point?

My Lords, I speak without a specific brief on that particular point, but I imagine the position is that if a premium has been received, then the contract is in force but that a claim could not be paid until these restrictions were lifted.

My Lords, are the Government keeping in close contact with the International Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva? I believe that the committee has offered its services on behalf of the Falkland Islands population. Is it not vital that there should be an impartial humanitarian body to protect the interests of civilians in the hands of an occupying state? Would the Minister not agree that safeguarding innocent civilians is paramount whatever else happens?

My Lords, I can confirm that the International Committee of the Red Cross has made an approach to Her Majesty's Government along the lines which the noble Baroness has described. We naturally welcome that approach.

My Lords, may I press the noble Lord, Lord Trefgarne, on the whole ECGD question? Would he not agree that it would be very unfortunate indeed if these events were required to be paid for by ECGD policyholders and by exporters generally, who have already suffered enough? Will he give this matter his most urgent attention? Will he reply to the request made by the noble Lord, Lord Mais, with regard to the position of compensation for firms which have suffered damage or loss as a result of these events?

My Lords, I understand that it is not the practice to pay compensation in these circumstances. It is the case that in a situation such as this one costs will be incurred and will have to fall on someone, but defending our national honour is not something that we can do for free.

My Lords, could my noble friend answer the following questions? Will he please make representations to the French and Italian Governments that they should supply no spare parts to the Argentinian armed forces for French and Italian equipment which they supplied? Secondly, how many Argentinian merchants ships are there in British or British controlled ports? How many British merchant ships are there in Argentinian controlled ports? Please can we put an embargo on the Argentinian ones if the odds are on our side and not on theirs?

My Lords, I can assure my noble friend that the Italian and French Governments have given us the utmost support in this matter, and I have no doubt will be considering acting along on the lines my noble friend suggests. I understand that at present there is only one Argentinian vessel in a United Kingdom port, but one or two are due either today or soon. I will certainly see that the point made by my noble friend is taken into account.

My Lords, it might be for the convenience of the House if, with the leave of the House, I now repeat a Statement being made in another place by my right honourable friend the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland. The Statement is as follows:

"Mr. Speaker, I will, with permission, make a Statement on policital developments in Northern Ireland.

"The Government have today published a White Paper setting out proposals for the election of an assembly which would provide a framework within which a devolved government might again be set up in Northern Ireland. These proposals are designed to meet two objectives. First, to provide at once a means for greater democratic participation by the people of Northern Ireland in their own affairs. Secondly, to give them the opportunity to evolve for themselves a form of government acceptable to them.

"The Government propose that there should be an election later this year to a new Northern Ireland assembly. While consideration of the arrangements for a devolved administration will be its most crucial task, the assembly will from its first day have important scrutinising, deliberative and consultative functions. It will be able to report on a wide range of topics and its reports will be laid before Parliament.

"The assembly will establish committees corresponding to each of the Northern Ireland departments to monitor and report on their policies and activities."

"The assembly will from the outset be empowered to recommend arrangements under which the whole or part of the full range of legislative and executive responsibilities which were devolved in 1973, could be exercised by the assembly and by a devolved administration answerable to it. If the assembly send the Secretary of State proposals which have the support of 70 per cent. of the total membership of the assembly he will be required under statute to lay those proposals before Parliament for its consideration. He would also have discretion to present to Parliament proposals which did not command 70 per cent. support but which in his view enjoyed the support of both sides of the community in Northern Ireland. I would like to make two things clear: first, the parties in Northern Ireland will have wide discretion about the basis on which a devolved administration and assembly might be formed and operate—Her Majesty's Government are not seeking to impose any particular system; secondly, the Government would not recommend any arrangements to Parliament unless they believed them to be acceptable to both sides of the Northern Ireland community. Stable government can only come from such acceptability. If Parliament approves the assembly's recommendations, powers would be devolved by order in council.

"The assembly will have the option of moving to full devolution of powers from the outset or, if it seems easier to achieve agreement on devolving the responsibilities of only some Northern Ireland departments, to make proposals for partial devolution.

"The arrangements will be flexible in that partial devolution could lead on to further or full devolution. And if the agreement on which devolution was based collapsed and could not be re-established, it would be possible for the assembly to revert to its scrutinising, consultative and deliberative functions, with the Secretary of State taking back other responsibilities.

"Direct rule has served Northern Ireland well. It was, however, introduced as a temporary arrangement. It does not provide satisfactory political structures through which a divided community in Northern Ireland can make the necessary mutual accommodations to tackle its special problems. For Northern Ireland requires new political arrangements suited to its unique character. These must reflect the history of the Province and its long experience of devolved government, and must recognise and respect the differences of identity and aspiration which exist there. The proposals in the White Paper take account of these circumstances. At the same time they are firmly based upon Northern Ireland's position as a constituent part of the United Kingdom for so long as that is the wish of the people of Northern Ireland.

"The Government are convinced that good relations with the Republic of Ireland are of great importance. These relations are for the sovereign Governments and Parliaments. It is for the London and Dublin Parliaments to consider whether the governmental meetings of the Anglo-Irish Intergovernmental Council should be complemented by an Anglo-Irish body at parliamentary level in which members of an elected assembly in Northern Ireland could take part. In addition, it would remain open to a devolved administration in Northern Ireland to make such bilateral arrangements and agreements with the Government of the Republic as it wished concerning the matters for which it is responsible.

"The problems of Northern Ireland are formidable. The evil of terrorism has struck at the lives and expectations of ordinary people, Catholic and Protestant alike, for far too long. The economic decline is more acute and more intractable than elsewhere in the United Kingdom. The Government believe that the defeat of terrorism, the recovery of the economy and the establishment of effective political institutions go together and support one another. An end to the political deadlock of recent years offers the best hope of a sustained improvement in the economy and in security.

"The proposals in the White Paper are fair and flexible. Like all proposals for Northern Ireland, they involve risk and controversy. The Government in no way underestimate the magnitude of the task or the strains any proposals will have to bear. But they also offer an opportunity which, with time and patience and the continued commitment and goodwill of Parliament, may be exploited to the advantage and relief of all the people in Northern Ireland."

My Lords, that ends my right honourable friend's Statement.

My Lords, we are grateful to the noble Earl the Minister, Lord Gowrie, for repeating in this House the Statement made by the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland in another place. The announcement made today by Mr. James Prior about the Government's new political initiative concerning Northern Ireland has been anticipated for some months, and especially during the past four weeks. There has been a continuous stream of statements, reports of meetings, and pronouncements by the Northern Ireland Office, and by politicians of various groupings, about the proposed devolved political powers and the structures of government for the Province. I would like to say that I am aware that the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland and the noble Earl have, in my view, worked earnestly and energetically to get the developments to this particular stage.

There have been the predictable political posturings and entrenched attitudes to these developments. Some of these positions are understandable; they are born out of bitter sectarianism; some arise from the years of fear, terrorism, murder and destruction; some are perpetrated through the ugly exploitation of a few rabid politicians who play upon the differing traditions of the people of the Province.

From these Benches we welcome the flexibility of the proposals in the Statement, and the opportunity that the new political initiative should give to the people of Northern Ireland to find peaceable and positive solutions to the many and terrible problems of the Province. The proposals involve considerable risk and possible emotive controversy. While much of the responsibility for the way forward lies with the Northern Ireland people, at the same time the United Kingdom Government must continue to help in the creation of a stable political framework in which community peace, improved security and social and economic progress can be built.

It is difficult at this stage to make other than a few general observations on the statement about the political developments. I would assume that we shall have an early opportunity in this House to debate in more detail the White Paper and the proposed way forward by order in council. There are a number of procedural arrangements which I consider require considerable clarification. I would hope that in the interim the United Kingdom Government and the Northern Ireland Office will continue to seek to provide adequate and appropriate security and economic measures. There should be no letting up on both of those vital fronts in any way forward to a political arrangement.

It is also hoped that all the consultations, discussions and debate which ensue in the interim with the interested parties will be conducted with the greatest possible degree of openness and frankness. It is my opinion that for future peace and prosperity in Ireland there is nothing to be gained by secret diplomacy, private deals or ad hoc agreements.

While I hold that it is the responsibility of all the people of Northern Ireland to find a system of devolved government which will promote harmony, trust and respect for all, I equally hold that it is the responsibility of the United Kingdom Government to help and support every step towards the achievement of parliamentary democracy in the Province. There is a great need at this time for both traditions in Northern Ireland and the United Kingdom Government to work together with honesty, goodwill and respect for each other. If we fail together then the only persons to gain are the men of violence. I wish to support at this stage the Statement made by the noble Earl and I shall look forward to further exchanges as regards the possible arrangements for political development.

My Lords, I, too, should like to thank the noble Earl for repeating the Statement for his right honourable friend. I think that we are in danger of feeling a sense of anti-climax not only because of the tragic events in the Falkland Islands which dominate the political scene at the moment, but also because on so many occasions the Secretary of State's proposals seem to have been published in the papers with little tables saying how the Catholics react, how the Protestants react and that we should take no notice of it anyway. But it is essential that we should turn to this highly important matter now.

We welcome the Statement because, as a party, we believe in devolved government. It seems to me, from the discussions that we have in this House on the orders, that it would make much greater sense if the people from Northern Ireland did not have to travel over here at considerable trouble but could discuss the matter in their homeland.

There is one matter that I should like to raise with the noble Earl. I am not certain whether I missed this point but I understood that the assembly would normally have the opportunity to comment on draft orders in council. I am sure that the House will wish to take careful account of these comments. I am not certain whether I heard the noble Earl mention that, but it may be that my attention was distracted for a moment. This has been described elsewhere in the press as rolling devolution. It comes by stages. There is no imposition. I think that the noble Earl will not be surprised if we say we shall encourage the use of proportional representation when we get to it.

The next point that I wish to make is that if unionists wish to remain in the United Kingdom, we believe it should be made clear to them that their co-operation in finding a way forward is essential. They cannot have it both ways. They cannot say that they are loyalists and then make everything as difficult as possible. I agree that direct rule has worked well, but for practically everyone it has only been second best. I believe that failure to proceed now would be a failure of the Northern Ireland politicians and the Northern Ireland people behind them, and not of the Secretary of State. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Blease, on the need for co-operation as regards this matter. We agree that there is a vital need for good relations with Eire. That is another matter which has to be kept in the balance. The tragic economic situation in Ulster emphasises the need for maximum co-operation and effort all round. Obviously details of how to proceed will have to be worked out with greater time to study the proposals in the White Paper, But we hope to be able to support the proposals wholeheartedly.

I should like to refer to the closing paragraph of the Statement which suggests the right mood. It says that the proposals:

"offer an opportunity which, with time and patience and the continued commitment and goodwill of Parliament, may be exploited to the advantage and relief of all the people in Northern Ireland ".

We very much hope to help that come about.

My Lords, on a sad and worrying day I am really most grateful for the welcome from the official Opposition Front Benches which I have just received for my right honourable friend's Statement. That is very gratifying to us and I hope that the remarks of both noble Lords will be heard in Northern Ireland itself. The noble Lord, Lord Blease, said that there had been a stream of statements by politicians as well as leaks and speculation. I think that that is the ordinary hazard of the consultative process. In fact, I do not think that it was so much a problem of leaks as a question of the people whom we consulted going out and issuing press notices quite overtly and right away the moment we had finished talking to them. But that is part of the process, and we certainly make no criticism of that.

I am very glad that the noble Lord, Lord Blease, who has so much experience of the Province and is so widely respected there, welcomes the flexibility of the package. No British Government can impose their own views on the Province or the views of one side of the community in Northern Ireland on the other. Our proposals are designed to provide a framework within which the Northern Ireland people and their representatives can have the opportunity to devise the necessary arrangements for progress there. The noble Lord, Lord Blease, echoed me in saying that of course there was risk here. But there is also considerable risk in standing still. Where security is concerned, we have achieved some improvement, although not enough. We wish to sustain that improvement and we wish the progress necessary for the improvement to continue.

