asked Her Majesty's Government:

My Lords, we already have measures in place to deter the hijacking of passenger aircraft. They were substantially enhanced on and following 11th September. Following the attacks in the United States, the Cabinet Office commissioned through the Committee on Domestic and International Terrorism an urgent and wide-ranging review of aviation security. As a result, a number of issues have been identified that may well result in further additional security measures being imposed upon airports and airlines.

My Lords, I thank my noble and learned friend for his answer. Is he able to give more details of the action the Government propose taking to give aircraft passengers a much greater sense of security and safety? Specifically, are the Government proposing to implement any new measures following last month's attempt by the shoe bomber on the flight from Paris to the United States? The attempt has given rise to very great apprehension.

My Lords, although it would be wrong for me to go into too much detail about the precise action being taken, the committee that I mentioned is considering matters such as systems to check passport validity, acceleration of work on security equipment, extended background checks on airport employees and revised aircrew security training. Those are only some examples.

My noble friend asked about the consequences arising from the shoe bomber incident. I should make it clear that we have both the physical and technical means of detecting whether a shoe has been modified, and those security measures are in regular use at UK airports. Since the incident, UK airports have been paying particular attention to footwear during the security screening of passengers.

My Lords, has any addition or alteration been made to flight deck security? As I have said previously, only on Israeli airlines is the door to the flight deck locked before departure and unlocked only after the aircraft lands. Consequently, if any terrorist sought entry, threatening, for example, to blow up the plane unless the door was opened, the threat would be ignored. Have we in place any proposals to improve the current situation in which there has been free and very liberal use by passengers of the invitation to visit the flight deck?

My Lords, the Civil Aviation Authority, with United States and European colleagues, is urgently examining the design of cockpit doors to determine which types of hardening and locking mechanisms are most compatible with safety standards. As an interim measure, the CAA issued a fast-track procedure to enhance in-flight security, allowing modifications to aircraft cockpit doors to be made to prevent unauthorised access without endangering aircraft safety. The CAA required all UK operators to lock cockpit doors with effect from 18th September. No visits to the flight deck are allowed.

My Lords, I declare an interest as a director of British Airways. As the Minister said, the CAA now requires all British aircraft to lock cockpit doors. Will the Government put their weight behind that and say that it is a statutory requirement?

My Lords, as the noble Baroness said, the current CAA guidance is clear to all who must follow it. As for the Government's position, the review to which I referred will advise us on its conclusions. Our position will subsequently he made clear.

My Lords, bearing in mind that those boarding transatlantic flights at Kennedy airport currently have to remove their shoes for inspection before entering the departure area, but that those boarding transatlantic flights at London Heathrow airport do not, will the Minister confirm that all inquiries have been made to ensure that the British security equipment is able in all cases to detect every known explosive or explosive device that could be concealed in a shoe without the shoe being removed and put through the X-ray machinery?

My Lords, one can never give absolute guarantees on security, and I would not seek to do so in any answer that I gave. As I indicated in answer to the initial Question asked by my noble friend, Lord Janner, we have the physical and technical means to detect modification, and guidance has been given. The implication of the noble Lord's question is that we are not doing as well as, for example, the United States. The advice I have is that we believe that such detection is more likely in this country than anywhere else.

My Lords, is this not yet another argument in favour of the introduction of national identity cards which contain much data?

My Lords, I am reluctant to be drawn into that argument. It is a long step from bombs in shoes to identity cards.

My Lords, will the Minister tell us how many recommendations the Government have received from the Civil Aviation Authority and how many have been implemented? Do they expect to receive more recommendations from the CAA?

My Lords, I cannot give an answer as regards the number of such recommendations. However, I should make it absolutely clear that the CAA is engaged with government—that is exactly as it should be—in trying to identify what specific further measures should be taken in addition to those adopted in the immediate aftermath of 11th September and since 11th September. I shall write to the noble Viscount as regards the specific questions he asked.

My Lords, how good are the arrangements for checking heavy luggage carried in the hold? In the days before September 11th, if a passenger with checked-in luggage did not turn up for the flight great efforts were made to remove his or her luggage in case it contained a bomb. However, if certain passengers want to be blown up, that precaution is meaningless. Therefore, it is necessary to examine with great care luggage that is carried in the hold.

My Lords, that important point about luggage is being considered by the committee to which I referred. I shall write to the noble Lord with details.

asked Her Majesty's Government:

My Lords, the Government have said that they will complete an assessment of the five economic tests within two years of the start of this Parliament. The assessment has not yet started but the necessary preliminary analysis—technical work that is necessary to allow us to undertake the assessment within two years as promised—is under way. No separate budget allocation has been made for the preliminary and technical work for 2001–02.

My Lords, I thank the Minister for that reply. However, if the assessment of the economic tests indicates that joining the euro is not clearly and unambiguously to the economic advantage of this country, will the Government put off any question of a referendum during the lifetime of this Parliament?

My Lords, we shall undertake a referendum only if the five tests are met so that there is a clear and unambiguous case for joining.

My Lords, assuming the economic tests still stand, does my noble friend accept that it is rare for two economists to agree on almost anything? Does he therefore accept that the final decisions will be made by non-economists; namely, the Cabinet?

My Lords, I can certainly confirm in response to the noble Lord's first point that the five economic tests set out in October 1997 are still in force. My objective in responding to these matters is to sound as far as possible like a "speak your weight" machine. As regards what economists and non-economists will do, the Treasury will carry out the assessment, the Chancellor will present that assessment to the Cabinet and the Cabinet will make a recommendation to Parliament. Parliament will then decide on a referendum so that the final decision is taken by the British people who are in the main not economists.

My Lords, would not government money be best spent on persuading British industry to adapt to the existence of the single currency? The Treasury must be well aware that major reorganisations have occurred among large companies on the Continent to adapt their strategies to the existence of, and the opportunities offered by, the new currency. Is there not a danger that by prolonging uncertainty the Government will again put British industry at a disadvantage, as happened when the Common Market was founded and similar large reorganisation took place on the Continent but not in Britain? The Prime Minister seems worried about the matter, but is it not a case that we shall never learn?

My Lords, the Treasury is not only well aware that British industry is preparing for the fact that the euro exists, but since 1997 has consistently encouraged that. We have published a series of national changeover plans to reflect the fact that it is, as the noble Lord, Lord Taverne, rightly said, in this country's interest to be fully prepared for the euro and to be prepared for it whether or not we are ourselves within EMU. That has been a consistent part of government policy from the outset.

My Lords, the EU says that we shall have to rejoin the ERM before joining the euro. The Government say that we shall not. Will the Minister give an undertaking today that after a "yes" vote in a referendum we shall not join the ERM before joining the euro?

My Lords, the Government have no intention of joining the exchange rate mechanism. Having said that, I think that the noble Lord is a little out of date. No doubt he quoted what an unnamed Commission official said yesterday about British membership of the exchange rate mechanism. However, I do not think that he has read today's Financial Times which points out that Commissioner Soldes has said that there is a margin for manoeuvre.

My Lords, will the Government's "speak your weight" machine say how long we have to wait before we can speak up in favour of the euro? Does my noble friend agree that political confidence in any economic project is a sine qua non of its success?

My Lords, I have no intention of seeking to censor what the noble Lord, Lord Harrison, says. His comments constitute a valuable contribution to the debate. They always have been and, no doubt, will continue to be so.

My Lords, with regard to the so-called convergence test, will the Government take into account in particular the experience of the United States and Canada? For many years those economies might have been thought to be convergent and at one stage the Canadian dollar was worth more than the US dollar. However, had the Canadian Government agreed to go into a single currency at that point, the subsequent effect on the Canadian economy would have been utterly disastrous.

My Lords, I am sure that that is one of the considerations that will be taken into account. I notice that contributions from the Opposition Benches always avoid actually taking a position on whether the Opposition are in favour of going into the euro. They have valuable points to make but they are peripheral.

My Lords, why do the Government continue to deceive the British people by pretending that the euro involves an economic project? The Commission and everyone else in Europe are quite open about the fact that it is a constitutional initiative, which is designed to cement together the emerging EU mega-state. What is the point of economic tests for a constitutional project?

My Lords, the noble Lord says that the Government are continuing to deceive the British people. If I were to respond to that, it would be like responding to the question "Have you stopped beating your wife?", which my wife would not allow me to do. As to whether there are other considerations, we have always said that there are other considerations but that they can be applied only once the economic tests have been satisfied.

My Lords, is my noble friend aware that economics is a universal science and that there is therefore no concept that could be meaningfully put forward about a decision that was not economic in nature? Those who suggest that the matter is all political are simply talking rubbish. This is an economic decision problem because all problems are economic decision problems.

My Lords, I am not really one for academic discipline—I was a university fellow in economics but flunked out of that position when I discovered that I did not understand anything about it. However, my noble friend's response to the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Pearson, is very worth while.

asked Her Majesty's Government:

My Lords, the Government have made it clear that they expect France to lift its ban as soon as possible and the Commission to take further proceedings in the European Court of Justice if France does not do so within a reasonable period. We have also written to the Commission seeking a relaxation of the conditions of the date-based export scheme. Officials met the industry yesterday to discuss the way forward.

My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister for that robust Answer. In reality, are we not witnessing yet another case of a senior—indeed, a founder member—of the European Union flouting the rules in order to try to get advantages for its own producers? That makes a mockery of the whole concept of a "common" market. More importantly, will the Minister assure the House that he intends to make certain that the Commissioner imposes maximum sanctions on the French Government if they persist in refusing to take British beef—a market which represented about 46 per cent of our pre-1996 worldwide beef exports?

My Lords, the export market to France before BSE was certainly very important for this country's livestock industry. By observing the new standards we could begin to restore that market once France has withdrawn its ban, as it is bound to do in view of the Court judgment. My right honourable friend the Secretary of State made it clear at the Agricultural Council just before Christmas that we expect the Commission to take action and that, within a reasonable timescale, we will press it to do so. I hope that the French comply. If they do not, I hope that the Commission will take the strongest possible steps, as the noble Earl suggested.

My Lords, what do the Government regard as a reasonable period in this context?

My Lords, the next action rests with the Commission rather than the Government. As with similar cases, there is no set timescale but, as with cases in which a government have not complied with a judgment of the Court of Justice, the Commission has tended to take up the matter within two or three months.

My Lords, does the Minister agree that it is not just farmers who think that the Government should be much more vociferous in protesting against a flagrant breach of European law and that they should do so publicly and privately using every possible occasion and every possible EU forum? Does he further accept that those of us who are most strongly in favour of the EU also feel most strongly that it is completely unacceptable for a country that regards itself as an advocate of further European integration to go flagrantly against the integration that is currently supposed to exist and to defy the rule of law, which is the foundation upon which the whole of the EU edifice has been built?

My Lords, I and, I think, the whole House endorse that position. We have made our position clear both publicly and privately, directly and indirectly. We expect France to comply.

My Lords—

My Lords—

My Lords, shall we hear from the Cross Benches?

My Lords, I declare an interest as chairman of Honest Foods. The Minister may be interested to know that we are trying to organise a visit of 12 producers of British food to the game fair at Chambourg on 21st and 22nd June. What is the position of the several beef producers who have shown an interest? Will they be banned by the French? If so, what representations will the Minister make to ensure that appropriate demonstrations are made of British beef and that it is sold to the French?

My Lords, British beef producers, like other food producers, have every right to try to sell their wares in France. The British Government support them in doing so. I would hope that the French will have complied by June, although one has to bear in mind that there are certain domestic complications of an electoral variety in France at the moment, which may make that more difficult. I also believe that there are many people and companies within France who would welcome the restoration of British beef exports.

My Lords, what is the current position on BSE in this country and is there any BSE in the herds in France?

My Lords, the number of cases of BSE in Britain is coming down very rapidly, whereas the number in France is increasing. There are more than 250 cases in France. In absolute numbers the incidence in Britain is still significantly higher than in France. Historically, we have had a huge number of cases—178,000—whereas France has had only a few hundred. The issue needs to be put in perspective. Nevertheless, our figures are going down and those for France are going up.

My Lords, first, will the Minister tell the House more about the discussions that were held yesterday? If I understood his response to an earlier question, he said that the French could hold out until June before fines were imposed. No; I see that he is shaking his head. Perhaps he will clarify the situation.

Secondly, how many discussions have taken place between Margaret Beckett and her opposite number in France in which there was an opportunity for her to lobby on behalf of this country? That would be in addition to the lobbying that has been going on with David Byrne, the Commissioner.

My Lords, yesterday's discussions related mainly to the terms of the DBES. We have asked for some modification to that regime to enable more abattoirs to meet the standards that are required to restore British beef exports to Europe. On discussions at the European level, as I said in response, I think, to the noble Lord, Lord Hooson, the Commission allows a reasonable amount of time—usually two or three months. The next move is for the Commission to take the matter to the Court of Justice for a ruling. I hope that within such a timescale the French could begin to comply. However, the complications to which I referred apply. As regards bilateral discussions, my right honourable friend had discussions in the margins on this and related issues, and made the point formally at the Agricultural Council in December.

My Lords, the Minister has accepted the importance to beef producers here of the export market to France. But what is his comment on the fact that, according to figures produced by the Meat and Livestock Commission, imports of beef to Britain rose by another 14 per cent last year? Is he concerned at the ever-rising volume of imports, which are having a detrimental effect on our home market?

My Lords, there has been a marginal increase in beef consumption within the UK and imports have met some of that demand. I believe it is reasonable to expect that there will be some increase in beef imports. Our concern is that we do not import illegal or diseased meat. We believe that we should be moving to freer trade, and our aim is to increase British exports to match that as well as competing at home.

asked Her Majesty's Government:

My Lords, the Home Secretary has decided to suspend removals to Zimbabwe until after the presidential election is held. We shall then assess the country situation and the risks faced by individual returnees and decide whether to resume removals. In the meantime, consideration of individual applications for asylum will continue.

My Lords, I am absolutely delighted that the Government have seen sense at last on this sensitive issue. But why did a spokesman say to the press as late as Saturday night that there would not be a suspension of removals at this point? Was that not calculated to arouse fear unnecessarily among Zimbabwean asylum seekers?

My Lords, I do not accept what my noble friend says. It is not fair to blame a spokesman for what was said on Saturday night. At ten past live on Monday this week I made exactly the same statement. Until the policy changes, it remains in place.

Oh!

My Lords, that is the reality; that is the way it is. On Monday I also made the point that we were not planning to return anyone on Monday evening. The policy has been under active consideration. It has not gone away over recent months and, contrary to what is said, we have not been working on old information. We have been assessing the situation on an almost daily basis.

My Lords, I believe that we all appreciate this change of policy and the fact that the matter is under constant review and consideration, and so on. But is the Minister aware of widespread complaints That the Home Office assessments always run hopelessly behind the pace of events in Zimbabwe? Is it not disgraceful that politically vulnerable people have been deported and sent back to Zimbabwe when it has been widely known for weeks and months that the country is descending into a police state? That has been perfectly obvious even to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. Is there no contact between the Foreign Office and the Home Office? If not, can such contact take place now so that this situation does not arise again?

My Lords, what the noble Lord said is not the reality of the situation. The fact that we publish the country assessments only twice a year in April and October does not mean that nothing happens between those times. Our case workers use the most up-to-date information available. When assessing an individual case, either they refer to extra bulletins which are provided following publication of the country assessments or they take advice from people inside the Home Office, the Foreign Office, our embassies and high commissions abroad, diplomats on the ground or others in the country of origin. Each case is judged on its merits. It is simply not the case that we use old information.

As everyone knows, the situation has deteriorated ever since President Mugabe began his attempt to introduce so-called "land reform". But we have constantly updated our assessments and, indeed, we received further advice from the Foreign Office on Monday this week. The policy was announced by the Home Secretary yesterday, but it will not alter individual cases. We shall continue to assess each case on its merits. We shall then assess the situation after the elections have taken place.

My Lords, if the CIPU assessments are updated on a regular basis, why cannot they be published on the web so that advisers and adjudicators can see them there? Secondly, what are the Government intending to do about their arrangements following the decision by the Secretary of Slate yesterday? Will bail be granted automatically to anyone who has been through the appeal process and is now awaiting the presidential elections before the Secretary of State makes a decision on whether to send back that person? Will the Secretary or State now also reconsider the Oakington treatment, which is applied to all Zimbabwean asylum seekers automatically?

My Lords, we are taking legal advice on the position regarding bail. As is known, detainees cannot be removed until after the election has taken place, when the situation will be reassessed. As we debated at length during the passage of the anti-terrorism Bill last year, a different legal situation arises if we know that we cannot remove a person. In such a case, we cannot normally detain that person. However, we are taking legal advice on that situation at present.

So far as concerns the bulletins, I understand that they are available. They are not published in the way that the country assessments are published in April and October, but extra bulletins are indeed available. I cannot say how quickly they are put on to the web.