Until such time as the people of Northern Ireland and their elected representatives decide to make proposals to us by which powers could be devolved back, direct rule will, of course, continue, as the noble Lord required, with great attention to both economic and security issues. But I for one welcome enormously what the noble Lord said about both traditions in Northern Ireland having to recognise each other and having to work together. That is very much the spirit of the White Paper which we shall be publishing in a few minutes.

I also agree with the noble Lord, Lord Hampton, that here, of course, there is not sufficient Parliamentary scrutiny or always scrutiny by the most appropriate people, of matters of very great concern to the Province. I can confirm to him that it will be for the assembly to comment on the draft orders and I am sure that Parliament as a whole and your Lordships' House will take their comments into close consideration. Direct rule has, I think, worked, but it is a second best and the people of that lovely part of the Kingdom with their great and productive traditions deserve rather more than second best.

My Lords, is the noble Earl aware that, owing to the rather foolish convention by which third and later speakers must ask questions and not make comments, I shall ask him several times "Whether he is aware of" things which I think he probably is aware of? Is the noble Earl aware, for example, that from this Bench we endorse entirely this latest effort to return gradually to devolved government? Is he aware that we have always taken the view that direct rule was not permanent but only temporary? Is he aware that we cannot produce effective politicians unless they are allowed to take part in government as well as politics? Is he aware that one of the difficulties in Northern Ireland over the past few years, since government was exercised at Stormont, has been that no responsible duties at all have been laid on politicians? Is the noble Lord aware that we found a number of very competent and effective politicians in the Stormont experiment, and that it is a great pity that it was sabotaged?

In view of the advisory and consultative form that the Secretary of State is proposing, has the noble Earl considered sending two members of each party to Hong Kong to see how they do it there? I returned from there on Saturday, and it is remarkable that there they have a Governor, an administration and a number of specific consultative groups who are listened to very closely and for whom the Government have the greatest respect, and that form of Government works there extremely well. The noble Earl is aware—I shall not ask whether he is—that matters are much more difficult than that in Northern Ireland, but I think that it is an example which could be pointed out to the politicians with whom he has to deal.

Finally, I was very glad to see that the right of Northern Ireland to remain within this country is, once again, stated in the Statement. As a party which is entirely bipartisan at the moment, we fully support this move by the Government.

My Lords, again, I am very grateful for that endorsement of my right honourable friend's Statement. It is particularly welcome, coming as it does from a noble Lord with considerable distinguished service and experience as a Minister in Northern Ireland, albeit in another political incarnation. I would also endorse what the noble Lord, Lord Donaldson, has said about the competence of Northern Ireland politicians. We would just ask them now to face their own reality squarely and to start working together for the good of all. If I suggested in the Province that Northern Ireland politicians should go to Hong Kong, I might be open to misinterpretation, but I will certainly draw to their attention the point which the noble Lord has made.

My Lords, is the noble Earl, Lord Gowrie, aware that none of the somewhat long statements that we have heard from the Leaders of the Oppositions has elicited the important element in this problem, which is that in the opening Statement the noble Earl failed (nor did any of those who followed him deal with the subject) to state whether the new proposals, the new device, or apparently new device—because, as we are all aware, the proposal for a devolved government is far from being original—have received the majority consent of any of the sections in Northern Ireland? Or is it just an attempt on the part of a new Minister, who realises that his predecessors have failed to solve the problem, to solve it by producing what might be called a gimmick, just a leftover from a previous suggested solution? Is the noble Earl aware of all that, or does he come to the House making a Statement about what is to happen in the future, based on a White Paper, without making it quite clear to Members of your Lordships' House that these proposals have the consent of any of the majorities on either side, either those on the Orange side or those in the minority? Unless he can do that, I suggest that they are just wasting their time.

My Lords, I think that the noble Lord, Lord Shinwell, has slightly misunderstood what 1 said. I said very clearly that no British Government can impose their own views on the Province. Nevertheless, it is also true—and the noble Lord with his experience will be aware of this—that the views of one side of a divided community in Northern Ireland cannot be imposed on the other. That is one of the principal reasons why the power-sharing experiment failed. As a result of that failure, the United Kingdom Government as a whole—the British Government—had to take back powers, and they are now simply spelling out the terms under which they would be prepared to devolve powers again should the people of Northern Ireland and their representatives wish to have those powers devolved back.

Certainly in the six months that I have spent in the Province, I have had wide representations of a desire for greater local autonomy and a restoration of responsibility. With his customary acuteness, the noble Lord is quite right in saying that the political groupings make statements in which they declare that they will not co-operate with each other. But if they are not prepared to do so, direct rule of course will continue, with the added bonus of more scrutiny of its procedures by regionally-elected representatives. However, my own view, for what it is worth, is that there is a great hunger on the part of the people of Northern Ireland to put some pressure on their representatives to make the necessary, perhaps limited, mutual accommodations, one with another, across the community divide in order to improve what is a rapidly deteriorating situation there.

My Lords, is the noble Earl aware that, according to a recent public opinion poll, no less than 74 per cent. of the population of Northern Ireland would be content with full integration with the rest of the United Kingdom? This fact has been known for some considerable time. Can the noble Earl say why no attention appears to have been paid to this majority point of view?

My Lords, the Government are constantly paying attention to points of view, though, of course, one particular poll does not make a summer. But where the issue of full integration with the United Kingdom is concerned, the role of Northern Ireland as a constituent part of the United Kingdom has been made quite clear by legislation and by myself in my Statement. If the noble Lord means by full integration a form of extra or improved tier of local government in Northern Ireland, I can only say to him that that does not evade the responsibilities of elected representatives there to make the same mutual accommodations and confront the same dilemmas inherent in Northern Ireland's unique political history and character, as I mentioned only a moment ago.

My Lords, is my noble friend aware that these proposals will be warmly welcomed by most responsible people who have been involved with the question of Ireland and Northern Ireland? Is he further aware that the reaction of politicians in the North of Ireland to these proposals will be a test of their sincerity and their statesmanship? Is he also able to say at this stage whether in the long run, assuming that the assembly is formed and begins to work successfully, it would be possible to hand over supervision of the police force?— which has been a major source of worry to both sides of the community—ultimately the test of the responsibility of the assembly in important matters?

My Lords, the bulk of law and order responsibilities—for example, the Royal Ulster Constabulary, the criminal law and prosecutions, and the treatment of offenders—are in the reserved category of powers and, therefore, they could, as my noble friend appears to imply, be devolved at some time in the future, though of course the British Government would have to be conscious on these matters, as well as on other matters, that the arrangements under which they were being devolved were broadly acceptable to both communities in the way in which the general devolution proposals also have to be.

My Lords, before the noble Earl sits down, I asked him a question about possible time for a debate on the White Paper in this House. If he is not able to answer that at this time, will he use his good offices to request a debate on the White Paper?

My Lords, I shall certainly draw that to the attention of my noble friend the Chief Whip. As the noble Lord will be aware, these are not matters for me but for the usual channels. The noble Lord makes his views and desires perfectly clear, and they will of course be taken into account.

moved Amendment No. 131:

The object of this Bill is to include in public legislation these uncontroversial matters appearing regularly in local authority rationalisation Bills which are being promoted by local authorities as a result of the lapse of their legislation by the end of 1986 under Section 262 of the Local Government Act 1972. To that extent the proposed amendment is not consistent with the object of the Bill. Indeed, in so far as the amendment seeks to impose an obligation on statutory undertakers, I wonder whether it is even within the scope of the Bill.

I appreciate that local authorities are concerned about the amounts of unpaid bills that they may be required to pay. However, I could not accept that the existing freedom of the statutory undertakers to negotiate with local authorities should be restricted unless there had been full consultation with them. The amendment's second purpose, of making sums due a charge on the premises, would in practice not necessarily be a better way of recovering money than local authorities' existing powers to collect rents. Putting a charge on the premises would also be indiscriminate since it could affect others than the defaulting owner who is to blame and I am not persuaded that it could be justified in national legislation.

That provision of the amendment which would cover cases where an owner merely gave instructions for disconnection would also be an indiscriminate measure, which would allow local authority intervention regardless of the circumstances in which an owner had sought disconnection. While I am satisfied that a local authority should be able to recover sums which are properly the responsibility of an owner, I am not at present persuaded that the fourth purpose of the amendment can be justified, which would allow a local authority to recover its own costs also, over which an owner has no control. Having said that, I would add that the whole issue, as the noble Baroness, Lady Fisher, rightly reminded us, has recently been considered by the gas and electricity supply industries in the context of a report by the Policy Studies Institute on the industries' code of practice on the payment of bills. My honourable friend the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Energy has now received the industries' joint response to the report; and the changes they have undertaken to make to their code of practice were announced by him in another place on 29th March in reply to a Question by my honourable friend the Member for Fulham. The industries have agreed that where the board or region concerned becomes aware that a tenant is at risk of disconnection because of his landlord's debt, they will inform the local authority of the position and advise the tenant to do likewise. Disconnection action will be suspended for 14 days to enable the local authority to use its statutory powers to intervene.

Where the local authority agrees to help, disconnection will not take place provided the local authority agrees to pay to the board or region from future collection of rents an amount which covers the cost of ongoing consumption and clears the arrears. The board or region will therefore not insist on a lump sum payment of the bill giving rise to disconnection. The industries have also agreed to take all legal steps open to them to pursue the landlord for the debt including, where possible, disconnection at his home.

Those positive proposals will benefit tenants by reducing the risk of disconnection. They will also assist local authorities by giving them time to act and will mean that no local authority has to find a lump sum from its own resources. I believe, therefore, that they should be given a chance to work. My honourable friend the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Energy has welcomed those and other positive proposals for changes in the industries' code of practice. He intends to maintain close interest in the whole operation of the code, and the gas and electricity consumer councils are to monitor implementation of the changes. In view of what I imagine the noble Baroness feels is a considerable and satisfactory advance on the position when the amendment was tabled, she may feel able not to press it.

I understand the Minister to say that the amendment was not within the scope of the Bill. It was of course accepted here by the Public Bill Office. The amendment is to existing powers under Section 19 of the Local Government (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act 1976. The 1976 legislation was itself drawn up with reference to local Acts, just as this legislation is, notably in that case the South Glamorgan Act. The basis of the amendment is to bring into that national legislation features which currently exist in Section 19 of the Greater London Council (General Powers) Act 1972. Although additional points are included which are not in the Greater London Council Act—recovery of local authority administrative cost and action on voluntary disconnections—the proposals are esentially based on local Act powers. In addition, the Bill seems an appropriate vehicle for amendng powers in an existing Local Government (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act. Perhaps the Minister would respond to that point, and I leave my noble friend to respond to the rest of what he said.

In so far as the amendment seeks to impose an obligation on statutory undertakers, I said I wondered whether it was even within the scope of the Bill. The noble Baroness puts forward a powerful case for suggesting it is within its scope, and clearly others would adjudicate on that. However, the main thrust of my response was to the substance of the matter concerning those who tabled the amendment, who I hope will feel that the position now is a major advance on what it was previously.

I accept what the Minister said; namely, that the code of practice that has been brought forward is a welcome step for people in whatever properties they are occupying, but it will have a direct bearing, as the noble Lord said, on multi-occupied properties. As I said, this matter has concerned local authorities and statutory undertakers and it has been a case of one playing off the other to get bad debts in, but it seems that we are now going in a more sensible direction. If I understood the noble Lord correctly, many thousands of pounds will be saved by local authorities if the code of practice comes into operation. In view of the Minister's remarks, I will withdraw the amendment at this stage on the basis that shall read what he said to see whether I need return to the matter on Report.

moved Amendment No. 133A:

I should like to ask my noble friend for an assurance with regard to these amendments. Having looked at the relevant parts of the Isle of Wight Act which are to be repealed as a result of these amendments, it seems to me that rather more is being swept away than this Bill provides for. I should like an assurance from my noble friend that he and his advisers have looked closely into this question to see that they have not in some ways washed out the baby with the bath water. I wonder whether he can reassure me that in these local authority sections which are being removed there is nothing substantial which the present Bill does not wholly replace.

I hear what my noble friend says. So far as I am aware, I am able to answer in the affirmative, but, as always, my noble friend, quite properly, raises matters which concern the Isle of Wight, and I would assure him that I shall take further advice. I undertake that, should it prove that his fears are in any way justified, I shall write to him and tell him exactly what is the position.

Following what the noble Lord, Lord Mottistone, said, I should like to ask the Minister whether he will consider withdrawing Amendments Nos. 133A and 133B until the Report stage, because I feel that there has not been adequate consultation with the local authorities and they have not been given ample opportunity to respond. I understand that, when they were notified of this matter, there were effectively only two days for them to consider it, and that seems to me totally inadequate. Since, clearly, we are not going to have the Report stage for another two or three weeks, it would be reasonable for the local authorities to be given another opportunity to look at the enormous list with which we are presented. It is much longer than the original list in Schedule 7. It seems to me that that would be quite a reasonable request.

I confirm that we consulted the local authority associations on this issue, as I assured your Lordships we would do. They responded in a very swift and, if I may say so, a very constructive fashion, though understandably—and I take the noble Baroness's point—they were concerned about the short time allowed. Of course we should have liked to have allowed more time by using the order procedure under Clause 36, but, as I have explained, we do not consider that that course is practicable in relation to the local Act provisions in question. In principle, all the associations appear to recognise the practicality of what we are now proposing, though I must say that naturally they express some reservations, which the department has tried in discussions to satisfy. I cannot withdraw the amendments, but I am sure the noble Baroness will recognise that, if between now and Report there arise any specific troublesome points, we can always discuss them with those concerned. I should have thought that that was probably the way to proceed.

moved Amendment No. 133B:

moved Amendment No. 134:

Page 86, line 27, at end insert—

We now come to the amendment which was omitted from the Fourth Marshalled List, although it appeared on the Third Marshalled List. It is now Amendment No. 135A.

moved Amendment No. 135A:

Page 86, leave out lines 28 to 30.

I should like to speak on clause stand part. I listened to what the noble Lord said about the order procedure, and I want to reiterate some of the points which my noble friend has previously made. It is incumbent upon the Government to give to local authorities adequate notice when they are considering repealing or amending any provisions of a local Act. Two or three days' notice is just not good enough, especially when we consider that local authorities do not lightly decide to seek their own legislation. Over a long period of time local councillors and officials think earnestly about possible legislation which they consider would be effective in their own area.

If the Secretary of State considers that local provisions should be repealed or amended so as to fit in more easily with national legislation, due consideration should be given to the matter. It should not be dealt with merely by means of a cursory letter requesting a reply within perhaps three or seven days. There should be real consultation with local authorities. If local government is to mean anything, there must be working co-operation with national government. I am sure that the national Government will accept that many provisions on the statute book arose initially from various local authorities which became aware of problems or which wanted to better conditions in their own areas, and in the long run such provisions became national legislation.

Along with my colleagues on this side of the Committee, I feel that the concern of local authorities should be properly studied; as I mentioned on Second Reading, there should not be merely a token consultation. A local authority should be able to retain any local Act which it feels would be more beneficial in its area than would such national legislation as might be brought forward. In some instances where national legislation is put forward—such as the miscellaneous provisions now before us—local authorities might agree to a repeal, only in the distant future to wish that they had not given up a specific power which they had in local legislation. So I would ask the Minister to be very tolerant of the local authorities' wishes on any future repeal, and to ensure that the phrase "to consult" will mean real consultation, not merely a letter requesting an answer within seven days.

I am sure the noble Baroness will accept from me that I, perhaps more than most, should like to believe that local authorities will not feel in any way badly done to, for whatever reason. I think it is also fair to say, in connection with this whole Bill, that there has been a great deal of con- sultation. In fact, it is really what local authorities need; they need this particular legislation. I am informed that they were pressing for it long ago, and it makes good sense that it should be there because obviously we have to do something that will prevent them all having to come individually to make cases. They will now have powers which will obviate the necessity for that, so that will be what they are wanting.

This is bound to be the situation. I have now had the privilege (if that is the right word; I am not sure that it is) to deal with (I am not sure that is the right phrase, either) a great number of Bills in the last three years, and always this matter of consultation arises. Always one tries to do the best one can, and always, it seems, there is someone somewhere who feels that there ought to have been more consultation. I entirely take the noble Baroness's point that two or three days on anything is really less than desirable; but I hope she will agree that there can be situations which arise where that may in fact happen, whatever earlier period of consultation there may have been.

So I would say that, so far as concerns, in particular, the clause to which she has referred, in fact an order may not be made until the local authority has been consulted, and they will be given plenty of time for this purpose. I would imagine, too, that they will be taking the initiative. So while I accept in general what the noble Baroness is saying, I know that she has also seen so many Bills going through that she knows that these situations can arise, and it is not done with any motive at all other than from anxiety to get into the Bill in question the points that everyone needs to have covered.

I take in some of the points that the noble Lord has made, but one presumes that consultation could have taken place earlier. I mean, in the repeals section we are repealing Acts before the ink in which they have been printed is even dry, to be perfectly candid. There is the Humberside Act 1982. We are repealing that under three clauses according to the latest schedule. The oldest one is the County of South Glamorgan Act, the most controversial one; the first one of the local government ones. In the case of all these, local authorities, with their officers and with their councillors, spent money and spent time, and used the parliamentary time; and one wonders, for what?

The consultation procedure, I should have thought, could have started even in 1981, to let the local authorities know that a miscellaneous provisions Bill was coming along and that it was hoped to accommodate this, that the other which they might be bringing forward. So I would have said that there should be consultation over a longer period, because I think there are already four Bills which will be going upstairs to a committee in the near future. I know that I have been asked to sit on the Epsom and Walton Downs Bill. Then I think there is the Nottinghamshire one; and I think Derbyshire is also going to a committee. I hope that their consultations have taken place, and that the committee will not be discussing things that have perhaps got into this miscellaneous provisions Bill. So while I would have said that on repeals we might have greater consultation, there should really be greater consultation on everything, so that public money or parliamentary time is not wasted.

moved Amendment No. 137A:

Page 43, line 34, after ("11(2)") insert (",[Work undertaken by local authorities and development bodies under certain agreements with Manpower Services Commission](3)").

moved Amendment No. 138:

Line 4, after ("Acts;") insert ("to make provision for the licensing of existing and future sex establishments;").

I take the point which the noble Earl, Lord Grey, is making in this amendment, but I have reservations about the precise form of the words proposed in it. It would seem to carry an implication, which does not accord with the general tenor of the discussions on Schedule 3, that local authorities are obliged to licence existing and future sex establishments. The Committee has been at very great pains to make the point that this is not so, and I think the contrary would be implicit if this amendment was made in exactly the words that the noble Earl has chosen.

I do accept, however, that technically an amendment to the Long Title may be needed to cover the proposed controls which arc set out in Schedule 3. While I hope, therefore, that the noble Earl may agree to withdraw his amendment for the reasons I have given, I will give an undertaking to take this point away and to look at it.

I am very grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Belstead, for being so helpful over this amendment. I think that in my amendment I did not make any reference to any obligation; I used the words,

"to make provision for the licensing of existing and future sex establishments".

But, in view of what the noble Lord has said and of his helpful remarks, I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.

moved Amendment No. 138A:

Line 14, after ("registers") insert ("to exclude from the definition of" construction or maintenance work" in section 20 of the Local Government, Planning and Land Act 1980 work undertaken by local authorities and development bodies pursuant to certain agreements with the Manpower Services Commission which specify the work to be undertaken and under which the Commission agrees to pay the whole or part of the cost of the work so specified;").

My Lords, I beg to move that this Bill be now read a third time. If I may make one brief comment on it, I believe that the subject of the Bill, the better care of antiquities, has a wider than purely domestic interest. If I may put it like this, I think that we in Britain would be concerned and distressed if states like Egypt and Israel, or great nations like Italy and Greece, did not take proper care of their antiquities. Antiquities are not only part of a national heritage; they are part of the human heritage. The countries I have mentioned would have an equal right to hope and expect that we in Britain would take proper care of our portable antiquities, too. Unhappily, Britain is behind other countries in this respect in our legislation; but, while I cannot claim that this Bill aspires to being able to put a bad situation completely right, I would claim that it is at least a step in the right direction. The noble Earl who has spoken for the Government in our debates on the Bill has suggested that the Bill proposes a radical change in the law on property. I can only say with the greatest respect that I cannot agree with him. I would claim that the Bill seeks no more than a fairly modest extension of the existing law, the law of treasure trove.

I should like, in conclusion, to express my gratitude and thanks to noble Lords who have supported the Bill; my particular thanks to the noble Lord, Lord Windlesham, who has given it staunch support and who has reflected the view of the British Museum; my thanks to the noble Baroness, Lady Birk, who spoke eloquently in support of the Bill and with the authority of having been a Minister in the Department of the Environment; and, not least, my thanks to the noble and learned Lord, Lord Elwyn-Jones, for his brief intervention. He suggested that in some respects the law of treasure trove is an ass. My wish might be that this Bill would seek to make it a little less asinine.

May I first acknowledge the time and attention that my noble friend Lord Abinger has devoted to this Bill and the contributions of others in this House who have generally supported the Bill or have sought to improve it. Its basic aim is to seek improved arrangements for the recording of archaeological finds and for their subsequent disposal. If, in the course of these debates, the Government have seemed rather less than wholehearted about the Bill, this reflects some doubts whether in practice these aims are achievable in this way. There are also some matters about which your Lordships have heard me express misgivings. These points have been mentioned in the course of debate and I have no intention of labouring them now. The Bill has many friends in this House and I would not want to cast a blight on the proceedings. I end as I began, by complimenting my noble friend on the way he has piloted the Bill through the House and on the diplomatic way in which he spoke this afternoon.

My Lords, I beg to move that this Bill be now read a second time. The purpose of the Bill is to restore the position of the Greater London Council and the London Transport Executive to that which it was held generally to be prior to the judgment of the noble and learned Lords of Appeal. The importance of London's passenger transport can hardly be overstressed; 5½ million trips are made each day, some 55 per cent. of which are in connection with work. Central London alone provides employment for 1 million persons, 80 per cent. of whom commute by London Transport and British Rail.

We are not debating here the Greater London Council's low fares policy but it must be made absolutely clear that until the judgment, few if any had thought that the fares policy adopted by the GLC was unlawful. I have a 157-page discussion booklet on Labour's GLC election policy which was considered at a two-day conference as long ago as October 1981. This included a 22-page section on transport policy drawn up by a 19-member working party. The low-fares policy was argued and recommended in that document. This was publicised, but no one suggested the policy was unlawful. This was included in the GLC election manifesto and was one of the controversial items in the campaign. No one suggested that it was unlawful. A number of independent observers said that this was an imaginative effort to tackle traffic congestion, energy saving and to deal with environmental aspects in connection with London Transport. There may be some who have criticised the proposal, but no one has suggested that it was unlawful.

One important reason why the proposals were not considered to be unlawful was because there was general acceptance that they were within the powers under the Transport (London) Act 1969. That Act was quoted in some detail in the course of the judgment and it was stressed that there was a difference between that Act and the Transport Act 1968 which dealt with the provision of public transport outside Greater London.

When the London Bill was introduced in 1969 the Ministers of the day intended clearly to give wide powers to the GLC. I am pleased that the noble Lord, Lord Marsh, is in his seat today and is down to speak because I want to quote from a statement that the noble Lord made at the Second Reading in another place on 17th December 1968 (in cols. 1247–8). He said:

"The main power that the Council will have, apart from the power to appoint, will be to pay grants to the Executive for any purpose it thinks fit and to issue directions to the Executive. This gives the Council the right to prescribe the policy lines to be followed and to take financial responsibility for its decisions. This is very important, because if the Council wishes the Executive to do something that will cause it to fall short of its financial targets, it will itself have to take financial responsibility for it. The Council might, for example, wish the Executive to run a series of services at a loss for social or planning reasons. It might wish to keep fares down at a time when costs are rising and there is no scope for economies. It is free to do so. But it has to bear the cost".

That statement was made on behalf of the Government of the day when the 1969 London Bill was introduced. The statement, your Lordships will agree, is clear and needs little or no elaboration.