In relation to the question about Oakington, the answer is: no. We shall maintain the Oakington situation and I shall give noble Lords two good reasons why. Since the beginning of this year—it is now only the 16th of the month—there have been at least two cases, among others, of people arriving in this country from Zimbabwe. The two people in question—one arrived on 2nd January and the other on the 5th—went to Oakington for fast-tracking. They were interviewed on 7th and 9th January. Both were granted asylum. In other words, there is another side to the coin: people from Zimbabwe are passing through Oakington and being granted asylum. The idea that everyone is rejected is nonsense. The vast majority are rejected, but noble Lords may have heard the interview on the "PM" programme last night of the official on the ground from the MDC in Zimbabwe. He spoke about people—the vast majority of whom were not MDC activists—buying MDC letters and coming to this country. Thus, noble Lords will see that there are two sides to the argument.

rose to call attention to the problem of overstretch and equipment failure in the British Army; and to move for Papers.

And major.

And major, and probably colonel and lance-corporal. However, all such officers we saw had had unpleasant experiences of sexual harassment. In most cases, nothing had happened as a result. The officers concerned did not want to take action because that would have been embarrassing and difficult. One such case resulted in a court martial. It seemed that there were too many such incidents. I do not know what can be done about that.

Pay 2000 has also caused problems. One warrant officer was promoted on 28th March. Another was promoted on 1st February. Pay 2000 meant a difference of £45 per day in their pay. I believe that that was the figure. It was sufficiently large for me to notice. The noble Lord, Lord Tomlinson, who was present, will perhaps confirm or correct that figure. The differential in pay was considerable.

I turn to equipment. Bowman, the Army wireless system, is Heaven knows how far behind. Somehow, the system must be put right. It is intolerable that people should go into battle with wireless sets which do not work when the Dutch and Canadians all have perfectly workable systems which we could have bought off the shelf. The SA80 rifle used not to work at all. Everybody says that the new version is extremely good. Why was it not used? Because the Army said that it could not he got to the aircraft carrier. That excuse is not acceptable.

There are further problems with equipment. There is no Scimitar replacement. When I joined the Army there were Dingo scout cars and Daimler armoured cars, which were designed in about 1941. Subsequently, Saracens were used. I refer to the light cavalry reconnaissance vehicle. There seems to be a great problem with that replacement. I suspect that we are paying too much, unnecessarily, for the Eurofighter. I am told that the money spent on carriers—I totally support the carriers—is making a terrible hole.

We went also to Sierra Leone. That arose by accident. Ministers refused to make up their minds until quite late as to whether or not to intervene. Triumph was not present, so we went by air to the airbase. The sudden arrival of really professional soldiers threatened the various warring parties. They drew back and within minutes we were involved in a neo-colonial situation. That was welcomed beyond anything by the people who live there. At a reception at the High Commission, I asked the chief policeman, "How long would you like us to stay and advise you?" He replied, "Twenty-five years". Their experience of their own self-government has been catastrophically disastrous.

I hope that the Government will ensure that the aim is clear. At present, our presence in Sierra Leone is based solely on bluff of an immensely high quality. I was in the jungle keeping my two colleagues awake and the animals away by snoring. I saw one of the soldiers, a mortar platoon corporal in the descendents of the Durham Light Infantry, in the pouring rain. I asked the soldier what he was reading. I am not normally totally lost for words, but he said that he was reading Homer's Odyssey. He then said that he interspersed it with Jackie Collins; a good intellectual mix.

My point is that we are in serious danger of getting into overstretch. Twenty-seven per cent of the Army is now committed. I know that the figure was 27 per cent when the present Government came into power because that is what Mr Hoon said yesterday. The Army hoped that the SDR would make it 20 per cent. It is making certain that one cannot have proper training, proper leave and proper rotation. Soldiers who like being soldiers want to do their job properly. They want to be soldiers. They do not want to be stuck in Catterick. But if one overstretches them—they are 8,000 people under-strength at the moment, so I am told—one will make retention of them difficult and he in danger of degrading our most wonderful asset. It is a stupendously good asset.

Mr Blair goes prancing around the Indian subcontinent, heavily disguised as Peter Sellers, without the accompaniment of Sophia Loren, with a magic carpet on his head. That may he a little unkind, but it is quite funny and I think reasonably accurate. Perfectly reasonably he has this wonderful machine with which he wishes to play. What are we doing in Afghanistan? I do not know. The Kyber Pass is blocked. The bridges over the Oxus are blown. We are under command of the Americans. The Americans do not want to do anything that we are doing in Kabul. We are not allowed outside of Kabul. This is an overstretched commitment. It goes too far. I do not know what it is there for.

I might have been a little unkind to Mr Blair; all Prime Ministers are prone to play with this lovely little toy, the British Armed Forces. I concede that if I was Prime Minister I could not resist the temptation. But, resist it they must, because if we overstretch them, if we make them do more than they can do—they will try their hardest—we shall destroy a quite exceptionally high-quality instrument. It is that with which I am concerned. I beg to move for Papers.

My Lords, I must apologise for arriving a little late to the debate. I apologise, not least to the noble Earl, Lord Onslow, because the House and I certainly like to hear the noble Earl. I do not think that we should like to see him as Prime Minster; heaven knows what would happen.

The noble Earl brings to the House not merely his own experience of a historic kind, but the advantage of the Armed Forces Parliamentary Scheme, which he and my noble friend Lord Tomlinson enjoyed last year. It brings a refreshing relevance to the experience and quality of debate in both this House and in the other place.

I understand the noble Earl's anxiety about the commitments which our Armed Forces bear at the present time. Unlike the noble Earl, I am nowhere near so critical of them. That is partly because the rotation between overseas duty is now better than it was before the SDR. The present level of overseas service is that which was required or planned within the SDR. It commanded widespread approval. Nevertheless, it is a point that exercises Her Majesty's Government because we must ensure that our forces are not deployed overseas on tasks which may prevent them maintaining the high skills which must be retained by adequate training and exercise in the broad range of military duties.

I agree with the noble Earl when he referred to our Armed Forces as being of very high quality. That is undoubtedly an advantage to Britain. It undoubtedly also allows Britain to more than justify its place within the western alliance and its seat on the UN Security Council. We are obliged to punch our weight. It is sad that we have been punching more than our weight for a very long time. It is rather a pity that in the long years during which we were on the Opposition Benches, the then Government were far too tame in their attitude to our European neighbours, who were quite prepared to see us bearing a grossly unfair share of the security burden. One hopes that greater effort will be maintained by the present Administration to encourage our European partners to make the proper contribution which, in all fairness, their membership of the NATO arrangement requires.

The noble Earl referred to equipment. I do not think that the present Administration has any reason to be apologetic about their approach to the equipping of our Armed Forces. No one suggests that they are perfect. But the imperfections which they inherited were substantial and more than justified the approach which can best be described as Smart Procurement. I make no claims for the quality of that policy because a number of years will need to elapse before it can be properly assessed. When one considers the deficient Bowman system, and the year after year that passed while that grossly inefficient arrangement applied, one can only congratulate Her Majesty's Government on seeking to remedy that appalling inheritance of incompetence.

I hope that the Smart Procurement, which is an attempt to secure reasonably firm specifications, will not lead to such regular, frequent and multitudinous changes in specification which have delayed equipment to our Armed Forces year after year. The approach embodied in the policy has a great deal to commend it.

So far as concerns commitments of equipment for our Armed Forces, I do not know whether we would have seen the same degree of determination and resolution that has been shown with Eurofighter. When the present Government were elected, the Eurofighter faced very real question marks, not least because of the attitude of our German friends, who seemed to delay matters considerably. They have the same problem with regard to the future military transport. The Government have met that particular need for heavy lift by their arrangement with regard to the C-17 aircraft. We hope to see progress in the long-term provision of the future European large aircraft. But there are doubts about that. In the eyes of some noble Lords, that issue may not strictly relate to the Army, but if we do not have the heavy lift capacity, Her Majesty's Government are weakened in the response that they are able to make in international crises.

It is in the response to those crises that we have cause to congratulate Her Majesty's Armed Forces. They have borne an enormous variety of burdens. They exist, of course, primarily to defend the realm, to—if you—like shoot people where necessary in the defence of this country's interest. But a huge part of their endeavour has been in the service of humanity, in responding to catastrophe, famine, fire and flood. They have done so in ways which are of great advantage to this country and which can give a great deal of professional satisfaction to our Armed Forces.

It is a pity that the national press often seems to ignore the enormous contribution which our Armed Forces make to international humanity and stability. Often, they are looking to criticise and condemn without looking at the achievements and contributions which are offered. It is not quite the same with local newspapers. There we see regular reports throughout the length and breadth of this country. They deal with local people from units which are still associated with the locality, of their service here, there and indeed almost everywhere.

Those young men, and young women—

Thank you.

My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend Lady Jeger for that comment. Those young men and women do more than just look after themselves, as a high proportion of that age group may do; they look after our interests. If we argue that trade follows the flag, it should redound to the economic advantage of this country.

I am most appreciative of this opportunity, and I hope that other noble Lords will offer the same commendation of our Armed Forces and the way in which they are led. In this situation, they deserve that.

My Lords, the debate goes to the heart of the question of the current deployment of our armed services. I congratulate the noble Earl, Lord Onslow, on initiating it. I wish to associate those of us on these Benches with the encomium to our armed services given by the noble Lord, Lord Hardy of Wath.

I wish to raise two points about the risk of overstretch. The first relates to the situation in Northern Ireland. We all hope that the twin processes of decommissioning and demilitarisation will be fully implemented in fulfilment of the Belfast agreement. It was to be hoped that the restoration of the Executive and Assembly would make for further progress. That has been put in serious jeopardy by the antics of the Protestant paramilitaries over the Holy Cross school and the murder of a Catholic postman last weekend. Such incidents illustrate how fragile the situation remains and how easily it could quickly deteriorate.

If the security situation significantly worsens, are there enough reserves in the Army for it to be able fully to assist the police, were that to be deemed necessary? I am prompted to ask that for two reasons. It will be recalled that the British Army was initially called in at the start of the Troubles to assist in the protection of the Catholic community, which is again under siege. There is a danger that history will be repeated. Secondly, the police in Northern Ireland are undergoing an enormous transition from the old RUC to the new police service. They are therefore possibly less well positioned at the moment to deal with the current outbreaks of violence as effectively as they would wish, especially if the situation escalates, In other words, has the recent upsurge in violence and unrest in Northern Ireland been factored into current planning regarding the world-wide deployment of our troops?

My second major point relates to the pattern of overseas deployment. Troops are often vital to the process of re-establishing peace after the breakdown of civil society. However, peacekeeping and the remaking of a nation are a somewhat different matter. They are more a matter of policing than of soldiering. In any case, it is not the best use of professional soldiers, who are a scarce resource, for them to be deployed in protracted engagements in peacekeeping. Armies must be able to hand over as quickly as is feasible to an international police force specially trained for the purpose, which can, in turn, assist in the development of a regular domestic police force drawn from the citizens of the country in question.

I know that British police officers, including police officers from Northern Ireland, have often been seconded overseas to assist in the promotion of peace. However, the numbers have been quite small. Given the expanding role of the United Kingdom in peace missions abroad, I ask the Minister what thought has been given to increasing police involvement in peacekeeping, preferably on an international basis? Such a development would have merit in itself and would also release our armed services to concentrate on their core activities.

I realise that policing matters are primarily the responsibility of the Home Office and the armed services that of the Ministry of Defence, but there is a need for effective co-operation between them—and, indeed, between those two departments and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office—if the United Kingdom is to perform its international peacemaking and peacekeeping roles effectively and economically.

My Lords, I am very grateful to the noble Earl, Lord Onslow, for initiating this debate, because the British Army is indeed overstretched in a number of ways, although I wondered for a moment whether the noble Earl would ever get round to mentioning it. But in the preposterously short time available, I intend to concentrate on only one area—the state of the medical services.

How the sorry saga started is pretty well known. The defence costs study knocked the stuffing out of the Defence Medical Services and led to a mass exodus of specialists. That had two serious repercussions. First, it threw into question the ability of the medical services to support land operations overseas on a scale for which the operational troops had to be prepared and put a disproportionate reliance on the Territorial Army. Secondly, it made it almost impossible for those medical services properly to look after the service population in home stations. Servicemen and servicewomen had to wait so long for specialist appointments that there was an adverse effect on manning levels, leading to further overstretch over a wide field.

The present Government inherited the problem, but as they have been in power for over five years, they are under an obligation—which, I believe, they fully accept—to put things right and reverse the decline as a matter of urgency. But in this I hope that the Government will not display a degree of complacency and merely hope for the best.

In order to move in the right direction and perhaps assuage the increasing number of critics, the Government announced with some pride that they would be setting up, in partnership with the distinguished Birmingham teaching hospital, the Queen Elizabeth, a centre for defence medical excellence. That centre is now known as the Centre for Defence Medicine. The Government announced that they would allot £140 million of new money to the Defence Medical Services. It is not too clear what that £140 million was for. If it was to pay for the extra personnel that it is hoped to recruit, as a result of the Birmingham development, to fill the medical ranks, it has not yet been spent. The ranks have not yet been filled. The money should now be spent on other urgent things. If on the other hand the money has been spent, more money is badly needed.

I say this because, with other noble Lords, I had the privilege of visiting the new Centre for Defence Medicine at Birmingham, and I can tell noble Lords that so much more needs to be done. If the term "excellence" could be confined to the enthusiasm and dedication of the fairly small nucleus of teaching, research and clinical staff so far assembled there, that accolade would be fully justified. The people whom we met were absolutely splendid and were working their heart out. I would echo the words of the group captain in charge, who said that failure was not an option for them. How right he is. Indeed, it is not an option for anyone. If the new venture fails to attract and—more importantly—retain the right number of specialists over a significant period, it will spell disaster for the future of our Armed Forces, particularly the Army, as a usable force for good.

At the moment, at Birmingham the Centre for Defence Medicine has one surgical ward of its own and CDM personnel provide half the staff of the emergency and trauma ward—the accident ward. Linked with this, there is literally a handful of specialists in clinical research and teaching, none of them with any assistants or understudies and most of them under some sort of quite short notice to move somewhere overseas, whether it be to Sierra Leone, Kosovo or Kabul, to provide essential medical back-up. That is so because of the general shortage of specialists right across the board. For instance, there is only one cardiac specialist of consultant status in the whole of the Armed Forces. If one of the consultants at Birmingham is required elsewhere, that function of teaching or research or that clinical contribution would stop, putting back the whole reconstruction and building up operation.

No one in his senses could fail to see the great advantage of linking service clinical activity, research and training to those of the National Health Service, but the purely Armed Forces aspect must never be forgotten, if the aim is to be achieved. For one cannot maintain defence medical services with high morale, capable and ready to go anywhere and share in the hardships, dangers and separation of operational troops unless they have an ethos and an esprit de corps of their own.

At the moment, the right climate for that just does not exist. The military personnel seldom if ever wear uniform; they have no messes of their own and there are no proper nurses' accommodation or married quarters in close proximity to their work. Moreover, their X factor in no way compensates for the lack of overtime paid to their civilian counterparts—this applies in particular to nurses—or for the continual and lengthy separation from their families because of the overall shortage of trained staff. Yet, as far as I can judge, there is no money presently in the programme for these very high priority improvements.

This is no way to make a breakthrough and turn the corner. If these good ideas are ever to get off the launch pad and be more than a face-saving gimmick, and if they are to build up fully manned and respected medical services capable of supporting the Armed Forces in peace and in war, these things have got to be put right and funded as a matter of the greatest urgency. If not, the Government can forget about the Armed Forces, in particular the Army, being used, as I have said, as a force for good in what has been described as Britain's pivotal role. For without proper medical back-up, no extended deployment of military forces even in a humanitarian role, let alone in warlike operations, can be safe or can even be contemplated.

My Lords, I strongly support what was said by the noble and gallant Lord about the role that the British armed services can play as a force for good in the world. Furthermore, I support the Prime Minister in his belief that we have a priceless asset here which, if correctly deployed, properly trained and well equipped, can be a great force for good in appropriate circumstances. That is not to say that it will work in every circumstance that arises, because we cannot meet every circumstance, but it can do so on appropriate occasions.

I am deeply concerned about the present situation. I know that the Minister will give an effective and clear reply which will suggest, from the figures deployed, that the situation is satisfactory. However, I beg him to heed someone who had a degree of responsibility for these matters for seven years, first as Secretary of State for Northern Ireland and then Secretary of State for Defence. During that time I saw the challenges and problems presented by trying to achieve the 24-month tour interval and the problems posed—in particular on the Army but also on the other forces—by the serious problem we face.

We know, even as we debate this matter today, that we are already falling behind the Government's avowed target of moving towards an increase in our Army capacity of 3,000. At present I believe that we are some 8,000 personnel short, a figure which constitutes over 10 per cent of the total. That shortfall has meaning. When I became Secretary of State for Defence and reviewed the situation with regard to the battalions. I found that we were willing to pretend that we had 55 battalions. However, when the strength of those individual battalions was assessed, we found that the real strength of the British Army was significantly lower. When the Minister, in his responsibility for the Armed Forces, is advised about which regiment to deploy and which unit should next be moved, and he is happy to recognise that he is dealing with a unit that has not been recently deployed overseas, he may well find that a considerable proportion of the members of that unit will have been transferred from other units to make up the shortfall of that particular unit. Thus the reality is rather different.

Overstretch is not a piece of elastic. The problem will not suddenly bust on the Government, but the strain will grow and grow. Many of the statistics advanced address the problem only in terms of pure recruitment. However, it is not only a question of recruitment, although that factor is important. The term covers the recruitment of the junior ranks as well as other ranks. The key issue here is the ability to retain the captains, the majors, the sergeant-majors and the sergeants—I cite the Army ranks—who form the absolute core. That problem may creep up on the Minister.

During the Gulf War, as in other campaigns, a certain excitement comes in when we deal with a new territory and a new adventure. At that time, retention improved; people were keen to join the Army and see the world, thus getting a little adventure out of it. That spirit still exists. But what happens when those commitments become a continuing obligation? It is at that point that families begin to complain. I recall talking to a sergeant-major posted to Northern Ireland and asking him, "Are you enjoying this tour? Have you been to Northern Ireland before?". He replied with a weary look, "This is my eleventh tour". That exchange took place some 15 years ago. I shudder to think, if that sergeant-major is still serving in the Army, how many tours he may have completed by now.

The reality is that our commitments are terribly difficult to shake off. The noble Lord who spoke from the Liberal Democrat Benches pointed out that we are still meeting commitments in Northern Ireland on a large scale, although many had hoped that the Good Friday agreement would have helped to alleviate the situation. However, we see British troops back on the streets trying to cope with the most unpleasant disputes involving Catholic schoolchildren and ensuring a safe journey to school. Troops are required to intervene in community disputes.

I myself was responsible for one of our present commitments. At the time it was referred to as "providing comfort" although I think the name has been changed. I refer to the no-fly zone in northern Iraq which we put in place at the time to protect the Kurds from persecution by Saddam Hussein's forces. That undertaking is still being met some 10 years later.

We must ensure that these concerns are properly represented to the Treasury and to the Prime Minister. This morning I heard the Secretary of State for Defence comment rather glibly that there had been no change from the time when the Conservatives were in office. I believe that he quoted figures of 27 per cent and 26 per cent as the percentage of forces meeting operational commitments. However, I have seen briefing notes which suggest that the basis of the statistics has changed since those figures were originally set up. I have great respect for this Government, but I am deeply suspicious and I do not ever believe in any figures they produce—a tradition I bring with me from another place—without first checking the small print and closely examining the situation. Whatever is the figure, I hope that the Minister will take a close look at what is really happening in the services at the present time by following the path of individual officers and sergeant-majors. He is entitled to ask for that information and to get it. It will give him a far better indication of what is really happening and whether the problem of overstretch is developing.

I say that because once overstretch takes a hold, although I said earlier that it is not like a piece of elastic that will snap, people begin to comment, "Well, I'm getting out because the family won't stand for this continual moving about". After that, the next person's wife complains because her husband then has to take on extra work resulting from the departure of his colleague. In that way overstretch can build very rapidly.

I repeat that I am extremely concerned. If we are to have good armed services, they must be well trained. On the evidence that I have seen, some 85 training exercises were cancelled last year. We simply will not be able to point to the priceless asset that is at present our Armed Forces, cherished by all parties in this House, unless we ensure that those forces are properly trained, given adequate rest and recreation and allowed time to spend with their families. They will then be able to make the commitment that is an essential part of the role that we look to them to play.

My Lords, I am honoured to follow a former Secretary of State and a former Chief of the Defence Staff in this debate because they bring great knowledge of the situation to our deliberations.

The Statement made by the Secretary of State last Thursday, which we were unable to take in your Lordships' House because of the debate on the House of Lords White Paper, gave an indication of how serious the situation is. The Secretary of State admitted that,

"the … force will be about 5,000 strong. Putting it together has not been easy".—[Official Report, Commons, 10/1/02; col. 689.]

However, the Secretary of State insisted that it has been done without having any impact on our other operational requirements. Is that true?

The Afghanistan enterprise has had the most serious effect on regiments undertaking tours of duty, in particular in Northern Ireland, a point made by my noble friend Lord King. The Scottish regiments are particularly badly placed, with the Royal Scots currently serving in Northern Ireland more than one company deficient. The noble and gallant Lord, Lord Inge, warned on 17th December that the UK Armed Forces were dangerously over-committed.

We are told that recruitment is satisfactory and that the Armed Forces are, within reason, up to strength. But they are not. A simple headline figure does not answer the problem. While recruitment and staffing are just about adequate for present tasks, as soon as there is a crisis a breakdown will be inevitable. If Northern Ireland blows up again—and it very well may—we shall be in trouble.

Let me give some hard facts on the numbers. For the Army, probably the greatest problems lie with REME. At the last count, REME was 13.8 per cent under strength. REME has the people who make the toys work, and their skills are the most attractive to employers in civilian life who have other uses for these highly skilled people.

The figures in other areas are even more serious. The noble and gallant Lord, Lord Bramall, pointed out the situation in the medical services. In March 2001, the RAMC was 14.2 per cent under strength and Queen Alexandra's Royal Army Nursing Corps 35 per cent. At that time, Headquarters Infantry was confident that the infantry-trained strength deficit, which was 1,348, would be reduced to 1,100 by September. Can the Minister say whether that target was achieved.

It would be wrong to confine the debate to overstretch in the Army alone. In this era of "jointery", we must talk about all three services. The RAF is desperately short of pilots—again a well known fact. The service is doing what it can to ensure that when it has a trained pilot it does not lose him to a civilian airline, but it is not easy. The Royal Navy lacks nuclear engineers as well as pilots, both helicopter and fixed wing. As we know, the Sea Harrier force recently offered a bonus of £50,000 to retain up to 16 pilots, and it seems that only 21 are combat ready. At the same time, the RAF has a shortfall of 42 combat-ready pilots from a total of only 230. The shortage of Royal Navy/Royal Air Force fast-jet fighter pilots is estimated to rise to 132 by 2005–06. If recruiting targets are being met, it is clear that improvement can come only from improved pilot retention.

The Government continue to promise the aircraft carriers, and the in-service date has not, at the moment, slipped. That is good news—but the carriers will be of no use if there are not the trained men to crew them and the aircraft they carry.

Yesterday's news about the compulsory call-up of elements of the Territorial Army is most significant. Apart from giving the defenders of the TA the opportunity to say, "I told you so", it is rather worrying that it should be necessary. Having said that, that is what the TA is for and we welcome it—but it cannot be ignored that this is the first time that there has been a call-up since Suez. At the moment, it is part of only one intelligence unit, but the Minister has made it clear that he expects that the concept will have to be extended.

The Secretary of State's Statement last week mentioned, in passing, that 17 countries will be deploying troops alongside the United Kingdom in the security force. That is very helpful for anyone who has to run it. One does not have to be a chauvinist to wish good luck to New Zealand, which is providing the headquarters staff for this mélange, assisted by the Turks.

I have concentrated on manning shortages and not on equipment. I shall touch briefly on the A400M. The Germans seem to be reneging—it looks as though they will be reducing their order from 73 to 40—and the Italians have, at the present moment, fallen out. If the A400M project dies simply because there are not enough orders, what will happen? How long can the Government maintain the C-130Ks? Their out-of-service date is 2004. It looks as though they will be needed for another six years. Dr Moonie has spoken about a slippage in the A400M in-service date from 2007 to 2010. That is an immense worry. What will the Government do about it?

My Lords, we should all be grateful to the noble Earl, Lord Onslow, for introducing the debate, which he did in his usual amusing fashion but with the serious strategic content that one expects from a former subaltern in the Life Guards.

The noble Earl perhaps went over the top a little in his description of the equipment position. I know that there are many atrocity stories about tanks in the desert and different pieces of equipment going into different ships and so on, but, generally speaking, the Army is reasonably well equipped for its tasks. The Smart Procurement programme is likely to ensure that in the future it will be even better equipped.

The noble Earl made a much better point when he referred to overstretch and the fact that the resources of the Armed Forces are not sufficient to meet the commitments that they have to face. My understanding is that the Chiefs of Staff do not subscribe to this view. As I understand it, their view is that the Armed Forces are stretched and that they entirely agree with that. They believe that the Armed Forces should be stretched, but not overstretched. I understand that that is the kind of advice Her Majesty's Government are getting at the moment. But, like the noble Lord, Lord King, I remain deeply concerned about the situation.

After all, it is a matter of common knowledge, fact and observation that, at the moment, our Armed Forces have great and growing commitments. We have forces in Northern Ireland, Germany, Gibraltar, the Falkland Islands, the Balkans and so on. Indeed, we can look forward to even greater demands upon our resources in the future. There is to be the rapid reaction force under the European Security and Defence Initiative. We have heard from the Government that this will not require any extra manpower. Quite frankly, I find that a totally bizarre concept. Either it will require new manpower and new resources or there is no point in it at all. I subscribe personally to the second view. The suggestion that the rapid reaction force, to which we will supply forces when necessary, will not require any extra manpower is a bizarre concept around which I simply cannot get my mind. Perhaps the Government are better at it than I am.

We can also look forward to increased commitments in the war against terrorism. If the operations in Afghanistan are not to be the end of the war against terrorism—and they will not be the end, as the Government will be the first to agree—we have to look forward to deploying our forces wherever that commitment leads us, even if the deployment is of a short-term nature. The present commitments are—whatever may be the advice of the Chiefs of Staff—causing considerable concern among sergeants, sergeant-majors, pilots, soldiers and their equivalents in the other services. As the noble Lord, Lord Burnham, said, it is significant that reservists have been made subject to a compulsory call-up to perform certain tasks.

If the Armed Forces were not stretched to the limit and perhaps beyond, there should be no need to call up reservists. The noble Lord said that is what reservists are for—and I agree. Perhaps the arguments that many of us have advanced in the past for more attention to be paid to the Territorial Army are coming home to roost. If reservists are necessary at this stage in military deployment, that must indicate that the regular forces are not sufficient to meet our commitments. Unless that is so, I do not understand the reasoning.

The Government must look carefully at the organisation of the Armed Forces. Are they organised in a way that will fit the requirements and commitments that they will have to meet in the next five, 10 or 15 years? Do we really need armoured divisions, tanks and heavy aircraft or a different kind of Armed Forces? Should the Royal Navy and Royal Air Force play a greater role if part of the aim is the distant deployment of military force?

Surely it all comes down to the fact that any government must, in the current circumstances, give the funding, equipment and resources of the Armed Forces a much higher priority. The Armed Forces must not come way down the list of priorities.

I remind the House that the noble Lord, Lord Healey—who is not in his place—once said in a slightly different but still relevant context that if one does not have proper defences, one does not have schools and hospitals but a heap of rubble. We should bear that in mind.

My Lords, the central point was made by the noble Earl, Lord Onslow, when opening the debate—when he clearly implied in the witty but serious kernel of his speech that Downing Street inexorably adds to defence commitments and the Chancellor of the Exchequer controls the resources. For all practical purposes, those resources have been fixed for many years.

My noble friend Lord King, a distinguished former Secretary of State for Defence, implied that the patience and abilities of our Armed Forces are being sorely stretched. Evidence of that is obvious. We have a shortfall of 8,000 men in the Regular Army—which is particularly felt among senior ranks and junior officers. I declare an interest as president of the Council of the Reserve Forces and Cadets Associations.

The Territorial Army is 40,000-strong and effectively provides the relief valve for the overstretch of the Regular Army. At any one time over the past few years, 1,000 reservists drawn from all three services have served in a voluntary capacity—infilling for regular forces around the world. Ten per cent of our forces in the Balkans are drawn from the reserve forces. The noble Earl will remember that Lord Kitchener's opinion of the Territorial Army in the First World War was not entirely complimentary. I am glad that General Mike Jackson takes a very different view and is most supportive of and grateful for the role of the TA in particular in infilling the ranks of the regular forces.

My noble friend Lord Burnham referred to Monday's important statement about the first compulsory call-up of reserve forces since Suez. We came close during the Kosovo conflict but Monday's announcement signals an important change. Dr. Moonie, the junior Under-Secretary of State, indicated that the use of compulsory call-up should become more frequent in coming years. The noble Lord, Lord Chalfont, indirectly referred to some of the implications. An advantage of compulsory call-up, which the Territorial Army welcomes, is that it shares the burden between the employer—who signs up to protect the employment of the TA soldier under bipartisan legislation that was satisfactorily amended by the present Government—and the family. It is not just a matter of a reservist saying, "I volunteer'. All his colleagues will be called up, so it becomes a patriotic, sensible and rational thing to do.

My noble friend Lord Burnham referred to the partial call-up of 3 (Volunteer) Military Intelligence Battalion. Some 140 of them will be going to Afghanistan, and we wish them well.

We must, however, watch carefully the cost implications for employers—who must be satisfactorily compensated for re-employing and re-recruiting staff—and for the Army reservists themselves. The compensation paid for serving in the Army compared with loss of earnings may not be at all equitable.

From my experience of talking to all ranks and officers of the Territorial Army, they would welcome the call-up in due course of formed units—perhaps as a company of a battalion. If reservists can train and work together and have loyalty to the TA, that would draw on its strengths. In doing so, the authorities must work with employers and give as much notice as possible—and reflect the specific strengths and skills of the solders called up.

Gone are the days of Dad's Army. The Territorial Army of today is not one of our dads but of our sons and daughters. We wish them well.

My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lord Onslow for choosing as the subject of debate matters that have been of concern in recent years, as is illustrated in previous debates and Questions in the House.

On overstretch, there have been concerns about the danger of taking on too many commitments for the present size of the Army. I look forward to hearing the Minister's response on that point. In the past two or three days, the press has reported the mobilisation of Territorial Army intelligence units and that some of their members, in their civilian jobs, have been working on government communications. Their work includes important tasks affecting security. Who is now doing their jobs? Is this not an example of overstretch, even if it is on the security side as distinct from the Armed Forces, in stretching the staff skilled in communications? I am glad to have this early opportunity of putting that question to the Government.

I turn to failures of equipment. This is worrying if it is happening, for example, to vehicles, especially tanks and weapons. In 1999 there were reports from Kosovo that the radios of British units were unreliable arid were breaking down. The subject was raised in debates in this House in that year, in which I took part. I had hoped that all the necessary improvements had been made since then. I can sympathise with the units and their soldiers where wireless communications are made difficult by inadequate equipment.

That was a bugbear in World War II. Being a gunner and a field battery commander for three years, I was fortunate in having powerful radios. My 25-pounders could not otherwise have been used when they were needed. Fortunately, the Army gave priority to field artillery equipment for that reason. I often had to send radio messages for the infantry with whom I was operating because their radios were too weak to overcome interference which, of course, included that from enemy radios which happened to be on the same frequencies.

I understand that our tanks and field guns at present are of a high standard and reliable. Noble Lords will know that in World War II the British Army had to fight in tanks that were inferior to the enemy's in quality. Early in that war they broke down too often, especially in the desert. The late Lord Carver could have told us more from his experiences of that. The noble and gallant Lord, Lord Bramall, paid an elegant and accurate tribute to him in our debate on 17th December. I would add that he was an outstanding commander of armour in action. I was not in the 4th Armoured Brigade, as was the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Bramall, but in the 15th Scottish Division, with whom that brigade, commanded by Lord Carver, operated in Normandy and later during the campaign in north-west Europe. We shall continue to miss him and I in particular, because he was a personal friend of mine since the 1940s.

There is no question of our preparing for a future war based on the methods and tactics of the last one. But the same general administrative factors tend to arise and lessons can be learned from the pass in that field.

My Lords, this is the first time I have participated in a defence debate in either the other place or in this House. I do so with some sense of trepidation. However, I begin by congratulating the noble Earl, Lord Onslow, for giving us the opportunity to have the debate. As he mentioned, we were together in the Armed Services Parliamentary Scheme which requires of its participants heroic decisions. Mine was to share a tent with the noble Earl for a week during the Saif Sareea exercise. But, of course, my appreciation of the role of the Army was enhanced. My admiration for our servicemen and women was increased and my view consolidated of the imperative need to get a reasonable equilibrium between the human and other resources available to the armed services and the demands made on them.

When, in a Motion, words like "overstretch" are used so loosely, I believe that we are beginning to do a disservice to the needs of our Armed Forces. All too frequently when used loosely, the word becomes a political weapon rather than a piece of strategic analysis. If I regret any part of the noble Earl's speech, it was the aberration in it when he referred, I believe with unnecessary rudeness, to the role of the Prime Minister in international affairs, which is one I certainly appreciate.

What is needed is a regular evaluation of the targets which were set in the Strategic Defence Review and of our successes and failures in meeting them, not to beat any government but so that we have the empirical basis of agreement on what improvements, if any, are needed and how we resource them. It seems to me, from the evidence, that when this Government came to power—we heard from the noble Lord, Lord King, of his doubts about the statistics at that time—26 per cent of our personnel were committed to operations. That rose dramatically in 1999 at the height of the Kosovo operations when the Army had 44 per cent of its personnel committed to operations. I have no reason to doubt my right honourable friend the Secretary of State, Mr Hoon, when he said on Radio 4 today that the figure is 27 per cent. That does not seem like overstretch, but stretch: it is 26 per cent to 44 per cent to 27 per cent.

Through the process of withdrawing personnel from operations at the earliest moment, it strikes me that the Government are making a significant contribution to controlling and limiting the degree of stretch. Of course, there is a serious problem when events arise such as those of September 11th. In his foreword to the Ministry of Defence Performance Report for the year 2000–1, the Secretary of State said,

"We are looking again at the implications of asymmetric and unconventional threats in what will be a new chapter to the Strategic Defence Review".