I could give a number of extracts from the Minister's speech, but I will content myself with just one more statement which the noble Lord made in reply to that debate in another place. He said:

"if a democratically-elected authority decides that it wishes to spend its rates in a particular way for the benefit of its electors it is a rather unconstitutional theory that Parliament should tell the authority that Parliament knows best".

That, I am sure noble Lords will agree, is what democracy, the constitutional position and local government are all about.

I thought it might be helpful if I read through the debate on Second Reading when the 1969 Bill came to your Lordships' House. The noble Lord, Lord Winterbottom, then Parliamentary Under-Secretary, on 10th June 1969 (in column 533), when dealing with the financial duties to be placed on the Executive and the procedure for controlling fares, said:

"The practical effect of this will be that Londoners through their elected representatives on the GLC will decide the pricing policies and levels of service for their public transport and will take financial responsibility for their decisions. This would appear to be an eminently reasonable approach".

I am sorry that the noble Lord, Lord Nugent of Guildford, is not with us. He was speaking for the then Opposition and said:

"The future financial policy for London Transport will be strongly influenced by the fact that the deficit will fall on the ratepayers who elected the GLC. This, I think, is a thorougly sound constitution and I commend both the Government and the GLC in agreeing to it".

To be absolutely fair to the noble Lord, Lord Nugent, I must say that in a later part of his speech he hoped that any subsidy from the rates would be on capital expenditure and would not be on current revenue. The noble Lord was entitled to that policy viewpoint. But at no time did he challenge the interpretation which has been generally placed on the 1969 Act that the GLC have powers to pay from the rates towards current revenue.

Just a few words on what has happened with the low fares policy. It is claimed that it generated 10 per cent. extra journeys, 400,000 additional bus journeys and 140,000 additional tube journeys each day during which the policy was in being. A survey that was undertaken indicated that 40 per cent. of these related to work journeys; the other 60 per cent. were additional journeys through fares reductions. Surveys generally showed that high fares discourage employment in central London, and I must remind your Lordships that 60,000 persons outside the Greater London area travel into work each day by London Underground. A journey of only 30 miles return will now cost a husband and wife £6.40, and when we remember that same journey can be done by car for £1.60, there is obviously an encouragement not to go by public transport but to add to the congestion of London's roads.

Following the judgment, the GLC has considered it desirable and essential to obtain counsel's opinion on various matters. One such opinion dealt solely with what capital projects could be lawfully embarked upon in the light of the judgment. This has serious implications for the future of the London Transport system in light of the break-even requirement which has been laid down.

It is estimated that by the late 1980s fares will need to rise by 50 per cent. in real terms over the increased fares which started on 21st March this year. There will be 40 per cent. less journeys by bus and 17 per cent. less journeys by tube. The problems of London traffic congestion will be immense. There are already in hand, because of the judgment, reductions in bus service levels by thinning out, withdrawal of some routes and cuts in service frequencies. The tube will suffer also by cuts in service frequencies, closure of some 25 stations and possible withdrawal of branch lines and little used lines in the outer areas. It is claimed that in the first week of the increased fares (since 21st March) the number of journeys fell by 17 per cent.—that is, 800,000 fewer journeys in one day. Higher fares can mean less travelling followed by further cuts and restrictions. All this has a multiplying effect for the problems of employment in the Central London area, and a possible increase in London weighting because of the heavy prices. A 30 mile return journey on a monthly season costs £330 in the course of 12 months, and there are great problems.

Since the judgment, editorials in various papers and journals have urged the need for the Government to clear the present confusion and for the law to be revised. I will not take time in quoting from all those publications because there are possibly more important statements to be made. I refer to the opinion of counsel regarding the capital projects. This was a 38-page opinion, which the GLC obtained. I am not going to read the 38 pages but I should like to quote the last paragraph:

"In conclusion, for as long as the duty to operate London Transport's bus and underground systems upon business lines attempting to break even on revenue account in any two consecutive accounting periods remains the overriding duty which must prevail above and be given priority to the duty under Section 5 of the 1969 Act' to provide or secure provision of such public passenger transport services as best meets the needs for the time being of Greater London', it is the melancholy fact that the public transport systems in the capital are likely to deteriorate and to contract. Capital expenditure must necessarily reflect the prospective public demand, as well as the need to attempt to balance the books on the revenue account".

The concluding part of the opinion says:

"The Council is in the melancholy position of being prevented by law from 'securing the provision of such public passenger transport services as best meet the needs for the time being of Greater London'. That position results ineluctably from the existing consolidated revenue account deficit which will probably persist for at least another three years. If the Secretaries of State for Environment and Transport wish the Council and LTE to secure such public passenger transport services as best meet London's needs or if they wish to prevent the continual reduction in the scope and quality of such services and facilities, the law will have to be changed. In any event the conflict of legal opinions may be thought to call for its urgent clarification".

That is the end of a 38-page opinion by Mr. Roger Henderson, QC, dated 8th March 1982.

I wish to refer to one other opinion. This is interesting because it is a joint opinion by three counsel for the Greater London Council and two counsel for the London Transport Executive. The opinion refers to known divergence of counsels' views on the proper interpretation of the Lords' judgment. I quote:

"The effect of this divergence is that counsel for London Transport consider that the GLC is entitled to provide a higher level of subsidy for the current year than is considered to be permissible by counsel for the GLC".

The joint opinion then sets out points on which the counsel are in agreement:

"We are also in agreement that it is most desirable that the principles upon which the GLC may grant subsidy to London Transport should be clarified by legislation … We therefore consider it necessary that legislation for the operation of the London Transport system should state unequivocally the principles upon which subsidy may be granted. Successive GLC administrations had approved budgets without challenge until 1980 on the assumption of a subsidy which included an amount which was decided to be necessary as a matter of policy in order to maintain a particular standard of service at given fare levels. If the continuance of this approach is considered desirable, it is necessary for there to be legislation which makes it clear that such policy objectives may properly be taken into account. It will obviously be a matter of consideration as to whether, if such legislation is introduced, amendments to other provisions of the Transport (London) Act, 1969, are desirable".

This Bill will go a long way to clarifying the situation set out in those two important legal opinions. It will provide grants which the GLC may make to the Transport Executive as provided in Section 3(1)(a) of the 1969 Act and will also include grants towards current expenses. The passing of this Bill would give the basis for effective planning for 1983, for capital projects and level of fares. I am assured, in the light of those two opinions, that urgent action is required on these matters for which planning needs to be started almost at once. It must be emphasised that the GLC would have the ability under this amendment to decide what is reasonable. Although the council will not be limited by statute, it would still—even if this Bill which I am introducing is approved—need to have regard to its fiduciary duty. My Lords, I beg to move that this Bill be read a second time.

My Lords, let me start by saying quite clearly from these Benches that we welcome this Bill and we thank the noble Lord, Lord Underhill, for introducing it. It fills a gap in the legislation which has been caused by the decision of the Lords of Appeal and the Government made it quite clear through the noble Lord, Lord Bellwin, during the discussion on the Transport Concessions (London) Bill recently when they sought to confirm the position of London Transport in relation to the elderly and the disabled that it was not their intention to take any further action. Therefore, I think it is greatly to the credit of the noble Lord, Lord Underhill, that he has brought this Bill before your Lordships today.

I made it clear during the discussion on that earlier Second Reading that even this is not enough to solve the problem, but at least it goes some way towards helping transport in London in that it gives London equality with the rest of the country. Having said that, one could almost sit down and hope that the thing would go through. In my opinion, there should be very little further debate. What is being asked for is a fair deal for London in relation to the rest of the country, but I have no doubt we shall not be able to leave it at that. I repeat that even this is inadequate to solve the existing problems although it does go as far as it is possible to go with this type of Bill—anything further would have to come from the Government side. If I repeat several things that I said during the Second Reading of the last Bill, I apologise to your Lordships, but I think they should be firmly on the record.

The first fact is that we are dealing with the capital city of this country, and that brings particular problems. It brings particular sorts of congestion and therefore perhaps a greater than usual need for a good public transport system. London has a very large number of commuters which other cities do not have in the same proportion. Some of those commuters pay rates and some do not. Not all of them can travel on London Transport—many of them travel on British Rail, particularly on the south side of the river. The problems of geography as well as the problems of finance bedevil this matter. Some of the ratepayers cannot benefit from the subsidies and some of those who benefit are not ratepayers.

The Minister was somewhat critical when I spoke on this subject before, and perhaps I did not make my position clear. I criticise the GLC for going too far too fast, and I think perhaps that has been at the root of some of the psychological reaction to the "fares fair" policy on the part of the Government and on the part of many ratepayers. I think they were wrong to expect to be able to recoup such large amounts of money—of the order of £125 million—from the ratepayers alone when, as I have said, many rate-payers are not able to benefit. Among those who do not pay but who do benefit are the large number of tourists who come into this great city of ours and the large number of business visitors, who naturally come to the capital city for a variety of reasons. A tourist tax is something which is outside the scope of this Bill, but it is something which has to be considered, it seems to me, if we are going to get the totality of this problem solved. However, in the end the cost of doing nothing is very high indeed. For a start, the sheer congestion has an enormous cost.

Many of us will have had various bits of information passed to us from a person called "Dave", to whom I have not been properly introduced. He sent me something about fare levels in London which I found quite interesting, and others may also have had that. I think, certainly, that many of the statistics given in that lead one to suppose that the extra cost of existing private vehicles under the new situation is of the order of £40 million. I do not know whether that figure is correct or not, but certainly the cost must be very significant.

The cost of accidents as a result of the extra congestion on the roads is another very significant figure. The estimate has been put as high as 3,000 more accidents in Greater London in a year and possibly between 30 and 40 fatalities, the cost of which I would not care to calculate. As the noble Lord, Lord Underhill, said, already in the short time since the fares rose we hear there has been a loss of something like 17 per cent. of passengers on London Transport. This increased congestion, increased pollution and increased frustration is only the beginning. I would remind your Lordships that the tourist season has not started yet and the congestion we shall have in the next few months is going to be horrendous.

Let me not pretend that throwing money at the problem is the complete answer. There is a need for greater efficiency, and the record of London Transport in many respects is not good. I am told that in the period between 1974 and 1981 there has been a decline in passenger miles of something like 6 million, while at the same time there has been an increase in staff of some 6,000. That seems to me to be a particular form of Parkinsonian law we could well do without. And it is not just the pen-pushers who are the trouble. There is a continued resistance to accept automation and a continued failure of management to press forward with it. There are far too many one-man buses that are being manned by two, but of course it is exceedingly difficult to achieve an improvement in productivity when the staff of London Transport are totally demoralised by being told that their services are no longer going to be required because of the increased fares leading to a rundown in services.

What the noble Lord, Lord Underhill, has told us about the reduction of services is really quite frightening—the closure of stations and the removal of buses. How could anyone in that situation feel they have a secure future? And if they do not feel that they have a secure future, how can they possibly participate in genuine discussions on productivity? So the staff have become demoralised and they need a new boost to their morale. This Bill is a start, and I hope the Government will not allow their prejudice against the present rulers of the GLC to affect their judgment.

This, as I said before, is a Bill about fairness. It is a Bill about giving Londoners the same rights and rules as other people; and justice demands no less. The Government may feel that the rights will be abused. They are perfectly entitled to that view, but I submit, as the noble Lord, Lord Underhill, said in quoting the noble Lord, Lord Marsh:

"That is a problem for the electors of London at the appropriate time".

Nothing is provided free in this world, and particularly is that true of transport. The question is: How shall we best pay for it in order to encourage an efficient, integrated public transport system in London, not only in the local interest but in the national interest? It cannot be achieved by charging economic fares: it can only be achieved by a subsidy of some sort provided either by the Government of by the GLC and preferably by both.

I note that the noble Lord, Lord Mottistone, is speaking after me and doubtless he will suggest that this is another attack on the ratepayers and industry. I hope he does not take that view. On that point, I would suggest that even if the rate costs go up slightly there will be some compensation in terms of a reduction in the London weighing and there is an equation to balance there. I hope I do not anticipate his argument.

The Bill deals only with the position of the GLC in this very unusual circumstance. As I said earlier, I think that there is a need to tackle the whole of transport in the South-East region, but that, again, is not a purpose that can be tackled by this Bill. But I hope that the Government will give a fair wind to this Bill and that your Lordships will give it a Second Reading today.

My Lords, in commenting on this Bill I speak as a London ratepayer in a small way. It so happens that, when the fares went down, I worked out that my increased rates just about balanced the extra value I would get from my own use of London Transport. Perhaps the situation is now reversed—I do not know. I have not had time to work it out. So your Lordships can take it that, though a ratepayer, I am a neutral one.

It seems to me—though I am sure that the noble Lord, Lord Underhill, was properly advised by his learned advisers—that the amendment to the 1969 Act as effected by this Bill does not give the value that is required of it to warrant the necessary authority. It seems to me that the underlying section in the parent Act is Section 1, where the Greater London Council is called upon,

"to develop policies, and to encourage, organise and, where appropriate, carry out measures, which will promote the provision of integrated, efficient and economic transport facilities and services".

That, surely, is the real objective. Just to supplement Section 3(1)(a), to spell out what purposes might be covered, does not seem to me to add very much, because what it says is, "the Executive for any purpose ". Anyhow, that is as may be. I am not a lawyer and I do not understand these things. But I should not have thought that the Bill does what it sets out to do.

We had a comparison from the noble Lord, Lord Underhill, about the effects of the new high fares. He said that a husband and wife journeying in by car from 30 miles outwould have to pay £1.60, as against £6.40 to come a similar distance by Underground. I calculate that the minimum cost of running a car is what your Lordships and I are paid by the House for our own transport costs, which I think is 22½p per mile. That covers not only the £1.60 for petrol in the example given by the noble Lord, Lord Underhill, and it looks much more like £6·60—

My Lords, I am obliged to the noble Lord for giving way. I am not suggesting that people will buy cars especially to travel into town. They already have a car, and because they have one they will be tempted to use it and pay £1·60 instead of £6·40.

My Lords, if they go on doing that for any length of time, as anybody with experience knows, it will cost them the equivalent of 22½p per mile; and the AA's figures are much higher. So I do not think one should take that as a categorical statement about figures. As I work it out for the kind of distance that I travel, which now costs 40p instead of 20p, it costs about three times as much to travel by car and about four times as much to use a taxi. Your Lordships may say that, because a taxi takes only one person and there are all the other factors related to it, that is very reasonable, and that it would be better if the differences were six times and eight times. But I do not know whether that is a very easy calculation. The fact is that, by any calculation, the new increased fares are not disproportionately high, even though it might be a good thing if they were lower.

To turn to the effects of the "Fares Fair" policy—and I have always wondered: fair to whom?—the benefits seem to go to the non-ratepayers who are often tourists. I am sure that they are necessary here and that they spend lots of money in the capital, but people have different views about how many they want here at any one time. Then there are the out of London commuters, to which the noble Lord referred, and I should have thought that Londoners as a whole did not particularly welcome giving special treats to them. They may have to give a treat to a tourist, in order to bring him into the country, but I question whether we should give a treat to an out of London commuter. I expect that some of your Lordships are out of London commuters, and I do not want in any way to be unpleasant to your Lordships, but for a resident that is not necessarily a good thing.

Then there are the young people. It depends how young they are. There are quite a lot of people who are not ratepayers and who do very nicely out of that sort of thing. The young people and the not quite so young get much higher wages and salaries, relatively speaking, than they did 20 or 30 years ago. That is a fact, and they can afford more than they could when I was a young man. I understand that the old and infirm are not affected, so we can discount them.

I should now like to look at the penalties imposed upon the ratepayers. A very large number of domestic ratepayers end up evenly balanced, as 1 do. That must be the average situation, and it is nice to think that one is sometimes an average person. But the people who need to be considered—and here I must disappoint the noble Lord, Lord Tordoff—are the non-domestic ratepayers. They are the ones who get clobbered.

According to the rates information which I get from the Westminster City Council—I do not know to what extent this reflects itself on the GLC side, because it is rather difficult to identify the figures—332153; per cent. of the total rates are commercial and 6·4 per cent. are domestic. So that one-fifth of the rate income is domestic and four-fifths is commercial. That seems to be a bit hard. I do not suppose that the small businesses can afford to pay London weighting, though, of course, the big companies and the Civil Service pay London weighting. But the ordinary small trader around the place, who in many respects provides the life blood of this capital, is the person who is getting clobbered and going out of business. He is the one who will bear the main brunt.

One might suspect the London Labour Party of not being sympathetic to such people, and I wonder whether they realised when they formulated their great plan that that was where the real penalty would be imposed. I wonder whether they thought the increase would be paid by the rich ratepayers—the imagined Lordships, who are all supposed to be so much more wealthy than any of us are, except the ones who do not come to this place. It may be that they, thought they would clobber the wealthy millionaires, but I think they will find that they clobbered the small shopkeepers. So it is for that reason above every- thing else, that I do not think they had an undeniable right to make the kind of shift that they did.

One then wonders to what extent it is reasonable for any civic authority to have freedom to adjust the rates to provide something, if anything, to assist their local transport system. I think it is reasonable that they should be able to do something. I come back again to Section 1 of the 1969 Act which I suggest, to be effective, requires London Transport to operate with the minimum gross labour costs. Grants towards current expenses, which are referred to in the Bill before your Lordships, will not, I should have thought, encourage the diminution of gross labour costs. The noble Lord, Lord Tordoff, drew attention to this point. There is no doubt that London Transport and many other nationalised enterprises—if you can call them enterprises, because they do not usually turn out to be very enterprising—tend to have an awful lot of fat on the labour side. There was a frightening article in the Evening Standard about a workshop—think it was a tube workshop but it may have been a bus workshop—into which a reporter and a photographer managed to get where they found people waiting about doing nothing: having cups of tea, playing cards, et cetera. It was a gross waste of money. I am afraid that a further grant would encourage more of this. How properly to support, if support is necessary, a body which does not in the last resort have to rely on making the books balance is a great problem. It is the great problem of our era. It applies to any body, any organisation, which does not in the last resort have to rely on making the books balance in order to remain in business. I should not have thought any little grant like this would help them very much.

To sum up, I do not think that this Bill does what it sets out to do, and even if it did I do not think it would make life better for the people of London. Something much more radical is required. Selling off London Transport to private industry, in sections, is needed to get the efficiency and effectiveness which Section 1 of the 1969 Act requires. Therefore, I hope that when we come to consider whether the Bill should be given a Second Reading, we on this side of the House will decide not to give it one.

My Lords, I listened with interest to the last comment of the noble Lord about the possibility of meeting at least part of the problem by selling off parts of London Transport to private enterprise. If he identifies buyers, I hope he will let me have prior notice. I shall then proceed to sell them the pigeons in Trafalgar Square.

The great problem that we have with London Transport is that inevitably it is a vastly expensive, complex undertaking. I find it a source of great pleasure that I am able to agree with almost everything which the noble Lord, Lord Underhill, said, because we have been friends for a long time. Having said that, I regrettably have to go on to say that I shall not support his Amendment Bill. On the arguments which he puts forward, all people would, I think, accept today the importance of an urban transport policy.

As a dedicated supporter of market forces I should be the first to accept that it is impossible to run an urban transport system without very large and heavy subsidies. The problem is that when one talks of subsidies and makes a case for them there is the danger of thinking that subsidies come from Governments, or local authorities. But subsidies come from people and there is a limit to how much they can pay, no matter how good the arguments which can be advanced. The problem, which has created this situation, is not that a decision was taken to subsidise Greater London's transport but that it is subsidised at a level which is insupportable, whichever party is in office. This is an argument which I would strongly promote.

May I pass on to some basic points. The noble Lord, Lord Underhill, quite fairly quoted from speeches which I made in the course of the debates on the 1969 Act. The interesting point, as the courts have revealed, is that it is just as possible to point to other comments which lead one to a totally opposite conclusion. The brutal truth is that the 1969 Bill was designed to appeal to a Labour-controlled Greater London Council which was positively enthusiastic about a high level of subsidy and that halfway through it had to be amended to make it acceptable to a Conservative-controlled Greater London Council—ably led, if I may say so, by the noble Lord, Lord Plummer—which was rightly suspicious of the whole concept and which was determined, above all else, not to get itself encumbered with an open-ended, ever increasing deficit. So the whole concept of the legislation changed in mid-air. if ever there were an argument against party political control of large, complex undertakings, the 1969 Act provides that argument.

To run briefly over what happened, as I saw it—and I know as much about these problems as anybody else in the House, because I created as much of these problems as anybody else in the House—in 1968 I was invited by the then Prime Minister to transfer from the Ministry of Power, after the completion of the Steel Bill, to the Ministry of Transport where I was to take charge of the 1968 Transport Bill from Mrs. Castle. I explained to the Prime Minister that I knew very little about the Transport Bill, that what little I did understand I disagreed with and that I would far rather stay at the Ministry of Power. As many noble Lords are aware, as always happens on these occasions I became Minister of Transport about an hour and a half later.

This is not the time to discuss once again the 1968 Transport Bill, other than to say that some of the key elements in the Bill led Mrs. Castle, logically as she saw it, to the 1969 London Transport Bill. Having created the passenger transport authorities and executives in the major conurbations, she was convinced, particularly since the creation of the new Greater London Council in 1965, that it would be totally illogical to have every conurbation in the country in charge of its own transport system with the exception of the biggest transport system and the biggest conurbation in the entire country. I am sure that she would not normally nominate me to speak on her behalf and I have not asked her permission, but I think that was her logic and one can see how it led to the separate 1969 Bill. She felt that control over London Transport should be transferred from central government to the new local authority.

For reasons which I will come to, I believed that was a fundamental mistake. Indeed, I felt so strongly about the 1969 London Transport Bill that I went with a paper to the full Cabinet and asked my colleagues to allow me to withdraw the Bill. Looking back, I am not surprised that they refused. In 1967, the Government and the then Labour-controlled Greater London Council had reached agreement in principle. Although political control of the council had passed to the Conservative Party under the leadership of the noble Lord, Lord Plummer, negotiations were still continuing. But there was, as I said at the beginning, a fundamental difference which followed that change. The difference was that Mr. Plummer, as he then was, recognised very clearly the enormous dangers of accepting the enormous financial obligations of the London Transport Board. I remember quite clearly, and I have recently checked my memory, that he said over and over again, "I accept that it may be necessary to subsidise on the capital account but I will never be a party to an open ended subsidy on the revenue account". That was a fundamentally different view of the same Bill.

If I may say so to noble Lords, (outsiders may regard it as cynical though others here will recognise the inevitability of it) the fact is that in the course of the Committee stage I was speaking to two audiences. I was trying to persuade the Government supporters to continue in support of the Bill and I was trying to persuade the noble Lord, Lord Plummer, kindly to take it off the hands of the Treasury, who were delighted. They were as delighted to get rid of it as the Labour GLC had been to receive it. The argument then was not about transport policy but about how to get rid of this element of public expenditure by central Government and put it on to the back of the local authority. Quite why we wanted to do that I do not know, because we have shown no greater historical ability more ably to control local government expenditure than we control central government expenditure.

We argued all the way through on that basis and in the event there was a capital reconstruction. Assets worth £270 million were transferred for £27 million to the local authority, and the £27 million was in turn split with the National Bus Company. Again this was the danger. Eyes were fixed on the capital account. But it is the revenue account which is the danger every time in a transport undertaking. As I have already said, the Treasury were delighted to see the last of this monster. I consoled myself with the thought which the noble Lord, Lord Underhill, pointed out, that local electoral considerations would exert sufficient pressures to prevent irresponsible financial policies in respect of London Transport. That was a fundamental error. It is probably too wide a subject to discuss at the moment, but, in my view, local elections have very little to do with local issues. It can be quite fairly said that no one in London had any excuse for being in doubt as to what the policies would be in relation to London Transport if Mr. Livingstone and his colleagues came to power. But, of course, people did not vote in local elections for Mr. Livingstone and his colleagues; they voted the way they did because they did not like the Conservative Government. They did not vote about London Transport. This was the fundamental mistake in my view; that the one control we thought would be there—local elections—in reality does not apply for those reasons.