I believe that that is a sensible way of dealing with problems which at the time of the review were not only unforeseen, but unforeseeable.

Despite September 11th, let us not forget that the Army's latest assessment of some of the targets in the Strategic Defence Review has been quite successful. The average time between unit tours is, I understand, around 28 months, which is the best figure for five years, and above the SDR target of 24 months. I am quite prepared to boast on behalf of the Government about that. But in doing so I also say that the average masks the fact that there are serious variations between units with some, especially infantry and light-role battalions, not achieving the 24-months interval. We need to approach the statistics not in order to beat each other with them but on the basis of making progress.

As regards overstretch it is too simplistic to say that we should give the Armed Forces more or get them to do less. The spending settlements for last year provided the Ministry of Defence with the first sustained increase in resources since the 1980s—again, not my words, but those of the Secretary of State in the performance review. There must be a continuation of the drive to maximise efficiency and value for money, not only as demonstrated by bodies such as the defence logistics organisation, but perhaps in more basic ways.

I was particularly interested to hear the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Bramall, speak about medical services. I wish to ask the Minister: is it not a fact that at any one time there are some 16,000 military personnel who are regarded as unfit for operational purposes because of illness, injury and, very significantly, bad dental health? I hope that the Minister can respond to that question. Would not a possible significant counter to the fears of overstretch be a reduction in the number of our servicemen who are presently unfit for operational purposes?

Time prevents my examining questions relating to equipment, as I should like to have done. However, I look forward to hearing from my noble friend on the specific matter I have mentioned.

My Lords, I want to take a more general and strategic approach. The Government have learnt in the last four years that, while health and transport tend to present nearly intractable problems, the British Armed Forces constitute a peerless trump card. We are respected in Europe, in the US and in the world at large for our armed services and their mixture of courage, professionalism and resilience. That is despite 10 years of merciless attrition conducted by both parties and described as "the peace dividend". The Treasury sold the married quarters estate in the 1990s for far less than its market value and has reneged, through repeated delays, on its promise of money for early refurbishment of service quarters. It sold the drill halls, so that the TA footprint has largely gone, and it regularly reduces the MoD's estimates to suit the Chancellor's procrustean bed rather than the real cost of defence. I hope that resources will now begin to match the requirement.

Because the forces are both resilient and trained to act and make the best of things without complaint—soldiers have no trade unions—I believe that the Government are getting away with under-spending while constantly increasing the tasks of the forces. The SDR did not envisage Sierra Leone, Bosnia, Macedonia, Kosovo and Afghanistan all happening at the same time, while the situation in Northern Ireland becomes steadily more menacing, our commitment in Iraq continues, and there is a distinct likelihood of trouble in Cyprus as Turkey and Cyprus joust for position for EU entry. The EU's common position on Africa also envisages possible EU military intervention as a Petersberg task. One of the disturbing things about the ESDP remit is that it is global.

However closely the FCO and the MoD work together, as we are assured they do, there are real problems for planning the disposition of our overstretched forces when the political agenda constantly commits them to new military tasks, while the Government fail to provide the financial resources that are needed to implement them. We are constantly told by Ministers that all the MoD needs to do is to refocus its spending, not have more funds, and that this splendid formula has been warmly commended to our EU allies. There is at last some money for much-needed equipment and armament, but according to the report of the Capabilities Improvement Conference mounted by the EU—and relevant to NATO's parallel Defence Capabilities Initiative—of the 40 shortfalls listed, most are not scheduled to be met until what is called "the medium term", defined as 2007–2012. The ESDP, we are told by the Secretary of State for Defence, does not impose financial targets, no distinctions are made between conscript and professional forces and the intention of the action plan is to mobilise for the political commitments. Meanwhile, the EU is claiming to be ready to perform all Petersberg tasks, including armed intervention, by 2003.

The harsh fact is that only we, the French and eventually, potentially, Germany have both the professional forces and the experience to conduct and sustain a serious military operation. We were able to disengage from Macedonia after a brief and effective intervention, but we are still in Kosovo, in Bosnia, in Iraq and in Sierra Leone, and in every case tying up experienced troops so that a very real risk of skill-fade exists. That does not make for retention, and as we progress from one politically dictated intervention to another, we add to the instability of married life for the services, especially since men on these operations are necessarily unaccompanied. Their families are often still in poor quarters, their family life is regularly disrupted. Good NCOs begin to worry about the future, and extensive voluntary retirement at that level, as well as in the skilled trades, will mean that there will be no one to train new recruits.

In 2001, according to the IISS, our defence budget was the equivalent of 33 billion dollars; France's was 24 billion; Germany's was 20 billion; and that of Italy was 15 billion. After Spain, at 7 billion dollars, the Netherlands at 5 billion and Sweden at 4 billion, the other defence budgets in the EU added up to 13 billion dollars.

Defence in this country is still a poor relation compared to health, and it is more than time that a Government who largely owe much of their present international status to the successful use of their Armed Forces to enhance their political clout, should recognise that defence needs a larger share of our money, not just for equipment but for the really vital element—people: skilled, dedicated, effective people.

Of course it is right that our country should use its Armed Forces as the asset that they are, not as a talent to be buried but one to be used. The question is whether they are being accorded their proper value, and whether those who commit them politically are accountable and fully aware of what they are doing.

Military matters, defence and security are rightly regarded in the EU as intergovernmental, not to be decided by QMV and carefully co-ordinated with our NATO responsibilities. We only have one set of assets, however many the calls that are made on them. Are we, who are more likely than any other nation but one to have to pay the piper in terms of providing the troops, able to monitor decisions and ensure that Mr Solana, who is moving more and more issues, including those with military implications, into the domain of common strategies, where QMV does apply, can be monitored and observed, and perhaps controlled?

According to the arrangements under which, ever since Russia and the Ukraine were invited at Feira to take part in operations to carry out Petersberg tasks, Russia regularly talks to the Political Committee and to presidential troikas about European defence, security and arms proliferation—many of which are NATO subjects for which we have made provision for discussion under the umbrella of NATO. What will happen if Russia is incorporated into the committee of contributors which is set up when it is decided to launch an operation? Will it, like other countries which are candidates for accession, have the same rights and obligations in the day-to-day conduct of an operation? Russia could probably provide quite significant air-lift, for which the EU would otherwise have had to go to NATO; and Russia's potentially developing relationship with the EU at a military level in the context of the Petersberg tasks, which sounds so sensible, is nevertheless part of the game she is playing to render NATO irrelevant if she can. That is a major factor in the European balance of power.

I hope that we shall resist at a political level moves which would advance Russia's subliminal interests in the chess game rather than ours. We have the political will to commit our forces, very much less to support their claim to a proper share of our budget, and possibly none to resist moves against our interests in Europe and so become unpopular. In the memorable words of a Minister: "We try to get ourselves in a position where we are not the country holding things up".

My Lords, I begin by congratulating my noble friend on introducing the debate, and on his prescience in having done so within 48 hours of the call-up of TA Reservists—the first, as my noble friends Lord Burnham and Lord Freeman have said, for nearly 50 years. That is evidence, if ever I heard it, of at least incipient overstretch.

In the few minutes available to me, I want to address the single issue of the frequency with which members of the Armed Forces are being asked to serve on overseas emergency six months' unaccompanied tours, and with that the associated issues of pay and rations and an update on the life assurance position.

As the noble Lord, Lord Tomlinson, reminded us, the existing guidelines on overseas unaccompanied tours are that there must be 24 months between tours—24 months between the end of one tour and the beginning of the next. Anyone understands that from time to time such agreements will undoubtedly be infringed, particularly at times of national emergency. However, there is a widespread view that, since the Berlin Wall came down, there have been persistent breaches of this agreement. This affects all soldiers, but in particular it affects the technical branches—signallers, engineers, helicopter mechanics and petroleum specialists. We are frequently told, and many speakers have made the point, that the Army is short of such specialists. Well, if they are badly treated, we must expect that they will vote with their feet and move to civilian careers where their skills are better appreciated and better remunerated.

The Government—sparing the blushes of the noble Lord, Lord Tomlinson—have been extraordinarily coy about accepting that there is a problem in this regard. In February last year, I tabled the parliamentary Question:

"If no soldier were required to serve more than one six-month emergency tour in each 24-month period, how many soldiers would now be available for deployment [overseas]?".

The noble Lord, Lord Burlison, on behalf of the Government, said:

"We do not hold the information requested centrally".—[Official Report, 13/2/01; col. WA 29.]

He went on to give various other statistics that were an attempt to wriggle off the hook.

A month later, on 15th March, I tried again. This time I asked the Government to confirm whether a central record exists of overseas tours of Army personnel; if not, why not; and at what levels such records are maintained. The noble Baroness, Lady Symons of Vernham Dean, gave a lengthy reply in which her key argument was:

"To put together such a record would, therefore, entail a disproportionate cost".—[Official Report, 15/3/01; col. WA 104.]

Apparently, it would entail disproportionate cost to keep a record of what our soldiers are doing overseas to ensure that we are complying with the obligations that we have freely entered into. If the Government really mean that, it betrays an extraordinarily cavalier attitude to the undertakings that they have given to the Armed Forces. I hope that the Minister will provide a proper reassurance when he winds up.

At the same time, I hope that the Minister will be able to explain how, as the Government pursue their world role and take on ever more responsibilities in areas of tension, they are going to avoid ever more frequent infringements of the agreement. I share the view of my noble friend Lord King about the dangers of commitment creep. We have gone into Sierra Leone, we have gone into the Balkans and we are now going into Afghanistan. Where are we coming out of?

My second issue is pay. Members of the Armed Forces are excluded from the provisions of the national minimum wage. I have asked the Government on occasions what the financial impact would be if the national minimum wage applied to a private soldier serving on an overseas emergency tour. The Government, again through the noble Baroness, Lady Symons of Vernham Dean, have not been prepared to give a figure. Instead, the noble Baroness referred to the "X-factor"—currently 13 per cent of basic pay—which is,

"added to reflect the overall balance of advantages and disadvantages experienced by members of the armed forces"— [Official Report, 29/11/00; col. WA 133.]

I leave it to the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Bramall, to argue whether 13 per cent is the right figure. That is all very well, but the amount is paid throughout a soldier's career, whether he or she is guarding Bagram airport, driving an armoured personnel carrier in the Balkans or driving a desk in Whitehall. If the Government are determined to continue with their global programme of commitments, with all the pressures that that entails for those involved in the Armed Forces, they surely must consider some special arrangements for those who undertake increasingly frequent emergency deployment at the sharp end.

Then there is the issue of life assurance, on which there were extensive reports in The Times and other newspapers late last year. I hope that the Minister will be able to give us reassurances about how that is being developed and the answers that are being found to the problem.

In replying to a debate on Afghanistan last year, the Minister rightly reminded us of the duty that we all owe to the members of our Armed Forces. We need to ensure that the Government do not make the mistake exemplified by the famous Kipling line:

"O it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' 'Tommy, go away';

But it's 'Thank you, Mister Atkins', when the band begins to play".

My Lords, I add my congratulations to the noble Earl, Lord Onslow, for raising this subject for debate and to my noble friend Lord Tomlinson for taking part in it. I hope that he is slightly ashamed of the fact that it was his first contribution to our debates on these subjects. I hope that we shall hear a great deal from him on these issues in the future.

I was very concerned about the noble Earl's reference to cases of sexual harassment during the recent exercise in Oman. That was news to me, although of course I accept what he said. Having told us what had happened, the noble Earl seemed merely to shrug his shoulders and wonder what could be done about it. There is something that we can do.

My Lords, I drew the issue to the attention of the House—and to the attention of the assistant chief of staff this morning—because I find it extraordinarily unattractive. I was laying the issue on the table in the hope that somebody would take it up. I do not take the issue in any way other than very seriously.

My Lords, I am much obliged to the noble Earl for making that clear. I am sure of the good faith of Ministers of this Government and previous Governments of either complexion in wanting this evil to be rooted out, just as Ministers have always been adamant and firm against cases of racial harassment. However, we have a lot to learn about what to do about it. It is clear that we shall not deal with these issues fundamentally unless we make it clear to the colonels and the sergeant-majors that their careers will be affected if there are incidents of that sort in units for which they are responsible. That is where the responsibility should lie. It should be made clear to those with such responsibilities that any incidents will go in their record and their career will be prejudiced. I draw your Lordships' attention to what happened in the United States at the time of the Tailhook scandal. Shortly after that, no less a personage than the chief of naval operations, the wholly admirable Admiral Kelso, resigned. It is worth considering whether we should require the personnel of the various service boards to consider their position if matters of that sort are not attended to and brought to an end forthwith.

I regret to have to say that I endorse every word that the noble Earl said about the Challenger tank. I am just grateful that it was not raining in Oman, or we might have had to complain about the windscreen wipers as well.

I take this opportunity to congratulate my noble friend the Minister on burying what I hope was my worst mistake in my last tenure at the Ministry of Defence—the Tracer programme. I thought that it was complete nonsense and I am ashamed that I allowed it to continue even to development stage. I confess that I should not have been as innocent as I was. The British Army told me that we had to have it because the Americans were insisting on it. I was mug enough not to ask any more questions until I got to Washington, when I found out that my opposite number, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, said that he had been told by his Army that they had to have it because the British were insisting on it. I hope that my noble friend can learn from my naivety.

I hope that my noble friend can also give me some assurances on a couple of bits of equipment that are not strictly Army equipment, but have a great effect on the Army. I am particularly concerned about the next generation fast jet trainer, the Hawk—or whatever the new Hawk is called; I can never remember the initials but I am sure that my noble friend has them at his fingertips. It would be unthinkable if the order for the new fast jet trainer was not to be placed with BAe Systems for the Hawk. It is getting pretty close to scandalous how long it is taking for the decision to be made. That is having a serious effect on defence sales. Quite apart from the capabilities of the Royal Air Force, it is also having industrial implications, of which I am sure my noble friend is aware.

My noble friend will not be so happy with my next comment. I am afraid that I do not share the enthusiasm of my noble friend Lord Hardy or the noble Lord, Lord Burnham, for the A400M. I shall not detain your Lordships with all the reasons why I think that it is a complete waste of money. The noble Lord, Lord Burnham, said that we ought to have the A400M as soon as possible as a replacement for the C130K. The C130J should be with us by now, although we have had a lot of birthing pains with it. In any case, the A400M is intended not as a tactical lift aircraft, but as a strategic aircraft. As such, it is in competition with the wholly admirable C17 aircraft, which is now in place. The decision should be taken on objective grounds. Rather than just trying to ensure jobs in Europe for a plane that does not exist and has specifications that are hugely inferior to those of the C17, which is already successfully in service in two air forces, we should be trying through OCCAR—I ask your Lordships to forgive me for all these initials—to secure European agreement with Boeing to build the C17 in Europe. That would be a major contribution to Europe obtaining the strategic airlift capability that it requires.

My final point reverts to questions of the Armed Forces. I very much hope that my noble friend can give us assurances that the welfare arrangements for the troops in Afghanistan have been properly considered. I am sure that my noble friend will say yes. But the Ministry of Defence is very bad at looking into such matters.

I hope that my noble friend will forgive me for saying this, but I can recall a private conversation with the current Permanent Secretary not so long ago—or perhaps it was his predecessor, I cannot remember—who commented what a poor show we made of this. I can remember going back to Kuwait where the troops did not receive their chip frying machines, or their telephone-to-home call arrangements. Moreover, the mail arrangements were inadequate. Time after time we say that it will not happen again; but it does. These are not frivolous matters. They are extremely important welfare matters, as I am sure my noble friend accepts. I hope that he can confirm that such matters are being monitored closely, and will give us an assurance that he will look into them as soon as possible.

My Lords, what a privilege it is to follow the opening remarks of my noble friend Lord Onslow. He referred to one or two interesting incidents during his career; and, indeed, some that happened recently in the desert. It was 44 years ago when I, too, was a young national serviceman. On 14th July 1958, your Lordships might remember there was a Nasserite putsch in Iraq. My battalion, the First Battalion Scots Guards, which was then serving at Windsor, was warned for duty. The commanding officer, who many noble Lords may remember, my late noble friend Lord Cathcart, needed a training area. "Very good", he was told, "you may have a training area, but you can't have Oman". So, as there was nothing in Scotland, the battalion was then sent to Dartmoor, where we had not one, or two, but three times the normal rainfall. Having trained one platoon, I arrived back at Windsor to be told by the company sergeant-major, "You're very lucky, you're to train Mr Keswick's platoon". So I went back and there was even more rain.

Things have not necessarily changed over the past 44 years. But, through the visits that I have made on several occasions with the House of Lords defence group in the company of the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Bramall, I have been delighted to see that, very simply, there is nothing that the British Army cannot do; and that there is nothing that the defence forces of the United Kingdom are unable to do. Last night I heard a very interesting address from a senior source in the Ministry of Defence, who referred to certain terms. As far as he was concerned, "stretch" was fine, but what he called "overuse" seemed to him to present a problem. I thought that that was a clever way of putting it.