The result was that Londoners found themselves faced with a financial disaster which, even if the policy had not been reversed by the courts, would rapidly have reached a level which could not possibly have been supported by the London ratepayers alone. I believe it was just sheer chance that the courts intervened when they did. If one extrapolates the rate of loss forward, it is inconceivable that ratepayers could have paid it. Many ratepayers under our strange system are not necessarily wealthy people and the hardships were very real indeed—all the more so for those who suffered very large rate increases to pay out of relatively small incomes and who did not use London Transport services for which they were being charged through the rates.

I have no doubt that London Transport will always require very substantial financial support. I know of no rail passenger transport system anywhere in the world which breaks even. There are many reasons for that. That is even more so in the case of a system which depends on and is operated largely for commuter traffic because there is no way in which a complex, expensive organisation of that size can cover itself when it is only operating efficiently for probably five hours out of 24. This is one of the key reasons why no commuter system will ever make money or wash its face. But because a socially necessary service cannot provide a convential commercial return, that does not mean that it should not be run on conventional commercial criteria. Indeed, I believe that the strictness of the commercial criteria is all the more essential when one is dealing with what is essentially a socially necessary but non-profit making service than it is with a business making money but which occasionally loses some, because things can run away with you the moment you see such a service as a bottomless bucket into which you just keep on putting pennies.

This vast, complex industry cannot be run as the part-time interest of local councillors. Indeed, it is a nonsense to regard London Transport (this is the reason why I find myself unable to support the noble Lord, Lord Underhill) as a local issue in the same category as libraries, swimming pools, parks or open spaces. As other noble Lords have said, the London commuter area stretches, for a very large number of people, to a distance of 50 miles from London. It cannot be viewed in the same way as the West Midlands conurbation or Glasgow. It is a national undertaking. Most of those commuters come to work in establishments and undertakings which are of a national or even international nature. They are not working in London shops but in Government offices of the nation, in banks, in financial institutions, and in the head offices of large British and international companies. It is an international city, and a very expensive international city too. Why, in heavens name, should a low-paid manual worker in Wandsworth subsidise the travel expenses of a highly-paid executive living in Woking? There seems to be no sense in that in terms of equity. Why should people who travel five miles to work subsidise people who travel 50 miles to work? Why indeed, particularly when those people who are travelling 50 miles do so because they find it more pleasant to live 50 miles out of London and can afford to live 50 miles out. In my view, there is no argument in logic for this concept.

I accept that in funding transport one needs to look at the total sum. I accept that there is a cost of congestion. I accept there is a cost of road accidents. I accept that there is the involvement of the tourist industry. But every single one of these things is a national cost and not a local cost in that sense. We tried a very expensive experiment with a major national asset. I conclude it is high time that the financial responsibility for this crucial element in what is the nation's economic life was transferred back to where it belongs, to national government, because it can only be seen as part of the nation's economic life, and because it is neither realistic nor fair to expect the people of London to carry this burden.

My Lords, I am glad that I am able to follow the noble Lord, Lord Marsh, and I must thank him for making the case that the Government should be subsidising London Transport to a much greater extent than they are prepared to do. I agree with the noble Lord that London Transport should not have been transferred to the Greater London Council and should have remained under central Government control—or better still, that there should he a London Transport executive or undertaking covering not only London Transport but the London section of British Rail also. I believe that all these proposals are right.

However, that is not the position from which we are starting. The position we have is that the Greater London Council has policy and management obligations to London Transport. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Mottistone, that the relevant section is Section 1. We have always thought that the relevant section was Section 1 and that this section not only gave the Greater London Council responsibility for policies but also the power to do something about these policies. It is only since the judges have stated that that is not so that we now have to do something.

It is all very well to say that some ratepayers benefit and that some do not; that some ratepayers benefit more than others; that some ratepayers are burdened more than others. The truth is that one cannot consider London Transport merely in terms of the bus and Underground services. One cannot consider it in isolation from the rest of the travel situation in London. London is a city to which people have to travel to work; to which people travel for entertainment; to which people come from abroad. Therefore, the question of how one arranges for people to travel around London is of the utmost importance.

They travel by many means. Some people walk and one must make provision for walking—that is what pavements are all about. Some people travel on bicycles, and if more and more people travel by bicycles, provision will have to be made to accommodate them. Some people travel by motorbike; I regard that form of travel as very dangerous but, nevertheless, people do travel by motorbikes. Some people travel by taxis and some by car, while others travel by bus and the Underground. It is obvious, and it has always been obvious, that the more people one can persuade to use buses and the Underground the better it will be for London in terms of travelling. There would be less congestion. There would be less need to build new roads. The logic of constricting London Transport in the way we are now bent on doing is that we cannot build more roads because we have already exhausted all the controls we can apply on cars coming into London, except one, which so far everybody has run away from, and that is supplementary licensing. Unless we are going to impose supplementary licensing for people who drive cars into London we have now exhausted the controls we can apply to those people driving cars into London and therefore we have to build more roads.

Roads are expensive, to central Government and to the ratepayers. Let us not minimise the point. When we are talking about what it costs to subsidise buses or Underground let us also talk about the cost of building more roads so that more people can use their cars. It is in that context that we must look at the whole system of London transport.

Of course, the question of low fares is a controversial one. I am not prepared to go into that debate at the moment. I personally think that it is as important that the services be satisfactory as that the fares be low, probably more important, but both procedures are necessary. You are required both to provide an efficient service and to provide a reasonably cheap service.

In terms of the cheap service, Lord Underhill was right in the way in which he presented the figure. The thing that matters to the person who has to make a choice as to whether he travels by bus or by car is what it costs. And of course Lord Mottistone is right; later on he will find that he was shortsighted in terms of the way in which he estimated his cost. The traveller will start by saying, "It will cost me X to travel by car and it will cost me X plus Y to travel by bus or underground", and he will travel by car. Therefore, in assessing what you charge those travelling by bus or Underground you have to bear in mind the possibility that if the charge is too high they will travel by car, create more congestion, and you find yourself in the position where you have to think in terms of new roads with all that that means. I cannot allow the debate to go in the way it is going, and has gone, where everyone discusses the problem of London transport in isolation, in terms of merely a question of what it costs to run the buses and tubes and what it costs people in terms of fares and ratepayers in terms of rates. There is a lot more to it than that.

It is the Government's job to see that the whole issue is viewed in perspective. So far—let us be honest with each other—the Government have signally failed; they have been so anxious to make political capital out of the fact that the judges give the present Greater London Council a knock on its knuckles. They have failed to appreciate the serious issue, but we are dealing with a serious issue and we must deal with it seriously. We must consider how best we are going to provide the sort of transport within this city which will enable people to go about their work, to go about their entertainment or anything else, so that they can get about in this city with the minimum amount of inconvenience.

As things are at the moment, we barely keep a day ahead of grinding to a halt. At the moment, by what are called traffic control measures—that is, you make a one-way street today or prevent a right-hand turn tomorrow—we have managed to keep ahead of grinding to a halt; by controlling the costs of people coming into London through parking restrictions, the cost of parking and so on, we have managed to impose some control. The question of supplementary licensing has been on the table for a long time and everybody has run away from it. It may well have to be faced. In the final analysis the question is how public transport fits into the scheme of things, and it is there the costs come in; what do you demand of those who use it in order to encourage them to use it. That is of the utmost importance.

Now we come to the Bill. I am not going to pretend that the Bill goes far enough, but it does help. It does indicate that the Greater London Council, in planning its transport policy, in discussing what should be done, can consider with the London Transport Executive what grant is necessary for revenue purposes and can make such a grant. That is what this Bill is enabling it to do and that is right. I know that Lord Plummer will say no, as he always said, capital grants, yes, revenue grants, no. It is quite a sensible stand to take. But even before the end of his regime we had moved from not merely making capital grants but also making revenue grants. The fact remains that when we eventually have to decide how to provide this service which is required we cannot just think merely of making capital grants; all of us who have anything to do with it know that revenue grants also are necessary.

If there is the problem of open-ended grant—I do not want to take time to argue that—that is where the control needs to be. My own view is that central and local government should always be in a position where they can together discuss and agree on levels of grants for these purposes. The problem we have had is that central Government merely wanted to run away from their responsibility in making their fair contribution to the running of London.

My Lords, I apologise to your Lordships for inflicting on you one more speech beyond the list which is in your hands. I had not thought to be here today, but since I am I feel I must make my contribution to this discussion. It will be perfectly plain from all that has been said—and I was fascinated to listen to the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Marsh, because I was on the council at the time when he was acting in his governmental capacity, and I remember the whole story, as does the noble Lord, Lord Plummer—that we are discussing a very difficult and, to my mind, national matter. I know we are talking about London Transport, but London, as we know, is the capital city, and the health of the capital city is a national matter. I think we are talking about the health of the capital city, and it is from that standpoint, and not from a political standpoint at all, that I want to talk.

The noble Lord, Lord Pitt, has mentioned, as have others, the traffic problem. The congestion problem in London is acute. Those of us who were on the old LCC and then the GLC, have lived with it for a long time. It is a matter of grave importance to the capital city that, somehow or other—and we have not found that it is for want of thinking or trying—we must find an answer to the congestion problem.

We have thought of supplementary licensing. How on earth do we enforce supplementary licensing? Can we have a blockade or a filter point on every road that comes into London and then have periodical checks? We could check every day, but even if we had periodical checks we would have a queue five miles long of vehicles waiting to come into London while we did the checking. That would be quite unacceptable. There has been talk of road pricing—it does not work. We have looked at everything. There has been talk of trying to have essential users only coming into London and trying to restrict the parking spaces under the office blocks which were built in the 1950s and 1960s when local government was insisting on having vast parking spaces. Now it does not want them at all because if people have parking spaces they drive in and congest the streets.

I was a member for a time—and it was a quite fascinating experience—of the South East Economic Planning Council. The industrialists who sat on the council pressed on us over and over again the enormous costs for industry of congestion, and particularly congestion in London. The council was pressing the Government—and if it were in existence it would still be pressing the Government—to get the M.25 built; it is still only built in bits and not yet finished. In my view the M.25, desirable as it is, will not do very much to reduce congestion in Central London because it is too far out. It is the third ring of a concept of two inner rings, neither of which are being built. We are going to get only the third ring and so it will not do that much to help Central London.

There is now very great concern about the loss of population from London. There is equal concern about the loss of jobs from London and the loss of industry and offices from London. I was concerned in the 1960s with decentralisation from London. Indeed, I was chairman of the New and Expanding Towns Committee of the GLC. Why did industry go out? It is perfectly true that it went out because when it wanted to build new factories it wanted green field sites which were easier to build on. The land was cheap and it could build a one-storey or at most a two-storey building very much more cheaply than in London. But the other reason why industry was driven out was that it wanted to escape the congestion of Central London, and not just Central London, but London generally, because of the on-costs of congestion. Industry went out because its employees arrived late at work. It said that it lost production time because of the difficulty of public transport. This is all information that came to me from the industrialists who moved. Employees arrived tired and worn out and suffered from ill-health because they were waiting for the bus that never came—and the bus never came not because London Transport did not want to run a decent service but because of the congestion. Again we come back to congestion.

Why did the people go out so willingly? Sometimes we hear that they were driven out. That is not true at all. Everybody who went, chose to go, and they went again because they were sick of conditions in London—sick of waiting for buses. They were only too glad to go. They also went out for a house and a garden because they did not want the flats that were being built in London.

So we come back to the fact that we have to get rid of London congestion. If London is to flourish and if we are not to see the essential Central London institutions—the banking institutions, the financial institutions and the international institutions—moving out, something has to be done about congestion and also about London fares, because 80 per cent. of the workers in Central London in these important international and banking institutions travel by public transport. While fares are going up and up, I think that we shall find that people will not bring in their cars, because they cannot bring in their cars, the streets cannot be widened. I need not go over that argument because your Lordships know that the streets cannot be widened. So I think that, in the end, unless we do something, the institutions will move out. To me this is a national matter. It concerns London deeply and it concerns London government deeply, whatever its political persuasion.