This morning, I was also interested to hear political representatives in another place—namely, the shadow Minister and the Minister—referring to various percentages. I should be glad to receive some clarification in this respect. Last night, the same senior source to whom I referred said that the percentage of personnel on operations was 26 per cent or 27 per cent. However, he also referred to the percentage of 6 per cent, which I believe relates to further personnel who are committed to operations. As I understand it, that means that such personnel would be placed on short notice in readiness to move on operations, or would be used in other ways as a back-up for those already on operations. Can the Minister say whether this is a rising or a falling trend?

The noble and gallant Lord, Lord Bramall, referred to a visit that both he and I made to the Defence Medical Services in Birmingham. I confirm every word that he said this afternoon. I have some personal knowledge of the Territorial Army and of the medical operatives who serve with the TA. Indeed, I reiterate everything that my noble friend Lord Freeman said in that respect. I was interested to note that 10 per cent of the Armed Forces in the Balkans are from the TA. I am sure that the Minister will accept that we are grateful for that help, especially in the technical and medical areas to which reference has been made. The effect of our forces in the Balkans, and elsewhere, would be seriously diluted without that assistance.

In the case of the medical services, can the Minister give both the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Bramall, and myself encouragement as regards what are called "parenting and messing" arrangements? As I understand it, "parenting" is the ability of personnel in such places as Northallerton, which I have visited on a previous occasion, and Birmingham, to carry out their necessary training as soldiers: in other words, the opportunity to use their weapons and undertake the necessary physical training. I believe that that can be achieved without disrupting the other duties and training commitments that they have at the hospital.

I should like to emphasise a point that the noble and gallant Lord did not have time to mention. I have in mind the extraordinarily forthright commitment of all the young men and women at what I believe is called the University of Central England, which is attached to the Defence Medical Services. It provides a marvellous three-year course for medical operatives of the future.

There have been one or two major successes. I was lucky to be in Docklands at the defence exhibition on 11th September. Indeed, my noble friend Lord Freeman was one of the first people I encountered, though I was not aware that he operated in that particular area. I found enormous enthusiasm there among the British Army team, but I also had the good fortune to visit HMS "Lancaster". I hope that the Minister, as well as noble Lords, will note the following. First, what a first-class ship it is; secondly, how very pleased the operatives and the people working with the new Merlin helicopter were with it; and, thirdly, the unbelievable enthusiasm of the sonar man on that helicopter. He suggested to me that one thing that your Lordships should do was to make a visit to see it. We shall try to do so. That seemed to me to be one shining success in a world event at the Docklands: it shows that there are at least some successes coming forward. Will the Minister please keep that rolling, as well as the other initiatives that no doubt he will be mentioning in his response?

In conclusion, I was delighted to hear the noble Lord, Lord Gilbert, refer to something called Tailhook in Las Vegas. The noble Lord may be surprised to learn that I, too, have been to Las Vegas for just one night. I went with a group called the North Atlantic Assembly—NATO parliamentarians. I can assure him that what I read of what took place at Tailhook seems to me to be quite modest compared to what I saw. I do not mean to refer to the activities of members of the North Atlantic Assembly; indeed, I was certainly astonished at much of the moderation. But, possibly, such behaviour was not fitting and worthy for the United States Navy.

I hope that the Minister and his colleagues will bear in mind that decisions taken now as regards recruitment and retention will be what count in three, four or five years' time. It is excellent to say, "Oh, yes; what happened in Afghanistan was unexpected". I admit that operations in Macedonia turned out to be a marvellous success; namely, to achieve something and pull out within the time schedule. The whole history of the British Armed Forces is one of waiting for the unexpected. I repeat: such decisions must be taken slowly with the help of the defence logistics organisation, and of the Treasury. Then in three or five years' time, if noble Lords and the Minister are still here, we can expect success in future operations.

My Lords, I remind the House that I have an interest as a serving officer in the Territorial Army. I am grateful for the comments made by my noble friend Lord Freeeman about the TA. I wish I had time to follow up on the remarks made by my noble friend Lord Onslow regarding the issue of sexual harassment. I can only say that I do not recognise it as a problem of the present, although it was clearly a problem of the past. I should admit that it was a very difficult problem for me to deal with when I was in command of a TA unit, simply as regards determining the rights and wrongs of even a minor complaint.

I took part in Exercise Saif Sareea for about one month in a very humble capacity. Morale among the troops was very good. They enjoyed the exercise: they enjoyed working in a new, different and challenging environment. My noble friend Lord Onslow raised the issue of the SA80 rifle. The design is old. It was the first design of bull-pup rifle to enter service in an army. The Government have a refurbishment programme for it, but the cost is comparable to that of the new weapon. Moreover, about 10 per cent of the Army will be left-handed. Can the Minister confirm that the SA80 rifle can now be fired left-handed?

We undertook Exercise Saif Sareea for good political reasons, but did so within current MoD funding. Omanis at all levels were very pleased to see us, but that is particularly true of the Royal Army of Oman.

There were, nevertheless, some problems. Because there was no extra money for flying hours, air transport was restricted throughout the year and there were fewer opportunities to use even individual members of the TA, let alone whole formed units on their annual camp. It is a sorely missed opportunity. I recall that, in the 1980s, my interest in the TA was maintained by the very large FTXs we engaged in in BAOR. If we had been able to deploy parts of the TA to Saif Sareea, it would have been a brilliant boost to retention. It would also have relieved pressure on some Regular Army units.

Several noble Lords have raised the issue of the Challenger 2 tank, and my noble friend Lord Onslow specifically addressed the track-pad issue, which was a problem in Sail Sareea. However, noble Lords have to understand that the rock over which the Challenger moved in the southern training area was unusually hard and sharp. Similar problems were not encountered in the Gulf War because those tanks were operating on a different type of ground. Nevertheless, perhaps the Government should consider developing desert track for Challenger so that we shall not experience the same problem if we want to deploy it in desert conditions.

Challenger 2 is optimised for Operations in a temperate climate, and there was no funding to "desertise" it for Exercise Saif Sareea. However, it is important to understand that a desertised Challenger 2 would have a significantly larger heat signature, thereby making it easier for the enemy to detect and engage it. Additionally, there would be a large increase in parasitic losses from the cooling system.

The good news is that the Challenger 2 turret systems, which caused so many problems when Challenger was introduced, worked well in Exercise Saif Sareea although the ambient temperature was well outside the design envelope.

Lessons were learned in Exercise Saif Sareea, but that is the point of having a field exercise rather than a computer simulation.

My noble friend Lord Onslow raised the issue of the Bowman radio system. We should thank God that the noble Baroness, Lady Symons, has dispensed with the services of Archer Communications. I hope that the project is now under control.

I have a couple of questions for the Minister on Bowman. First, what is the planned in-service date for the first brigade to receive it? Secondly, when will the whole Army—the Regular and the TA—be equipped with Bowman? It is no use equipping only one brigade with the system as it will have to be used right across the Army.

Casualty evacuation is a vital part of all exercises and operations. The Staff place great emphasis on speedy evacuation within agreed timescales. Helicopters are frequently used in evacuations, but they are not always available, particularly in adverse weather and when dealing with a second, nearby casualty. In such circumstances, Landrover battlefield ambulances have to be used. The ambulances. however, are not fitted with radios. Moreover, their crews are usually too busy to play around with a radio.

What happens, however, if a battlefield ambulance is lost, crashes, is stopped by locals or attacked by the enemy? The headquarters simply does not know the situation, and the lines of communication can be very long. In Exercise Saif Sareea, for example, the distance between the traffic posts on the main supply route were about the maximum allowable. It is a pity that the TA was not available to reduce that distance.

Supermarkets—at least Safeway—do not have a similar problem because all their vehicles are fitted with a satellite-tracking system, enabling them not only to know the precise location of all their assets, but to send text messages. If we fitted such a system to battlefield ambulances, the headquarters would know the precise location of all ambulances in the area of operations and could communicate with them. The system would also automatically tell the headquarters whether an ambulance had stopped moving.

Not every battlefield ambulance in the fleet needs to be so fitted. However, I think that the system should be included in ambulances involved in exercises or operations overseas. I have not raised the issue before, but I hope that the Minister will consider it. I believe that service personnel deserve the best chance of surviving an accident whether it occurs on an exercise or an operation.

My Lords, I thank the noble Earl, Lord Onslow, for initiating this wide-ranging debate which encompasses two issues rather than one, allowing the maximum number of your Lordships to address these important issues.

All noble Lords have expressed the high regard in which they hold our armed services, and I echo those sentiments. Our armed services are small but extremely professional. It is a source of pride that they are called upon to lead in many operations. Overstretch, however, is one of the main threats to the capabilities of our armed services. It is a perennial problem that will not be solved overnight. Nevertheless, recruitment and retention are the two main issues that will have to be addressed.

We on these Benches support the personnel levels set out in the SDR. However, undermanning is a serious problem. Many noble Lords have cited statistics; the ones I shall quote are dated September 2001. They show that the Army was short of 6,669 personnel; the Royal Navy of 1,358; and the RAF of 1,029, with a particular shortage of jet pilots, as the noble Lord, Lord Burnham said. Moreover, as the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Bramall said, the shortages are not spread equally. There is a particular problem with the number of doctors and nurses. That undermanning will lead to operational overstretch.

Our commitments are not outside the parameters set by the SDR. Furthermore, as has been mentioned, fewer Armed Forces members were involved in operations during Christmas because the situation in Kosovo, in Macedonia and in Sierra Leone had improved. Nevertheless, some sections continue to experience problems caused by undermanning.

I believe that the Government are considering retaining the services of professional recruitment firms to help solve the problem. We support such moves. The firms will, however, have to present a positive view of the services. At a time of low unemployment, with pay levels high outside the armed services and no attendant risk or prospect of being sent overseas, the Army will face recruitment problems.

Retention is the other half of the problem. I am particularly concerned about the new proposals on service pensions. When there are difficulties with morale and retention, changes to current arrangements have to be handled with great care. I am sure that no noble Lord would support any measure that worsened the pension arrangements for service personnel.

The retention issue can be addressed by reviewing the formula used by the Armed Forces pay review body. Pay should recognise that service life is more dangerous and less stable and that it can restrict opportunities for partners to work. The use of a bonus system should be investigated.

The provision of high quality unaccompanied personnel and family quarters would he helpful. Change is needed to the "march in, march out" arrangements for the handover of married quarters. It should he replaced with a contracted out arrangement to prepare housing for new occupants. A review of moving and relocation allowances to ensure that total costs to service personnel are covered should be considered.

The noble Baroness, Lady Park, referred to a matter of major concern; namely, family issues. Ensuring high standards of welfare for the families of service personnel is central to securing high levels of retention. The reason for departure most cited in the continuous attitude survey of service leavers is the effect of service on family life. It is imperative to the efficient running of our Armed Forces that social, educational and recreational facilities for service families are actively supported.

The Service Families' Task Force has done some good work in addressing issues outside direct MoD control such as schools' admission policy, access to the NHS and eligibility for benefits. There is no reason why the Service Families' Task Force should not also investigate and report on issues within direct MoD control such as the provision of on-base welfare services and service accommodation. A revamped Service Families' Task Force would need to meet more regularly, possibly on a monthly basis. The SFTF also needs to be open and accessible to service families with reports and conclusions of meetings made available at forces' bases and on the Internet.

We on these Benches would like to see a service families' charter applied at all bases requiring the delivery of consistent, standardised welfare services to a minimum specification. There would be annual reporting mechanisms and a families' officer on every base responsible for overseeing community development. A dedicated budget would be provided aimed at giving practical and systematic help to spouses, improving facilities for families and co-ordinating information supply on local job opportunities, housing choice, local amenities and local schooling. Families' officers need a standard job description so that they can rightfully demand resources and requisition facilities to fulfil the tasks set out for them. A review is needed of the support offered to forces' families welfare organisations by the MoD, including funding, to encourage best practice and avoid duplication.

I turn to equipment failure. Although I shall probably overshoot the time allocated to me, I wish to comment on a couple of issues. Like the noble Earl, Lord Attlee, I ask whether the modified SA80 can be used by left-handed people. I am not left-handed but I have a particular loathing of the SA80. However, it is an excellent rifle as regards its sighting mechanism and it is accurate. The sling is an extremely useful piece of kit. However, the first time I fired the rifle I discovered that a large section of my thumb was missing. The dust cover of the modified version—I believe that it had been modified 125 times at that point—had the tendency to flip open and cut into the hand of the person firing the weapon. I very much hope that the modified SA80 has far fewer defects.

I am particularly concerned about boots. The standard issue combat "highs" occupy a particular place in the hearts of those who have worn them in that they can inflict incredible damage to the knees of serving personnel. Has any research been carried out on how many servicemen have been invalided out of the Army due to the effect of their boots? From an economic point of view it would be worth redesigning those boots and introducing a far more comfortable model which causes less friction on one's knees.

Finally, I wish to comment on the Bowman radio system. When I was an officer in the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers I was told, "Don't worry about the Clansman, it is a useless piece of kit, but we shall have the Bowman very soon". That occurred a good 10 years ago. The target date for the Bowman's initial operating capability is March 2004. Is that date still on target? The procurement cost of supply and support of Bowman, including VAT, is £1.8 billion. Are we still on target not to overspend that sum, or is there a new estimate? The whole life programme cost is some £2.5 billion.

The noble Lord, Lord Freeman, said that the first compulsory call-up of Territorial Army personnel has just taken place for intelligence personnel. Having served in the Territorial Army, I know that its members are prepared to be called up. Many have served in Kosovo and the Falklands. However, I refer to the new provision of compulsory call-up which has not been used before. Will there be an ongoing assessment of that call-up in the short term as regards retention of TA personnel?

My Lords, we are all grateful to my noble friend for bringing this debate to our attention today. In the defence White Paper of 1999 it was recognised that people give us the critical edge that leads to success, whether in high intensity conflict, peace support operations or defence diplomacy. To retain that edge and to resolve the deep-seated problem of overstretch, we need the right number of good quality, well trained and highly motivated people.

The MoD is to be congratulated on the recent initiatives it has taken to improve some of the personnel matters that have a direct bearing on retention and attract people to a service life. The noble Lord, Lord Bach, has been exceptionally helpful on many occasions and I am most grateful to him for that. The criticisms and points at issue that I shall raise are designed to be constructive and lead to further improvements for our men and women. However, both overstretch and equipment failure cause low morale in the Armed Forces of the Crown.

The main reason for overstretch and equipment failures is a continuous lack of resources in that insufficient funds are provided for the MoD budget, a theme which has been represented throughout this debate by your Lordships. Until more funds are made available by the Treasury, I can see little hope of rectifying this serious situation. In some cases overstretch occurs as a result of having too few units to meet certain commitments. In others it is a product of having too few individuals which arises from undermanning, which in turn fuels further overstretch, causes dissatisfaction and low morale, leads to retention problems and hence more undermanning in a vicious circle. The recent announcement of the compulsory call out—the first since Suez some 45 years ago—of 140 TA intelligence specialists confirms the alarming overstretch and illustrates the point well. There are two main ways of dealing with overstretch and undermanning: to reduce overseas commitments to a number that we can deal with or to increase recruitment and retention levels.

I should now like to draw your Lordships' attention to some aspects of overcommitment. Currently the United Kingdom has the Armed Services deployed in 28 different areas around the world and within those areas the Army has just under 31,000 deployed. It is undertaking operational deployments—in addition to Northern Ireland with just under 14,000 troops, which may well need reinforcement in the future—in Sierra Leone; Bosnia; Kosovo; and in the Falkland Islands.

The dangers of peace-keeping operations are that in many cases they result in open-ended commitments. There are already signs that that may be the case in Afghanistan. In Afghanistan, there will probably be ground forces of some 1,800 and a Royal Navy task force of around 4,500, including Royal Marines. In March last year, prior to deployments to Afghanistan, the Army was 24.4 per cent—the figure is now some 26 per cent to 27 per cent—committed to operations. However, few people realise that that means an overall commitment of some 73 per cent to 81 per cent, allowing for those who are "preparing for" and "recovering from" those operations. The figure is too high to sustain.

In the past, when serving in the Armed Forces, I have welcomed operational deployments. Operations are an essential part of the ethos and morale of the services. They are what we train for and confirm whether the training for war has been correct. They must be sustainable without bringing dissatisfaction to those who are serving by the imposition of excessive separation, by restricting training and the quality of our military skills and by making retention more difficult. After all, men and women join up to serve their country and look forward to operations provided that they are not continuously over-committed.

I turn to undermanning, which results from taking in insufficient numbers of recruits and not being able to retain them once they are in the services. The Army has a trained requirement of some 108,000 but a trained strength of around only 96,000, according to UK Defence Statistics 2001, which shows a shortfall of just under 12,000. However, the MoD performance report for 2000–01 quoted a figure of 8,000. To those figures can be added some 9,000 medically downgraded personnel, which means that between 17,000 and 21,000 personnel are not available for operational deployment. It would be helpful if the Minister could clarify the situation.

The estimated trained strength for 2004 is around 98,000, which is a marginal increase of only some 2,000 personnel. There is little hope of the Army approaching its trained-strength target by 2008. The total outflow exceeded inflow by 528 people, although that retention has improved by some 2,000 during the year 1999–2000. The Army needs an intake of some 15,000 new recruits each year just to stand still in terms of manning and an annual figure of some 25,000 if it is to meet its trained strength by 2008.