However, I beg the Government not to regard this for one single moment as a political matter. It started as a political matter with Bromley. Bromley has always hated the GLC, whether it is Tory or Labour. Bromley never wanted to be integrated in the local government reorganisation. That is where this matter started. But for goodness sake! I hope that everyone who is concerned with this vital problem will rise above politics and see that something must be done. Whether it be the Bill before the House today, or whether the Government come up with something else, I wish that the noble Lord, Lord Beltwin, if he does not like what is in front of him now, would get up and say, "We shall take it away but will come back with something". If only the noble Lord, Lord Bellwin, would say that, it would be a step along the road to a solution. What the solution is, I do not know. It needs someone very, very wise to find it.

My Lords, I should like to rise and support the words of my noble friend Lord Mottistone. Indeed, I support, wholeheartedly what the noble Lord, Lord Marsh, has said. At the time of our negotiations, which I must say I enjoyed very much, I was urged to accept a 75 per cent. write-off of London Transport's debt. But I pursued the matter with some opposition from the noble Lord, Lord Marsh, to the point where we got 100 per cent. I do not think that that was, in fact, a very clever thing to do, because it brings me to the point that local government, and indeed, the very efficient local government officers, are not really trained by reason of their profession to deal with a commercial undertaking. On the night when the noble Lord, Lord Marsh, and I finally agreed terms, I remember saying that I thought we ought to have a very much greater write-off than the 100 per cent. which in fact we got, and that was because it was not being looked at as a commercial undertaking, but was merely being looked at with the eyes of local government.

The trouble is that London Transport is looked upon as a rather nice new toy which the councillors can play with because it is rather like playing with trains. It is a much more serious matter than that. Indeed, I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Denington, that it is a national matter and it is a very difficult national problem which affects the whole of the health of this great city conurbation.

I am very concerned, as I know the noble Baroness was at the time, with the problem of the low paid worker in London. The noble Baroness, Lady Denington, mentioned the new and expanding towns policy and how industry was asked to move out to the new towns. But I must challenge her on one point, which is, of course, that they went not only because they wanted a greenfield site, but because they were paid out for the site on which they were already in London and they took it with both hands. Very often those sites were turned into housing estates. Consequently there are a large number of low-paid workers who still have to move across London to get to their jobs, and they cannot be expected to do so if we have a very high fares policy.

How shall we deal with this? I firmly stick to my point of view that once you are on revenue subsidies, you are on a slippery slope and you cannot climb back up that slope. If you can stick to capital subsidy—and I agree that it is very difficult to do so—you have a measure of control over what you are expending. If you once get on to revenue subsidy you no longer have any control over the money that you are handling. I must say that the policies at County Hall at the moment cannot reassure us that they know what they are doing.

There are three parties involved in the subsidy to London Transport. There is the rarepayer; there is the taxpayer; and there is the rarepayer. All of them contribute very large sums indeed to the undertaking. All of this is bound up with another very large transport undertaking which works in the capital, and that is British Rail, where the subsidy very largely is provided by the Government. It seems to me that if you are to have a centralised transport policy in London, in view of the way in which the whole undertaking has been handled in the past year, I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Marsh, that it would be better to put it back into Government hands.

My Lords, I hestiate to interject, but this seems a little difficult coming from a Government supporter. What will he do if the Government will not take it into their hands? Will London be simply left to rot?

My Lords, I think that recent events may well persuade the Government that in the control of subsidies they may well be advised to take it back into their hands in order to see that the money is well spent. I should mention that in the days when Mrs. Castle was persuading the GLC to take over London Transport she offered an alternative which was a passenger transport authority. That, would have had the power to precept on the ratepayer, but the ratepayer would have had no recourse as to the amount that the PTA asked. We thought that this would merely create what I would call another ILEA in London, and would be the worst of all worlds. Therefore, very reluctantly indeed, with the pistol at our heads, we proceeded with the negotiations to take it over.

What it really amounts to is that there must be a reasonable balance between what the taxpayer pays and what the farepayer pays. Recently that has become so distorted that many firms are now leaving London and going off to places like Swindon, Bristol, Bournemouth, Milton Keynes and Peterborough as fast as they can. Indeed, it is quite clear that a low fare and high rates subsidy is causing a vast amount of unemployment in London, which is the reverse of what was expected. I hope that this whole matter will be reconsidered on a high level, and I fear that this amendment Bill which is before us today will not be of great help.

My Lords, I rise to speak in this debate following two former chairmen and one leader of the GLC, so I fear that perhaps in some ways the debate is becoming slightly incestuous. In introducing this Bill my noble friend Lord Underhill has highlighted the problems of London Transport. His Bill, of course, enables us to restore to the GLC the powers which we all thought it had prior to the Law Lords' judgment.

I myself have been concerned with the problems of transport in London for a number of years, particularly during a period when I was chairman of the Central Area Board of the GLC, at a time when the noble Baroness, Lady Denington, was chairman of the Transport Committee of that council. As she rightly pointed out to us—it has always been a concern of the GLC—the vitality of central London is a matter of great importance to the nation as a whole because on this depends the success of London as a business centre and depends the convenience of its inhabitants moving about London, and for all these things to happen it is essential that traffic flows freely in the central areas.

As we have been reminded in this short debate by various speakers, the changes in policy towards London Transport have varied and changed over the years. Of course, this has very much coincided with the increasing problems brought about by the ever increasing number of people in and outside London who own cars. As the noble Baroness pointed out, it is curious to think that up until the early 1960s people were positively encouraged to bring their cars into central London by the fact that at that time those building new offices were encouraged—indeed, compelled—to provide a proportion of car parking spaces for their employees underneath the office blocks which they were building. As we know all too well, after a period of time this policy was seen to have been folly. The effect of it, of course, was that in the early 1960s congestion was slowing down the average speed for each bus journey, and as it slowed down fares had to increase further in order to help London Transport meet its bills.

We then moved into the period when parking restrictions were introduced, but the downward spiral of bus usage continued, and fares and congestion continued to grow. Then in the late 1960s more measures were introduced, with some success, in order to get the buses moving again, and priorities were established in the form of bus lanes further to increase the speed with which they managed to move around the capital.

These measures met with some success and were, for a time, helped by the hike in petrol prices which occurred at the time of the Six-Day War. Inevitably, the successes from these particular measures were limited and other ways of solving the capital's traffic problems had to be examined. In particular, it was seen that groups of users should be persuaded to change their mode of conveyance into central London, and the obvious candidate for such a change was the commuter who basically is somebody who brings his car into Central London, parks it, and does not use it again until he returns home in the evening.

Having tried the various measures which I have described and various noble Lords have spoken to, the Greater London Council eventually saw that there were two extreme solutions to these particular problems. The problem of solving it with a carrot or solving it with a stick. The carrot, the positive encouragement for people to use public transport; the stick, to stop commuters bringing their cars into Central London.

Both my noble friends Lady Denington and Lord Pitt have mentioned the question of the supplementary licence fee and the cordon proposal which would stop people from coming into Central London without going through a checkpoint, and would cause great congestion on the perimeter of that area. This has recently been highlighted in the press. This solution would not be one which would be acceptable to Londoners as a whole. This particular solution, which was highlighted in the press recently, was rejected by the Transport Committee chaired by my noble friend Lady Denington some seven or eight years ago.

It can be seen that the only solution to London's traffic problems is a carrot solution, a positive solution to encourage people to use public transport in Central London. As the noble Lord, Lord Underhill, pointed out in moving the Second Reading of his Bill, the cheap fares policy in a sense added proof to the ideas behind this particular solution by the fact that immediately it was introduced there was a 10 per cent. increase in the usage of public transport in Central London. As the noble Lord, Lord Underhill, pointed out and was underlined by the noble Lord, Lord Tordoff, since the increases have come in, that increase which had been experienced has been followed by a decrease of approximately 17 per cent. in usage.

Unfortunately, this experiment lasted for a very short time. However, it had the unique effect of providing that a solution along these lines could help solve some of London's serious congestion problems. Also, we have been able—and this has been highlighted in the press a number of times recently—to make a comparison of cheap fare systems and the amount of subsidy paid to other metropolitan systems throughout the world. Indeed, these surveys have shown that the level of subsidy being paid in the transport system under the "fare's fair" policy was no more or no less than the average subsidy being paid to other metropolitan city transport systems. As the noble Lord, Lord Marsh, reminded us no commuter system in the world pays its way.

There may well be arguments about how fares should be subsidised. The noble Lord, Lord Mottistone, in his contribution queried the fact that certain groups received the advantage of cheap fares. He came to the support particularly of the commercial ratepayer. One always ought to realise when one is making the sort of comment that the noble Lord, Lord Mottistone, made that what one is actually talking about is a transfer. He compared his own personal situation of how he was paying more on rates and he got it back through cheaper fares. If one is thinking about commercial employers, or perhaps the shopkeeper is the best example, the shopkeeper would have to charge more for the goods he sells, albeit fractionally but the person who buys from him will have received the advantage of the cheaper fare to reach the particular shop concerned. Likewise, one can say with regard to offices and commerce as a whole that the employees of particular firms will have received the advantage of the cheap fares, and no doubt that could be reflected in the rate of wages paid at the end of the day. These are fractional, but if one thinks of it in total, this is exactly what has happened.

My Lords, might I intervene before the noble Lord moves on? It is fractional so far as the individual goods being sold are concerned; maybe it is fractional if you can persuade people to take less wages if your company is not doing well—that is rare; but it is not fractional when you are paying the rates as a commercial ratepayer.

My Lords, it is fractional if it is broken down. I should like to take the noble Lords, Lord Mottistone and Lord Tordoff, off on another point. I am afraid this is a hobbyhorse of mine. They both raised the red herring about the tourists not paying sufficient tax, and raised the question of a tourist tax. One always feels compelled to remind people who raise this point that the tourist, through the VAT which he pays on his hotel bill and the VAT which he may pay in other ways, produces many millions of pounds of tax revenue each year for the Government. That should not be forgotten.

Returning to London Transport, what we have so far as London Transport is concerned, basically, is that more of their total income is coming from subsidy and less from fares. As we have seen, for a metropolis this appears to be a more effective way of apportioning the total amount of money needed in order to run an effective transport system in a metropolitan area.

How a subsidy to London Transport should be paid has been raised by a number of noble Lords. Lord Underhill's Bill provides a stop-gap solution to this problem. It returns the GLC to the position in which it was before the Law Lords' ruling. But, as several noble Lords have hinted, this may not necessarily be the right and ultimate solution to London's traffic problems. The noble Lord, Lord Marsh, has said that the level of subsidies should not be paid by the ratepayers alone. He in fact advocated, and he was supported by the noble Lord, Lord Plummer, that London Transport should be handed back to national government. I think indeed that my noble friend Lord Pitt of Hampstead agreed with this solution.

My Lords, I indicated that I would not quarrel with that solution.

However, my Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Pitt of Hampstead, went on to say that it was of the utmost importance how people travelled around London, and underlined the importance how people travelled around London, and underlined the importance which I do not think was underlined by many other speakers, of having an efficient and effective system; of having a high quality of service. The question of a high quality of service can go hand in hand with the other points we have mentioned.

The noble Lord, Lord Plummer, raised the difficult question of how to ensure that money is well spent by London Transport Executive once they receive it. He reminded your Lordships that when the agreement relating to the 1969 Act came about, he rejected the possibility of a passenger transport authority, and I am sure he was right to reject that solution to the problem. The situation today, with an elected authority determining the policies of London Transport—an authority which spelt out, as my noble friend Lord Underhill pointed out, in its election address what it intended to do—gives an area of accountability.

However, I agree in some ways with my noble friend Lady Denington that the solution to the problem is not easy. I hope we shall not regard this as a political problem; it affects all Londoners and the vitality of London as a whole, and that should be of the greatest concern to us all. Lady Denington called it a national problem. I hope your Lordships will view it in that way. As I said, while the Bill is not the final solution to the problem, it is a solution which is available to us now, and I hope your Lordships will give it a Second Reading.

My Lords, I begin by saying that I, too, am not without some sympathy for what the noble Lord, Lord Underhill, said in moving the Second Reading of this Bill. Nevertheless, I must ask your Lordships to oppose it because I have to say that it is simply not the right way to tackle the problems of public transport in London.

Nobody could deny there are problems—very serious ones. Fares on London Transport have just doubled. I regret that as much as anyone. As has been said, transport is one of the major factors that people take into account when they decide where to live or work. They cannot change them overnight. They expect some stability. Of course, the cost of transport is liable to change, like anything else—because of world oil prices and many other factors; but people are entitled to expect that fares should not jump up and down because of the way transport is run and decisions are taken. The GLC has been responsible for running London Transport for 12 years. It is surely not without significance that for 11 of these 12 years, under both parties in County Hall, people knew where they stood; but suddenly, in the last year, all that has changed.

It is easy to say it is all due to the Law Lords and that all we need do is reverse their decision and all will be well. The GLC are trying to show that fares have doubled because they are no longer allowed to give London Transport a reasonable amount of subsidy. They have put out figures which take account of only part of the subsidy which London Transport gets. In fact, London Transport is still getting a massive amount of subsidy from taxpayers and ratepayers this year. Even leaving aside the £125 million needed to make good last year's deficit—and the noble Lord, Lord Ponsonby, said the experiment lasted only a short time; they managed to run up a £125 million deficit—they will be getting around £250 million now, nearly one-third of their total costs. Apart from last year, that proportion has remained fairly constant over the last five years. The noble Lord, Lord Pitt, said the Government should not run away from their obligations. There are those who say they should have run much faster.

My Lords, may I ask the Minister to compare the contribution the Government make to London Transport with the contribution they make to British Rail?

I should have thought we were not talking about the same thing by any manner of means—

Why not?

—and if the noble Lord is suggesting that there should be some dramatic reduction in the subsidy to British Rail, then that is a point of view.

No, my Lords; raise the contribution to London Transport.

My Lords, why have fares doubled? To put what has happened in perspective, we need to relate the new fares to what they were before they were cut last October. In fact, they are now about one-third higher in cash terms than they were six months ago. The last increase before that was in September 1980. If the previous policy had continued, there would have had to be some increase since then to take account of increased costs. The new fare levels are in fact about 15 per cent. above what would have been needed to keep up with inflation over the last 18 months.

Many people would say that fares were already too high. London Transport has been in a spiral of increased costs, leading to increased fares, leading to a loss of passengers, lower revenue and more fares increases. There are underlying problems which cannot be solved simply by increasing subsidies if the available resources are not used effectively. I quote from a Government White Paper on Transport Policy:

"subsidies transfer the cost of a service from the traveller to the taxpayer or the ratepayer. And the traveller is often a taxpayer or ratepayer himself. To use subsidies to disguise from people the cost of the services they are paying for is pointless".

That White Paper was published in June 1977 by the then Labour Government, and I agree with what it said.

The real problems which need to be tackled are how to tailor services to meet the changing demand for public transport, how to make it more responsive to the needs of passengers and how to make it more efficient. Over the last 10 years, the number of pas- sengers has fallen by about 20 per cent., yet London Transport still employs the same number of staff. The number of vehicle miles per employee has fallen over the past 10 years, whereas the National Bus Company and municipal bus operators have increased the number of vehicle miles per employee by about 15 per cent.

The passenger transport executives in the other conurbations have not done quite so well, but their costs are still much lower than London Transport's—by nearly £100 million a year for the number of bus miles run by London Transport. That is equivalent to half the extra revenue they will obtain from the recent fares increase. Of course I accept that London is different and that traffic congestion is much worse, and although the noble Lord, Lord Pitt, does not think so, the fact remains that fares would not be at their present level if costs had not gone up so much. One cannot simply ignore the whole point about what it costs. The policy of the present GLC administration would have made matters still worse, by running more bus miles and taking on more staff. Their policy would have cost an extra—I repeat, "extra"—£250 million this year. But there was no attempt to see how the money could be used to improve efficiency. For example, London Transport has said that to install automatic fare collection machinery would save substantial numbers of staff, but that was not part of the policy. London Transport have for many years tried without success to introduce one-man operation of tube trains.

My noble friend Lord Mottistone, the noble Lord, Lord Tordoff, and others—though not the noble Lord, Lord Underhill—pointed out what I must repeat tonight; namely, that the problems of London Transport are like so much of our industry: change has been resisted for too long. I do not underrate the human problems involved; and it is not only the fault of the people who work for London Transport. These problems cannot be solved overnight. But it is totally misleading to pretend that they are all due to the wording of an Act of Parliament and that all we have to do is change the words and all will be well again.

I understand the desire of the noble Lord, Lord Underhill, to see the legitimacy of subsidy payments placed beyond doubt. I have said that the existing law allows a reasonable amount of subsidy, and the noble Lord asks, "How much is reasonable?" But that is not a problem. It has never been a problem in the past with reasonable people. The GLC is pretending that the Lords' judgment requires London Transport to break even next year. It pretends that the only choice is between its policy of doubling the amount of subsidy at the expense of the ratepayers on the one hand and no subsidy at all on the other. No other previous GLC administration took that view. No other previous GLC administration ever had to be challenged on this point. The House of Lords' judgment has not changed the law. It has not said that the subsidies given by previous administrations were unlawful. I repeat, because it must be fully understood, that the real responsibility for the present situation lies fairly, squarely, and solely with the present GLC administration.

I am not going to rise to any bait about becoming involved in the politics of the matter. The noble Lord, Lord Tordoff, and I think the noble Lord, Lord Pitt of Hampstead, and certainly the noble Baroness, Lady Denington, stressed that we should not allow politics to become part of the issue. Would that that were so. Would indeed that politics did not come into it at all; and certainly I am not going to make an issue of that tonight. But the fact is that there are those who would say that the behaviour of the present GLC administration over its fares increase has been the behaviour of people who are not concerned to take the problems as seriously as we are taking them tonight, but are simply using them—and indeed they have said so—to mount political campaigns. But I shall say no more about that now, much though I am tempted to do so.

I am sure that the majority of people must feel that these politicians should stop campaigning and drop their slogans; let us get together to find a solution to the problems. My right honourable friend the Secretary of State has had recent meetings with Mr. Livingstone, Sir Peter Masefield, the chairman of London Transport, and the unions representing London Transport workers. He has asked the GLC to consider whether the £250 million which London Transport is now receiving in subsidies is being spent wisely and whether Londoners are getting proper value from it. He has asked them to examine carefully how Londoners can get better bus and tube services with the resources likely to be available.

Officials of the Department of Transport and the GLC are undertaking a joint exercise to work out options for London Transport's budget for 1983 and to see what levels of service could be provided and how much subsidy would be required. It will then be possible to consider whether the degree of subsidy required would be legitimate and, if not, what changes in the law would be required. Here I come to the point made by both the noble Lord, Lord Tordoff, and the noble Baroness, Lady Denington. I always like to say something to please her if I can; sometimes I do, though more often I do not, I fear. However, I am sure she will be pleased to hear me say that the Government are not ruling out the possibility of further legislation.

But I must make it crystal clear that there can be no question of giving the GLC a free hand to behave irresponsibly and to place massive extra burdens on London. Whether the Bill of the noble Lord, Lord Underhill, would actually allow that, I am not quite sure. On a number of occasions he has asked me to say how much subsidy is reasonable. I have tried to cover that point. With respect, I suggest that his Bill does not give us the answer. We do not know how the courts would interpret it, and it would be wrong of me to take drafting points on a Bill of this kind. That is not the reason why I am opposing the Bill, but it illustrates the difficulties. If legislation should be needed to clarify the law, it would have to be drafted with very great care.

I conclude by referring to what is the real question. As was rightly said by my noble friend Lord Plummer of St. Marylebone and by the noble Lord, Lord Marsh (in a splendid speech), it is the level, the scale, the degree and the extent of subsidy that we are talking about. That is the issue. The noble Lord struck what was for me a very personal note when he referred to what happens in local elections. Do I not know how right he was about what happens in local elections, having been on the receiving end, and looking around the Chamber I see other noble Lords who are nodding agreement with me on that point. We have all done what we thought was a jolly good job, only to be turned out by the electorate, perhaps because our own party was in power at Westminster, and our efforts were all to no avail.

What we now need is a new approach whereby the GLC considers what services are required and what fares would make the best sense, and then decides how costs are to be met, taking full account of all reasonable economies. That cannot be achieved simply by changing the words in the legislation. In fact, there is a real risk that legislation at this stage, however well intended, would actually divert attention away from what really needs to be done while the lawyers try to work out what it means. Therefore, I hope that the noble Lord, Lord Underhill, will understand why we do not want to see the Bill go further.

My Lords, I am sure that at this hour, after a very interesting debate, your Lordships will not expect me to speak at any length, but I should like to thank all of your Lordships who have taken part. I noticed that among those taking part were three former chairmen and a former leader of the GLC, and I should like to thank them for their contributions. I also wish to thank the noble Lord, Lord Tordoff, for his supporting words.

The noble Lord, Lord Mottistone, thought that Clause I was the important provision. That makes it clear that there should be an integrated and efficient service. The GLC, taking into account the legal opinion it has received, makes it quite clear that such a service cannot be provided unless there is a subsidy for the revenue account. Of course, it could be done quite simply if the GLC wanted to slash services and have less public transport; that could be done quite easily.

I appreciate what the noble Lord said about the commercial ratepayers. In replying to a debate it would be wrong to introduce new material, but there is considerable evidence of statements by employers in Central London that they are becoming increasingly perturbed over the difficulties facing their staff travelling into Central London, due to traffic congestion and the high cost of travel. That is what employers have stated.

I appreciate the generous remarks made by the noble Lord, Lord Marsh, about how I had referred to his statements, to which, 1 am very pleased to note, he still adheres. I am sorry that he said that he cannot support the Bill.

The important question that we must consider tonight is, what are we going to do now?—not, what are we going to do in two, three, or four years' time? We have the problem now, and until we do something the transport situation in London will remain very difficult.

The noble Lord, Lord Bellwin, extended sympathy to me, but then called upon noble Lords to oppose the Bill. If we took at face value everything that he said, we would question subsidy for British Rail and subsidy for the National Bus Company—which, perhaps I ought to remind your Lordships, is still publicly-owned; the noble Lord praised its work—and we would do away with the transport suplementary grant, which enables county councils throughout England and Wales to make grants towards public transport, and for other purposes. Of course, everyone recognises that without those subsidies there could be no transport system in this country. I was very pleased that the noble Lord, Lord Marsh, emphasised the position of public transport throughout the world.

There have been appeals not to make this a party political issue. It seems that other countries do not do that, even though they have public transport, and have subsidies far higher than ours. The subsidies to the railway system and the capital public transport system in this country are the lowest in the world. They do not seem to make party political issues out of it, and I hope we shall not make a party political issue out of this tonight.

The noble Lord said that the Government do not rule out further legislation but he will not give any free hand for the present GLC to behave irresponsibly. I emphasised in my speech that the Law Lords' ruling, which confirmed the 1955 Act on the question of fiduciary responsibility, still obtains. Therefore, even with my Bill the GLC would still have to behave responsibly.

But what is overlooked in the comments of the noble Lord, Lord Bellwin, is that the legal opinions to which referred—these are not the GLC opinions, not the London Transport opinions; these are opinions from learned counsel—say that the law must be changed, that something must be done quickly, because otherwise the existing interpretation of the law is going to make it absolutely impossible for the GLC and London Transport, as they make their plans during the next two or three months, to budget for next year. Unless the constraints on them are removed, then the budgeting will undoubtedly mean further cuts in services; and, as other noble Lords have said, cuts in services mean further congestion. Therefore, we are not considering only the benefit of the people who use public transport, we are considering employers, and we are considering everyone who benefits by the removal of traffic congestion from the streets of London.

Much as I should like to be able to ask leave to withdraw this Bill I cannot unless, frankly, the noble Lord can get up and tell me that very quickly the Government will resolve the position and clarify, the law, because all responsible opinion says that the law must be clarified and must be changed. If the noble Lord will say that the Government will do that, then I will not press this to a Division, but unless that can be done then I must ask the House to give this Bill a Second Reading.