Despite all the determined efforts that are put into recruiting, the situation is deteriorating and a really radical approach must be adopted to improve recruiting figures as soon as possible. Many years ago, regiments relied on their own regimental recruiting teams; perhaps we should return to that system. An improvement to the system would be for experienced senior NCOs to be placed on a special list at the age of 45 and to continue their service, but not to count against the existing rank structure, which would ensure that that would not upset the promotion structure. They would be an invaluable force, particularly in the training of others.

I turn to retention. As I have already illustrated, that has improved over the past two years. However, there is more that can be done in that area if retention is to improve further and morale is to be kept high. There is no time to cover all those issues in any detail, but they are: lack of individuals creating double work loads, aggravating the poor manning situation; excessive separation, leading to many family break-ups; the still poor state of single and married accommodation, although some improvements have been made; the critical state of first and second line medical services, although some improvements have been made to fast-tracking procedures with the National Health Service; and the cancellation of training exercises, which has a large impact on the standard of our military skills. The Armed Forces rightly hold a special place in our society and political correctness must not impede in any way our fighting efficiency.

I turn to Army equipment, which I shall not cover in great depth because so many noble Lords have already identified equipment problems. I agree in the main with what has already been said. However, I will reinforce briefly some of the points that have been made. The Challenger 2 tank is a world-beating tank and the Royal Armoured Corps has great faith in it. However, its performance in Oman was abysmal. That was in no way due to the design of the tank. Had it been desertised with the appropriate air filters and track, as Vickers had recommended, it would have functioned just as well as the Omani Challenger 2 tanks.

It is unacceptable that additional funds for the desertisation of those tanks was not forthcoming. Would the Minister explain how that occurred? Could he explain why the new SA80 was not issued to the Royal Marines prior to their recent operational deployment, confirm that Bowman is on course and inform us of any other major equipment slippage dates? In addition, what was the reason for the cancellation of the anti-tank missile system Trigat, in relation to which £115 million had already been spent? Finally, are there any plans to reduce the equipment programme over the next four years by £1.2 billion?

This has been a very worthwhile debate. I agree with many of the points that noble Lords have raised. Regrettably, there is no time to comment on them. I hope that the Minister will record our concerns on the matters that we have raised.

In conclusion, I do not believe that there can be any solution to overstretch and over-commitment without either tailoring our Armed Forces to their capabilities or making a real and significant increase to the defence budget. As a start, what is known as the £500 million efficiency savings measures—in my opinion they are now defence cuts—should cease forthwith. A year-on-year programme of efficiency savings can only have a debilitating effect on all levels of command and can be destructive to the quality of life that will sustain retention in the Armed Forces.

Finally, as is customary in your Lordships' House, I pay great tribute to the brave and courageous men and women who serve their country loyally and with the utmost dedication to duty. This debate has drawn out matters that show that the Army is not as well equipped as it should be and that it is over-committed and undermanned. It is our duty to rectify those serious shortcomings as soon as possible. I repeat that the only solution to those problems is either to increase the defence budget significantly and to cease the annual requirement for the £500 million efficiency savings or to restrict our commitments to within our operational capabilities.

My Lords, I, too, am grateful to the noble Earl, Lord Onslow, for securing this debate. Whether he is someone with whom I should choose to go to the jungle—or maybe even the desert—I am not absolutely certain, but he would be a very enjoyable companion anyway.

Noble Lords will recall that, during our debates last year on international terrorism, the noble Earl raised concerns about some of the equipment that was issued to the Army. It is of course right that we should address the issue in more depth, as we have done today. I regret that we have not had a bit more time in which to do that.

I am grateful to all noble Lords who have spoken this afternoon—they did so with great expertise—and experience—and welcome the tributes that have been paid to our servicemen and women. I must point out that this debate relates in particular to the Army. Although I shall do my best in the very limited time that remains to discuss the other services—particularly in terms of equipment—I am afraid that I cannot do justice to that subject today.

There will be complete agreement in the House when I say that we have the finest Armed Forces in the world. Their professionalism, self-sacrifice and determination has been shown time and again in such places as the Balkans, Sierra Leone and now in Afghanistan. Their actions and achievements continue to demonstrate their world-class quality. I believe that it is highly appropriate, therefore, that any misgivings about the equipment with which they are provided or the conditions under which they operate should be discussed arid considered in this House.

Let us, first, consider the term "overstretch". It is one which I happen to believe should be resisted. Overstretch is, by definition, that stretch to the system which is excessive. In this instance, it can be assumed that we would not engage in military activities beyond the limits that we are prepared to endure. Of course, pressure points exist in certain specialist areas, but one must consider those within the complexity of defence business. While the overall pace and number of commitments may be entirely manageable, some shortage categories may feel pressure.

I shall set out some of the measures that we have in place to address those issues. But let us be clear: the Armed Forces have not declined any operational commitments because of excessive stretch. And that is not because of political directives. As the House knows, whenever we deploy our forces, we do so with the full support of our senior military advisers; namely, the Chiefs of Staff and, above all, the Chief of the Defence Staff. Their important advice is based on their collective expertise and the best information on the availability and readiness of our forces. There is inevitably some risk in any deployment but we manage and minimise that risk.

It has been suggested that in order to reduce overstretch we should either reduce our commitments overseas or seek additional funding for the Ministry of Defence. The noble Lord, Lord Vivian, has, as always, been absolutely up-front and straightforward about which he prefers. I regret that the shadow spokesman on defence in the House of Commons was not so up-front this morning on the "Today" programme when he refused to answer a question about seeking additional funding for the Ministry of Defence. The noble Lord, Lord Vivian, is right. In this sense, we must either reduce our commitments overseas or seek additional funding for the Ministry of Defence. The Official Opposition must say where they stand because, having listened carefully to what they say, it is clear that they do not believe that we should reduce our commitments overseas. They supported the Government, for example, in the setting up of ISAF in Afghanistan. They also supported us in Kosovo. Are there any overseas commitments which the Opposition do not accept or believe that we should not be involved in? If there are, it is essential that they say so—I do not mean in the Chamber today, but at some stage in the near future.

I would argue that to do less in relation to operations overseas might mean that we do not complete the tasks that we set ourselves. That might result in additional commitments and additional stretch at a later stage. That is a matter that we must bear very much in mind in relation to Afghanistan. If we do not have a presence there now, shall we be faced with this problem in a much greater way in three to five years' time?

I must remind the House that the Government have increased the defence budget—certainly not sufficiently for some noble Lords' purposes. But, overall, the defence budget will have received about £1,250 million of new money between 2000–01 and 2003–04, even after inflation is taken into account. It is the first time that defence expenditure plans have increased in real terms each year for more than a decade.

Our underlying policy for our Armed Forces is to be found in the Strategic Defence Review. We remain committed to achieving a balance or commitments consistent with that document's assumptions. Decisions were taken in the SDR about the size and structure of the Army. Manning the Army to those levels will require an increase in its strength from current levels. The extent of the increase will depend in part on the outcome of ongoing studies into the best ways of delivering the military capability required of the Army.

The noble Lord, Lord Smith of Clifton, asked about Northern Ireland. I can assure the noble Lord that, as part of the Army's formation and readiness cycle, we have the necessary forces available to meet the requirements of military assistance to the civilian police—one of many roles that our Armed Forces undertake. We are addressing this problem in several different areas. In particular, we are focusing on trying to attract more high-quality potential recruits into the training organisation, reducing wastage during training and keeping retention levels steady. I am pleased to tell your Lordships that recruitment into training organisations has been good. Wastage rates during training have improved significantly during the past three years. But I add quickly that the Government are not complacent; there is a very long way to go.

We work on the principle that, on completion of their training, we aim to commit personnel to operations for no longer than is absolutely necessary to achieve the military aim. Personnel are withdrawn from operations at the very earliest opportunity, as was the case in Macedonia last year. We said that our forces would be there for 30 days, and 30 days it was. Similarly, we have set limits on our commitment to act as lead nation of the ISAF in Afghanistan.

Army tour intervals are currently assessed at an average of 28 months and are the best they have been for five years. We are above the SDR target that we set ourselves of 24 months. However—this must be said—there are differences between units within the Army, notably within the infantry and light role battalion. Not all make the 24 months figure; nor, possibly more importantly, do individuals. It is perfectly possible, for example, to conceive of a unit whose tour intervals are 24 months or more but within which certain individuals may well have tours inside that limit. We remain committed to tackling that issue, particularly in relation to specialisations where problems are most acute.

So far as concerns the point raised by the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, I say briefly that recording separated service for all service personnel is now a key objective of the Armed Forces' personnel strategy. Its importance is reflected in our efforts to manage the operational tempo on the family lives of Armed Forces members. I hope that that goes some way towards dealing with the noble Lord's point. The illustration that I give to the House is that in comparison with the Kosovo operations in 1999, when 44 per cent of the Army's personnel were committed to operations, at present, the world-wide commitment is approximately 27 per cent. The noble Lord, Lord King, argued in a powerful speech that it is possible that the way in which the figures are calculated has changed. My best understanding—I asked about this point in particular—is that there is no difference in the way that the figures are calculated to give 26 per cent in 1997 and approximately 27 per cent now.

My Lords, the only information that I have seen is that since April 2000 the percentage of trained services committed to operations for each service has not included personnel preparing for operations but those covering operations or engaged in training. If the Minister is not able to reply now, perhaps he would confirm that later. However, that would of course make a significant difference to the percentages.

My Lords, I shall certainly come back to the noble Lord following the debate. If I am wrong, I shall obviously want to say so. My understanding is that the figures are calculated in precisely the same way as they were four-and-a-half years ago.

We recognise the need to support families, who face considerable pressure in the absence of their loved ones, as well as our personnel, and to determine the demands upon them. In parallel with other armed services, the Army is developing a system to measure the amount of separated service undertaken by its personnel. Electronic monitoring and recording of separated service for all service personnel is a key objective in the Armed Forces' personnel strategy, affecting its importance in our efforts to manage the effect of operational tempo on the family lives of our people. The information will be of great importance and value to the services in managing their people. However, it is in no way a benchmark for comparison with employment outside the services or even within the services.

We introduced a new and comprehensive package of welfare support into all theatres in April 2001. The noble Baroness, Lady Park, drew particular attention to that issue. The aim is to mitigate the demands made upon service personnel deployed on operations. Such support now includes a comprehensive communications package offering, among other things, 20 minutes of publicly-funded telephone calls per person per week and free airmail and Internet access. Our service personnel serving overseas are also provided with free books, videos, televisions and exercise equipment, and they have their own dedicated radio and television stations. They also have guaranteed post-operational tour leave and mid-tour rest and recuperation where appropriate. Learning from experience, we continue to develop those welfare support packages.

Before leaving this part of the debate I want to make one important point. Although separated service can be and is a strain on service families, deployments away from home should not always be seen as a negative factor. They are quite the reverse on occasions. The prospect of overseas deployment is a powerful attraction to potential recruits, as is shown by the fact that we rely on that for some of our recruiting literature. The vast majority of service personnel relish the opportunity to put their skills to use on operations and exercises, but we recognise the need to balance the needs of our Armed Forces as service personnel, family members and individuals.

In the course of the debate a powerful support for medical services was made by the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Bramall, and the noble Lord, Lord Lyell. I do not have time to deal with the issue as I would like to. However, their remarks have been taken on board. Their support for the Birmingham centre is appreciated. We all know that we have a long way to go before the position is satisfactory.

I turn to equipment. We are committed to the modernisation of our Armed Forces to ensure that they are structured and equipped to perform the most demanding tasks. We are investing in a number of new systems that will ensure that the Army's capability is maintained. I mention briefly in passing that plans for future equipment include the WAH-64 Apache attack helicopter; improvements to the range and accuracy of our artillery weapons through the indirect fire precision attack (IDFA) and the light mobile artillery weapon system (LIMAWS) projects; a fully-integrated fighting system for the infantryman, future integrated soldier technology (FIST); a new range of armoured fighting vehicles through the future rapid effects system (FRES); and new armoured engineering vehicles. We are planning to procure a number of systems to improve logistics and combat support, including the heavy equipment transporters (HET) and the recently-announced procurement of around 8,500 cargo and recovery vehicles and trailers.

However, that impressive package must develop from the current in-service equipment and legacy systems, some of which have had long-standing problems. The SA80 is a good example of where we have taken decisive action to rectify under-performance. When studies showed that the reliability of the weapon system could be substantially improved, necessary action was taken to modify it. The modified S.N80 A2 is now among the best assault rifles in the world, and demonstrates our willingness to take quick and decisive procurement action when required. As further evidence of the importance we attach to ensuring that our forces are well equipped for each Operation, the modified weapon has been distributed to those units deployed as part of the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan. There will soon be a decision on Hawk, as my noble friend Lord Gilbert mentioned. I stress to the noble Lord, Lord Burnham, that as far as the A400M is concerned, the Germans still say that 73 is the number that they require.

The noble Earl, Lord Onslow, referred to Saif Sareea. He called it "playing soldiers", but I know that he did not really mean that. That was an important exercise. The objectives were to deploy and sustain a major joint force across long distances and to conduct combined war fighting training in a demanding environment. That was the first time that many new items of equipment had been tested in the desert under near-operational conditions. Lessons still need to be learnt. However, overall we should be pleased with the way that both our Armed Forces and their equipment overcame the many challenges posed by the exercise. It was a great success. The exercises allowed us to identify the challenges our forces might face when operating in testing conditions. We shall learn lessons from that.

As regards Challenger 2, I am delighted to hear the praise given to that weapon. It is a world-class, battle-winning tank. This is the second time that the noble Earl has described it as "smashing". He did so last year and has done so again today. However, problems were encountered. The decision not to fully desertise Challenger 2, which would have cost millions of pounds, was made following an assessment that the conditions in Oman during the autumn would be within acceptable environmental tolerances. Not least, I remind the House that this was an exercise, not an operation. As I have said, Saif Sareea was a test of our equipment under near-operational conditions. It was an exercise and a balance must he struck. I do not have time to go into the details of that matter. I am told that it is time for me to wind up.

Finally, I turn to Bowman. This is an important project for the Government and will be for all noble Lords who remember its sad and long history. In answer to the noble Lord, Lord Redesdale, the figure of £1.8 billion still stands. I met with the prime contractors last week. I am pleased to report that the project is making good progress. This is a project in which any slippage in the in-service date of March 2004 would be unacceptable.

I end by thanking noble Lords for their contributions. Perhaps we should be more proud of the fact that our forces are deployed in various countries around the world helping reconstruction, saving lives and maintaining stability. In other words, we are a force for good. This is a noble role for our country and one in which we should all take pleasure and pride. No one carries that out with more skill and commitment than our own Armed Forces.

My Lords, I am relieved that I do not have to sum up the debate because there has been overstretch by those who have spoken. I am told by the Clerks at the Table that the average length of speeches was seven minutes rather than six.

I shall make two extraordinarily quick points. First, I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Bach, that the rifle is now very good. However, to say that that improvement was made rapidly is not strictly accurate. Secondly, the definition of "overstretch" seems to be a question of degree. I believe the noble Lord says that it is "taut". I say that there is overstretch and that there are inherent dangers unless something is done. The Minister asks where I think that the commitment should be reduced. I have grave doubts that Afghanistan was not a commitment entered into for purely political reasons.

Having said all that, I thank all noble Lords who have taken part in the debate, especially as it has been good-natured in the best traditions of your Lordships' House. It has been informed and constructively answered by the Minister. I beg leave to withdraw my Motion for Papers.

rose to call attention to the case for improving the teaching of foreign languages in schools following the recommendations of the Nuffield Languages inquiry report of May 2000; and to move for Papers.

My Lords, I do know who Goethe was, and I agree with the quotation used by the noble Lord. I am one of those who do not know foreign languages. I have always found them extremely difficult to learn, possibly because, at school, I was taught by someone whose first language was English and who, on a school trip, managed to drop his pocket French dictionary into a garlic-infested lavatory and was totally panic-stricken that he would not be able to get round France without it.

I hope that we can all agree that languages are immensely important and that we are not nearly as good at teaching them in schools as we should he. Taking a long view, over 50 years or so, we would be a better, more competent society if we started teaching languages well now. That is an objective that all governments ought to have, and it is an objective that the Department for Education and Skills ought to have too.

Languages help with all sorts of things, including mobility and business. Business may proceed largely through the Internet and big international meetings may be conducted in English, but if one is going to do business with someone it helps a great deal if one can have a conversation with them after the meeting and share something of their culture and home life. That sort of relationship is still the foundation of a great deal of business and always will be. Knowing foreign languages adds immensely to the enjoyment that one can get from travelling to foreign countries and adds to one's understanding of the world as a whole.

The principal point that I take from this excellent report is that the primary school is where we must begin. That has been said for a long time, but it has never seemed possible to move in that direction. We do not have a core of teachers who are good enough at mathematics, let alone French. If we had to teach a foreign language in primary schools based on what teachers know, it would have to be French, which would make us polyglot only in a limited sense, as it is perhaps one of the least useful languages if one is going trotting around the globe. Many other languages would come first, if we were considering giving people a chance to enjoy the world and its cultures and, for the better linguists, use their languages in business.

I find it difficult to go down the road that the Nuffield report follows, in suggesting that we should put a lot of effort into trying to recruit more language teachers and put languages higher in the curriculum. I cannot see a sensible source of language teachers in the volume that would be required. I cannot see a source for the money that would be required to pay all those supernumerary teachers, who might be able to teach languages but would have nothing much else to do in a primary school structure that is largely based on class teachers. I cannot see that we will find ourselves in a position in which it would be practical or possible within the limits of a school budget to go down the route that the Nuffield report proposes.

I take a great deal of heart from what the Minister said recently. She waxed enthusiastic about the use of IT in schools. That is where the base should be. If we want to expose every child in primary school to a wide choice of foreign languages, we should use IT and distance learning. The techniques are beginning to appear. We can see the enormous success that Thomas Telford has had with its GCSE practical course. Several million pounds' worth of that technology has been sold, starting to bring distance learning into GCSE work in schools. We are not that far away from having the technology to bring it into primary schools.

The teacher in a primary school does not need a great deal of skill to guide a properly put-together system that gives exposure to a foreign language. At that age, children will absorb a language as if it were their own. One knows of children who speak nothing but French coming to English schools at the age of five and being fluent in English six months later. They are not being taught English; they are just being exposed to it. At that age, the process seems to be osmotic, and children just pick the language up. Once children have learnt that facility with language, it carries on into the later stages of their learning.

Therefore, I would recommend the Government to concentrate on what is going to be possible with new technology; concentrate on the early ages; and, as the Nuffield report states, keep a broad view of what languages should be. In bringing about the change, there is a great deal which the Government can do which it would be hard for other people to do. One needs the pump priming to make the programmes available—at least the first one—and to help schools take them on and experiment with them. I look forward to hearing from the Minister that there are commitments in that direction.

Perhaps I may make a few minor points. I have first-hand experience of the imbalance in students referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Williams. There are a lot of Germans fleeing the German education system. We like to think that ours is in trouble but many Germans prefer our system to theirs. By and large, people do not go to Germany to study the general curriculum because we have a better state education system here.

As regards language education, we need to focus on the difficulty in moving from GCSE to A-level. Those who are going on to learn a language properly need a foundation in the structure and grammar of the language and they are not getting that at GCSE-level. It is difficult to move from one to the other and the fault lies in the GCSE. If there were more conversational exposure from primary school and through the early years at secondary school, it would be easier to introduce the more formal aspects in the examination syllabus. That said, I look forward very much to the maiden speech of the noble Baroness, Lady Michie.

My Lords, first, I apologise to the noble Lord, Lord Williams of Elvel, for arriving in the Chamber a minute and a half or so after he had started his speech. There was no disrespect on my part because I have the greatest respect for his views on the subject. Indeed, I agreed with all the points he made. I am looking forward to the maiden speech of the noble Baroness, Lady Michie, and I am sure that I will agree with everything she has to say.

I declare an interest as chairman of the English Speaking Union and therefore professionally committed to the promotion of English as a global language. Why, with that interest, should I have such a strong interest in foreign language learning in schools in this country? I want to explain that.

First, perhaps I may remind your Lordships of the extent of the current dominance, unprecedented and unparalleled, of the English language. Arguably, there are at present four world languages: Chinese, Hindi, Arabic and English. However, only English is growing because of its use as a second language. More people are learning English in China today than are speaking it in North America. That is an astonishing statistic.

More surprisingly, perhaps, English has carried all before it in continental Europe. Some 70 per cent of all communications between European Community institutions and those institutions in the rest of the world is carried out in English. The European Commission's recent task force on skills and mobility proposed that all pupils in the European Union should master two languages in addition to their own, but that one of those two should be English. It argued that by 2005 the early acquisition of language skills should be attained by all eight year-olds.

English is the language of science, with 70 per cent of scientific theses now being published in English. It is the language of information technology, aviation and globalisation. Therefore, why should we be so concerned by the poverty of our own foreign language skills and those of the Anglo-Saxons more generally?

One of the reasons is the depth of that poverty. The noble Lord, Lord Williams, referred to Nuffield's findings that nine out of 10 children in this country stop learning any foreign language after the age of 16. Eurostat's recent research shows that our foreign language skills are the lowest in the European Union; fewer than one in five people in this country say that they have any foreign language ability whatever.

Perhaps we can take comfort in the fact that the situation in the United States is no better, but we certainly cannot share the attitude of the perhaps apocryphal account of the American Senator who, giving evidence on the Hill explaining why he did not think that foreign language learning was important to the United States, said that if English was good enough for Jesus Christ, it was quite good enough for the United States.

Quentin Peel put a related point well in the Financial Times last year when he wrote:

"The English-speaking world has got itself into a dreadful bind. We think we understand what makes other people tick—but only if they tell us in English".

There are three overwhelmingly important reasons why we must make good the linguistic shortfall in our schools and also in our universities from where many of our teachers come. The first is that unless we act the situation will grow worse. A-level figures for the past decade show that the fall in the number of students taking qualifications in A-level German and English has fallen steadily—in the case of French by more than 30 per cent. The situation in the universities is equally worrying. The survey carried out last year by the University Council of Modern Languages, which looked at 30, universities saw that in 77 of those universities one or more of the language courses, or of whole languages, had been cut out of what they were offering. That is potentially a disaster. Samuel Johnson, who knew a lot about languages, said of them that they are the dress of thought and the pedigree of nations.

Our political and economic future turns on our ability to understand, to work with, to persuade, to listen, to live with and to sell to our colleagues in Europe. We must accept that, despite the 70 per cent of EU communications, linguistic pluralism is with us and, thank goodness, in Europe. If we ignore that reality, language not the mythical fog will isolate the Continent from us and us from the Continent. Seriously, I believe that our failure to play our full part in Europe during the past half century stems in substantial part from linguistic inadequacy. The reverse is also true: that linguistic competence opens up both career opportunities and economic success, as recent research has clearly shown.

So, what to do? The Government have responded to the Nuffield report by setting up a steering group. They have done a little more than setting up a steering group but not all that much more. The issue we must consider is that at the heart of the inquiry was the call for a national strategy on languages. Ultimately, we do not want a study group, a talking shop; we need a strategy. It needs to be a national strategy. It also needs to be able to plan across other departments of state. It is not an issue only for schools or even universities. It must cross all relevant departments of state; that is, the Treasury, the Home Office, the Department of Trade and Industry and so forth.

The Government also state in their response that in time—and they give a time—every child in every school between the ages of seven and 11 will have the opportunity to learn another language That is splendid, but what does "have the opportunity to learn" actually mean? Of course good schools will offer something to motivated children, or to children motivated by their parents, as private schools already do. But the crisis in our language capability means the curriculum; it means building it into the system. I would like to know where the Minister stands on that.

In conclusion, it is our great good fortune and our real advantage that in an age of globalisation English has become a global language. But if we use that as an excuse to allow our own foreign language abilities to wither away, if we do not have a strategic and national action to reverse the decline, an extraordinary irony will emerge: that in a world which speaks our language we will be increasingly isolated; that in an integrating Continent we will become more and more insular; and that in a global village we will be choosing to live on our own. I hope that we are not confronted with that irony.

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Williams of Elvel, for introducing this debate and for giving us the opportunity to discuss an important report which raises serious issues for our whole approach to foreign languages. I am a graduate in French, have taught French and since have learnt Russian out of necessity and interest. I shall reflect on my experiences and later relate them to the current realities for young people today.

It seems to me that the successful learning of anything depends on opportunity, motivation and inspiration, often from good teaching and the organisation of the learning. That is unless, of course, you are born into it, Harry Potter-like, but I suspect that that is rarely the case. Good teaching is about love of the subject, wanting to transfer that love to others and having resources available to aid in teaching.

In my view, there are three major influences on the teaching and learning of foreign languages in schools: culture, motivation and the school curriculum. I shall say a little about each in the short time available. I have talked to teachers and head teachers in primary schools and comprehensive schools to inform me about this and there are some interesting thoughts and conclusions.

First, I shall talk about culture. When I was learning French in a small grammar school in the small, mainly working-class town where I grew up in the north of England, there were few windows on the world: little travel, little television, no Internet and few people from overseas. I learnt French and went on to study it at university because of two inspired English national teachers who taught French, and because I was good at it. The world has changed. I do not believe that there is any such thing as being naturally good at languages. Witness those children who are brought up to speak at least two languages. They may have parents of different nationalities, or they learn through necessity. The children of friends in the Netherlands have spoken English from an early age. I am told that boys in this country are deeply resistant to learning foreign languages. Perhaps, as has already been pointed out, greater use of IT would inspire them, as well as girls, to participate.

This is part of the problem. A second language around the world is usually English. That is due in part to our colonial heritage, but also to the strength of the American, Canadian and Australian cultures. Ambivalence towards Europe, let alone other parts of the world except perhaps the United States, may be giving our children messages that it is not important to learn languages other than English. The noble Lord, Lord Williams of Elvel, also referred to this issue.

The culture in which the young people of today are growing up is obviously different from when I was at school. We may be convinced that young people need another language, but do we sufficiently integrate into our system the notion that learning another language is not for purely academic reasons any more, but for practical reasons such as business or tourism? It appears that the focus in schools is still on French or German. Surely for commercial and practical reasons the Spanish language would be of more use. What of Japanese, or a Chinese language?

Young people need to be strongly motivated to learn another language and they have to see its relevance. I learnt Russian because I was engaged in some work in the former Soviet Union. Diplomats frequently need to learn one or more sometimes incredibly obscure languages in a very short time before they are posted. How do we motivate and teach young people? In London and in other towns around the United Kingdom, I see young people from a variety of other countries serving in shops and bars, going to college, or working in business for a year or two to learn English. Do our young people do the same? If not, what is stopping them? Is it lack of interest in language?

I turn now to the curriculum. Given where we are in curriculum development, surely SATs should include a foreign language. This would affect both motivation and the curriculum. The curriculum is tricky. There are not enough teachers of foreign languages overall, and there are very few male teachers of foreign languages. If a school has no sixth form, it is difficult to recruit and retain language teachers. In primary schools where, as has already been pointed out, it should all begin, there are few specialists. Perhaps this is less of an issue where strong links are formed between primary and secondary schools, so that a language teacher can work in both.

I believe that reform at A-level in the delivery of modern languages has been unimaginative. We need to look towards a baccalaureate type of offering where language is integrated into other areas of learning. Lower down in the curriculum, resources still seem to encourage reading and writing in French and other languages, although I realise that speech is now included. Furthermore, topics still seem to focus on the home, shopping, pets, friends and a bit of football. Perhaps that does not motivate every child. The shape of the school day is often not conducive to the effective teaching of language. Language teaching needs regular short slots rather than an hour once or twice a week.

Young people and older people in this country can learn languages, and many do so. I cannot think that we are genetically resistant to foreign languages. I should like to ask the Minister where there are examples of good practice in the learning and teaching of foreign languages in this country and abroad. If there are good models, what are we doing to use them to our own advantage? I look forward to the following speech.

My Lords, I welcome the opportunity to make my maiden speech during this debate and to congratulate my noble friend on having secured it on the important subject of foreign languages in schools. I also thank him for his kind words, although I should let him know that I am no expert, and certainly no expert on the teaching of foreign languages in the English education system. I shall try to concentrate on one particular part of the Nuffield report.

First, may I tell your Lordships that I had the honour and privilege to represent Argyll and Bute in another place for 14 years. I should add that I stood down; I did not lose my seat. As many noble Lords know, it is a large rural area with 26 islands served by the famous Caledonian MacBrayne ferry company. It has more sheep than people and is quite the most beautiful constituency in the United Kingdom. I realise that there may be objections to that assertion. The people are kindly and hospitable. The weather is variable and the midges wear tackety boots. Despite the latter, I recommend it to all in this House as a holiday destination. Noble Lords can be assured of a warm and friendly Highland welcome, often a bilingual welcome.

Some noble Lords will recall that, on entering this Chamber, I repeated the Oath of Allegiance in Gaelic and I am grateful to the Procedure Committee for allowing me to do so. Thus I was following in the footsteps of my father, the late Lord Bannerman of Kildonan, who began his maiden speech in Gaelic, much to the astonishment of all. There is, unfortunately but understandably, no record of it in Hansard.

Many noble Lords were appreciative of hearing what is known—feadh na gaidhealtachd, throughout Gaeldom—as the language of Eden. I am grateful for that support. Not all noble Lords were happy, as reported in a certain London-based newspaper which has only a very limited readership north of the Border.

That brings me to my particular interest in this debate. While Scottish Gaelic is an indigenous language, the report of the Nuffield Language Inquiry devotes a whole chapter to the indigenous languages of the United Kingdom, which include Welsh, Gaelic, Irish and Cornish, and recommends that we should learn from, and draw upon the extensive and valuable experience of, bilingual education from nursery and primary schools to university and beyond. The report goes on to point out that there is much that can be extrapolated from their experience and applied to the teaching and learning of other languages in all parts of the country.

The report also draws attention to the influence of the media, which can and must play an important part—as it has in Wales. We in Scotland look with envy upon the dedicated Welsh language channel, S4C. Once digital broadcasting covers the whole country, we hope to have such a dedicated channel, particularly in the Highlands.

As has been mentioned, one of the universal problems is the chronic shortage of language teachers. This is highlighted in the Nuffield report. It states in no uncertain terms that the United Kingdom desperately needs many more of them.

Last year, on European languages day, a debate was held in the Scottish Parliament. The then Education Minister, Jack McConnell, now First Minister, indicated that over the next three years the Scottish Government would provide funding and support for the learning of foreign languages, including Gaelic, and for the professional development of language teachers.

The demand for entrance to Gaelic-only units in primary schools continues to grow, and that is good progress. There is also a great demand for Gaelic-only pre-school education. These groups are very often run by parents. There is no question of compulsion, but it is a hard battle which we are determined win to keep the language alive.

Since 1707 until fairly recently, for Gaelic it has been downhill all the way—proscribed, denigrated, ridiculed and forbidden in schools, even in playgrounds. So we await with some trepidation the results of the census which will reveal the numbers of Gaelic speakers in Scotland. Will they have fallen again?

To lose one of the oldest languages in Europe, so rich in literature, music, poetry and song, which has so enhanced our heritage, our culture, our traditions and values, would be nothing short of criminal. It would be a loss not only to Scotland but to the United Kingdom and, indeed, the whole world.

Finally, I have tried to demonstrate that those who are native Gaelic speakers, using their mother tongue and bilingual from an early age, with English their second language, have a head start when it comes to learning other languages. The same goes for Welsh. It is a way of trying to persuade people in this country that they should learn foreign languages. In the Highlands it now has economic as well as cultural benefits. There, people are well placed to learn, understand and appreciate others on the international and world stage.

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Michie of Gallanach, and to congratulate her on an excellent maiden speech. She said that she is not an expert in language but clearly she is an expert, as evidenced by her passionate and understandable espousal of the cause of Gaelic. It is nice, too, that she is following in the footsteps of her well-known father, Lord Bannerman of Kildonan, who, sadly, was a Member of your Lordships' House for a relatively short time.

The noble Baroness is not only an expert on language but on many other issues, including practically every agricultural subject on the west coast of Scotland. In the past, we used to meet mainly in her beautiful constituency—from which she was not pushed but fell—in Oban and at events such as the Argyllshire Gathering. I do not think she ever took part in tossing the caber, but, in whatever equivalent pastime there may be in your Lordships' House, she will be an outstanding performer—as she has been already in making her wonderful maiden speech and in being, I believe, the first person ever to take the oath in Gaelic. Long may we continue to hear from her.

In congratulating the noble Lord, Lord Williams of Elvel, on introducing the debate, I should declare two interests—neither of which is financial. I am a chairman of the governors of a school in Scotland and I am a member of the Board of the British Council.

Let me start with a brief story. Not long ago, I was in Amsterdam, and in the early evening I went out for some exercise. I was going along a rather dark road beside a canal and I was accosted by a large, tough looking young man, who made some obvious demands of me in Dutch. I said that I did not understand Dutch, whereupon he repeated the request for financial assistance in English. I said to him, "I am terribly sorry, but when I am running in a tracksuit I do not normally have any money in my pocket". Whereupon I received the charming answer, "Oh well t hen, I do hope you have a nice evening".

I am not trying to suggest that we should expect all muggers in Britain to be bilingual—let alone that we should train them to be so—but that story makes the obvious point that in much of continental Europe, particularly in countries such as the Netherlands, being bilingual is natural. Sadly, that is very far from true here.

One of the most striking statistics to come out of the Nuffield report, to which the noble Lord, Lord Williams, referred, is the fact that less than one in 10 young people continue to study a foreign language after the age of 16. That is a horrifying statistic.

I do not wish to dwell for too long in a short time on European languages—many other noble Lords are far more qualified to do so than I am—except to make two points. First, it is not only highly desirable to learn a European language but it is significant in terms of jobs for young people. If two people—one from the UK and one from Europe—with the same kind of qualifications apply for a job, but the person from Europe speaks more than one language, it is obvious that the job will go to the person who speaks more than one language. It is an economic necessity.

Secondly, it comes out of the Nuffield report that, perhaps, we over concentrate on French—more people study French and more people become teachers of French and so on ad infinitum. Surely we need more people to study and then teach German and Spanish.

The noble Lord, Lord Williams, also mentioned the fact that, contrary to what one might think, more people are now, surprisingly, using non-English languages to access the Internet. If one looks at that statistic—as the newspapers have pointed out and common sense suggests—one can see that, if not now then very soon, the majority of those people will be speaking and accessing the Internet in Chinese. There are some 1.3 billion people in China, of which some 300 million are studying English. How many people do we have here who are studying Chinese?

But it does not stop at the main oriental languages such as Chinese or Japanese, there is an important point to be made about the lesser used and lesser known languages. Surely this was emphasised to us all in the aftermath of the events of 11th September. It is a remarkable fact that the Foreign Office was able to bring out of retirement and produce as the Prime Minister's Special Envoy to Afghanistan someone who spoke Tajic, Uzbek, Farsi, Dari and, indeed, Russian—which is no mean feat. It is very much to the credit of the Foreign Office and some other departments that they continue with the teaching of these relatively unused languages. We never know when we are going to need them and we should continue to teach them. It may not be a main priority, but we need to do it.

There are rays of sunshine in the dark picture painted by the noble Lord, Lord Williams. They include good initiatives at various levels—some under the auspices of the British Council, whose reputable Central Bureau has been incorporated with the Council's Education and Training Group. Some 2,500 foreign language assistants are teaching in UK schools. Thanks to substantial European funding through the Socrates programme, some 50,000 pupils are working on projects involving schools and colleges in Europe. The Leonardo Da Vinci scheme provides for 2,500 young trainees and workers to be sent abroad on placements.

As to the private sector, I am particularly impressed by the sponsorship of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation and the Department for Education and Skills in promoting the study of Chinese. It embraces some 30 schools in England, and 200 students and teachers went to China for intensive language study. I understand that there have been discussions to expand that scheme to Scotland, which I hope will happen.

It is good to encourage young people to take an interest in Chinese, even if they do not master it at school. It is fascinating for even a primary schoolchild to know that when the Chinese characters for woman and child are put together, it means good. If the character for the sun and moon are put together, it means bright. Even more fun, if one puts the character for a pig under that for a roof, it means family or home.

Much is going on at the moment but more needs to be done. We need a coherent strategy. The vision is there but we need to make it reality. I know from my inquiries that all that is close to the Minister's heart. I hope that when she responds, she will be able to assure the House that there will be provision to match the vision.

My Lords, I pay tribute to the noble Baroness, Lady Michie, who was a good colleague in the other place. I am glad that we are together again in this House and I congratulate her on her maiden speech. I apologise to my noble friend Lord Williams for arriving late; the debate started earlier than I expected. However, my noble friend gave me a preview of his speech, so I know what he said in the part that I did not hear.

My noble friend is a very able Member of the House and a fine cricketer. He is also a distinguished biographer of not only Bradman but, more relevant to this debate, his biographies of de Gaulle and Adenauer are arguably the best studies of their subject in the English language. My noble friend could not have written those works without his command of French and German. I am nothing like as good at languages as my noble friend or others who have spoken. Despite having an outstanding teacher, my German is still poor.

My French is better. I have even made a speech in French in the Assemblée Nationale, as has my leader. I admit that my accent is appalling and my grammar still erratic. All the same, it is one of the great pleasures of my life that I am able to communicate freely with the French on my frequent trips across the Channel.

There is a general consensus, reflected in the debate, that the teaching, learning and understanding of foreign languages is a national disaster area. We are caught in a vicious circle of declining A-level results, an inadequate number of teachers and a poor general grasp of language. That is a disgrace. It is bad for the country that only 25 per cent of British people are able to communicate in another language.

However, without a strong government lead that strong consensus will not result in decisive action. Because English is the major world language for the moment and the most common spoken within the European Union, there is not the political will to do anything serious about our poor record. If English was not the main language, we would have to do something—in the same way as have the Swedes and the Dutch. We continue to believe that provided we shout loud enough, the rest of the world—including our closest European neighbours—will understand.

That attitude helps to explain the Government's inadequate response to the devastating Nuffield report, which shows that we have the worst record in language teaching of any country in the European Union.

We all welcome the increase in specialist language schools, such as that attended by one of my grandchildren. There are more than 100 such schools and I hope that there will be more. I welcome the Government's promise to take the issue more seriously, but why have they not committed themselves to making the teaching of foreign languages obligatory at primary level—at least as a long-term objective? I have seldom read anything more depressing and defeatist than the report of the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority, which advised against a statutory requirement. If French and German primary schools can observe one, why not British schools?

I accept that the shortage of teachers is a serious problem. I do not write it off, as did the noble Lord, Lord Lucas. What about employing teachers from abroad, as my noble friend suggested? What about using teachers from the growing number of specialist secondary schools in primary schools for an hour a week? What about attracting retired teachers back to work? If we are serious, we must do something serious.

What are the Government doing about the fact that only 10 per cent of GCSE passes and only 4 per cent of A-level passes are in foreign languages? The A-level situation is deteriorating, which is a totally inadequate platform for ensuring that the nation is linguistically equipped for the modern world. Establishing more specialist schools is not a strong enough answer, although it is a good measure in itself. What are the Government doing to ensure that people can acquire a foreign language after the age of 16, where they have not had the chance before?

The Government must make a more serious response to Nuffield. Unless there is radical action on the lines proposed by my noble friend Lord Williams and other speakers, the situation will continue to deteriorate. That will be bad for UK citizens and bad for the United Kingdom. I hope that the Government will say something this evening that will put my fears at rest.

My Lords, it is good that the noble Lord, Lord Williams of Elvel, has so speedily followed up the European Year of Languages with this debate—in which I am happy to endorse most of the points made by most speakers, as I am to declare my interest as a past president of the Institute or Linguists and a current adviser to language providers and educational publishers.

In a series of articles in the Observer written nearly 30 years ago, I was already arguing that the relatively recent status of English as a world lingua franca was in danger of being to our disadvantage—making us think that we needed to learn no foreign language. Now, as more and more well-educated, bilingual youngsters from the Continent are snapped up by British employers in preference, as the noble Lord, Lord Wilson, has just pointed out, to our own monolingual youth, these disadvantages have become ever more apparent.

One of my Observer articles was entitled "English is not enough". The same words head the Executive summary of the Nuffield report which is the basis for this debate, as they have been repeated by the noble Lord, Lord Williams. Indeed, it is true to say that these words have become so familiar as to seem like a familiar mantra. Yet in many ways our institutions, industrial and commercial firms, tacitly ignore them as they rely on translators, foreign employees or, as the noble Lord, Lord Radice, has just said. on just shouting louder. How many invite statements about language qualifications in their job adverts? How many of their switchboard operators can cope with incoming calls even in such unexotic languages as French? How many of our ubiclitous news gatherers and reporters rely on interpreters for their "pretend" interviews even in Frankfurt or Paris? How many, indeed, of our politicians support the Government's welcome of the Nuffield report?

I ask that because I have with me a letter to a British educational publisher from a British parliamentarian—not, I hasten to say, a parliamentarian here in Westminster but one in the European Parliament. He had been asked how useful a knowledge of a foreign language was to him in that multilingual environment. I quote from his reply:

"The multilingual environment in which I work is, from my point of view at least, an English language environment".

Why, he went on, would he ever,

"seek to learn a foreign language",

since all the people that matter would before long be speaking English? Some MEP!

Given that the Government would heartily repudiate such parochial arrogance—and I echo the word used by the noble Lord, Lord Williams—I ask the Minister when can we expect a firm commitment to a national language policy as robust as that of France and Germany, our partners in the "Club of Three" meeting, held in London just two months ago.

As the Minister will know, Jack Lang has already implemented a policy whereby every child in France will begin a first foreign language at the age of six, take up a second language at the age of 11 and maintain both to the age of 16. Will the Minister endorse the words of her noble friend Lady Kennedy, spoken at that November meeting, that a foreign language should be introduced in every primary school and that pupils should have two foreign languages by school-leaving age?

Of course, I acknowledge, as other noble Lords have done, the progress we have made over the past dozen years; the introduction of one foreign language at least in the national curriculum and the recent surge in the number of specialist language colleges, many of which, although by no means all, are doing excellent work.

Of course I acknowledge too the problem of teacher recruitment. But this is an area, as several speakers have pointed out, with lots of scope for sharing resources with other EU countries, as the German Ambassador, Dr Hans-Friedrich von Ploetz, has been tirelessly repeating to various UK audiences up and down the country in the past year or so.

Perhaps I may say a word about the estimated 3 million in our midst who come from non-Anglophone countries. Dr Philida Schellekens was recently commissioned by the Department for Education to study the extent to which those 3 million were effectively excluded from employment through a poor command of English. She found, horrifyingly, that there might be as many as 1.5 million. Clearly, their English is a problem that has to be addressed urgently so that, for their sake as well as ours, these people can be absorbed into our institutional and economic life. But that is to address the downside of this issue.

But there is an upside of the issue that we in the UK have scarcely begun to appreciate. A poor command of English does not mean a poor command of language. More than any other country in Europe we have people in their hundreds of thousands with a perfect command of foreign languages for which there is an increasing need and which we could never supply starting from scratch even though, as the noble Lord, Lord Wilson, has pointed out, the Foreign Office, by its encouragement of special language schools, does a lot to maintain it.

How long would it take to teach a police officer enough Turkish for service in Wood Green? There are 70,000 Turkish speakers in London alone from whom such a police officer could be recruited. Staying with London, we have over 100,000 speakers of Hindi/Urdu, ditto of Bengali, ditto of Gujerati, ditto of Punjabi. We also have many thousands whose language is Arabic, Chinese and up to 300 other exotic languages, as we call them.

London is exceptional only in respect of numbers. A similar rich linguistic array can be found in cities up and down the country—in the Midlands and the North, as we know well. We should be eagerly and gratefully making use of these resources in firms, in the social services and elsewhere. I note that Lord Justice Auld, in his recent report on the criminal courts, deplored the serious shortage of interpreters in just such languages. The paradox of famine in the midst of plenty! I hope that this aspect of immigrant minority languages will be taken into account by the Minister in the language statement which I hope that she will make.

My Lords, I also thank the noble Lord, Lord Williams, for drawing our attention to the Nuffield report and for providing a very useful and timely debate. I thank too the noble Baroness, Lady Michie, for a beautifully judged maiden speech. Looking back at my own maiden speech, I am full of envy. I wish to make reference to the heroic efforts of the European ambassadors, led by the German ambassador to this country, in trying to draw our enlightened self-interest to the problem that this debate highlights.

Most of my life I have spent making essentially cultural arguments. Today I restrict myself to the practical, and possibly the achievable, aspects of this debate. The opportunity to learn must, and I am sure, will be enhanced and improved at primary level. That is an essential component of whatever response the Government make today and in future.

I believe it is also true to say that motivation must be significantly improved across all areas of education, not just in primary, but in secondary and adult education. So more opportunity and far better motivation are the challenges that face us. Interestingly enough, my noble friend Lady Massey used the exactly the same words in her speech.

That said, I find myself in agreement with many of the comments made by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas—particularly in regard to the utilisation of ICT and its relevance and importance in the future, not merely across the broad spectrum of the curriculum but specifically in language teaching.

Today, I am almost a professional school visitor. I spend most of my life visiting schools, secondary and primary for the most part. I have, therefore, become hypersensitive to the realities as perceived at the chalk face. Foreign language ability is not a basic skill for students in this country, as they understand matters. To attempt to make such an argument does this debate, and our fairly well shared position, no particular favours.

Children are very smart. You cannot "con" them into something which, on a day-to-day basis, they know not to be true. A knowledge of foreign languages, for the most part English, is a core, or a basic, skill for ambitious French, German or other European students. They know it. But to pretend that there is a precise equivalence is wrong. As I say, I do not believe that we advance our case by taking that position. Frankly, our young people know better. Therefore, the real challenge is motivation—for the enhancement of their personal, cultural, and in many cases their professional lives by the addition of another language.

By way of doing my homework for the debate, I sought the help of the CBI, which was very supportive. Yes, more jobs require more languages. Yes, multilingual jobseekers are to an extent advantaged, and on occasions their pay mirrors that advantage—but marginally. The CBI did a quick snapshot over the past three days of international businesses. The response was fairly consistent. It can be summed up in a statement from a very large employer—a huge law firm—in this country. It told the CBI that it was important to emphasise that it does not look for languages in recruiting. The key skills that it looks for are,

"attention to detail, commercial awareness and dealings with others".

It states that it will invest in trainees' language skills as and when they are needed and as and when it finds the right candidates. In fairness, I imagine that much the same is true of the Foreign Office or even of the police force.

Young people know that language is not a core skill. But it is our job to make sure that they see it as a thoroughly desirable skill. In a desperately crowded secondary curriculum, we must make the point that language skills are very desirable. However, they fall some way short of the claim that they are "basic" skills. I believe that that will be one of the factors that will influence not only the Minister's response but, indeed, government action in years to come.

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Williams of Elvel, for enabling us to have this debate. I declare an interest as chairman of the Nuffield Foundation.

The reason why we set up the inquiry was not that it was a new task. As the noble Lord, Lord Quirk, reminded us, there have been many endeavours to take a grip on the way in which languages have been taught, provided for and respected in this country. We turned to this somewhat Sisyphean task again because we thought that there might be one new way in which to look at it. We are grateful to the co-chairs of the inquiry, Sir Trevor McDonald and Sir John Boyd, for carrying this through.

The perspective and intention of the report was that it should not be a provider's forum, that we should not round up those who are keen on languages and those who teach languages—who would then indeed say that languages should be more widely taught. If you round up the usual suspects, you will get the reply, "Well, they would say that, wouldn't they?". We also attempted to look at the demand side. That is why there were people on the inquiry drawn from business, banking and the Civil Service, and it is why we inquired widely of employers and of the tourist industry. Indeed, we received much evidence that is not entirely congruent with the evidence reported by the noble Lord, Lord Puttnam.

This approach was taken not because we doubt, or doubted, the intrinsic educational worth of language learning, the importance of understanding the richness of more than a single literature, the importance of understanding other cultures, the deeper understanding that we all have of our own languages; nor was it simply because we know that economic arguments can cast long educational shadows. It was taken because we wanted to test the evidence for the claim that there is no demand for languages and language learning. We found that there was demand from pupils and parents and from employers and business.

It is hard to get the statistics together. It is a mark of the lack of seriousness with which we regard this matter that good statistics are not available. But there is an enormous amount of evidence of language learning at considerable inconvenience and expense to families outside the educational structures. What is spoken of as language provision in primary schools is all too often a French club—which is indeed an opportunity, but is voluntary; it is taken up by some children and not by others, and parents often pay for these kinds of activities. We also found a great deal of evidence that employers sought languages and could not recruit in this country. A good example was of airports being unable to recruit ground staff with elementary language skills and therefore recruiting people in Spain.

The inquiry's central recommendation, therefore, was that government should adopt a national languages strategy. Other noble Lords emphasised that need. In referring to a "strategy", the inquiry does not mean "aspiration" or "enthusiasm", although of course such ideas are not redundant. What we were looking at was a landscape of fragmentation and failure, which I fear are growing.

I have mentioned what is not happening in primary schools. We also know that language provision is fragmented and often discontinuous in secondary schools. There is a very large opt-out after GCSE. There is the fact that the new AS-level has led to only an 8 per cent increase in language enrolments. Had it been proportionate, assuming that people are going from three to four subjects, it should have been a 33 per cent increase. The figure for university entrants is down. That for PGCE entrants is down, and that for entrants into the teaching profession is down.

There is a thin ray of sunshine in the language colleges. But let us not over-estimate it. It may be bright, but it is reaching less than 2.5 per cent of the age group. That is not a strategy. The statistics are poor, and I cannot give more accurate ones than that. Also poor is the provision of accurate standards of measuring competence for those who are learning languages in a prosaic, useful and aspiring way.

We should remember that more people in the world are bilingual or multilingual than are monolingual. The noble Baroness, Lady Michie of Gallanach, reminded us that that is not unknown in these islands. Our report places great importance on the indigenous languages of these islands and on the community languages in our immigrant communities, referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Quirk.

Our young people are as talented as any. But they are being denied the opportunity, the encouragement and the basic provision. A child can be as keen as he or she may, but if the basic provision is lacking. nothing substantial happens. In consequence, children miss out at later stages on the valuable experience of working abroad in a way that their contemporaries elsewhere in Europe do not miss out. Furthermore, they may miss out on jobs at home. I have mentioned ground staff at airports. Similar evidence is coming in from call centres, from tourism and from the City. Not all these jobs are trivial. Home languages are not supported. People who are able to speak another language often receive no support for becoming literate in that language.

I know that the Minister is aware of many of these problems and I hope that she may be able to answer just a few of the questions that arise out of the report. The central question is whether the Department for Education and Skills is going to propose a national languages strategy. If so, when does the Minister expect a draft to be available? It would also be interesting to know whether such a strategy—if it is to be made available—will set targets for participation rates, not for opportunity. Other noble Lords have cast doubt on whether opportunity is the right currency.

How will the Government address the crisis of supply? Nothing can be done overnight, but meanwhile we are fiddling while Rome is burning. This is not just a schools issue. It is a matter that extends through our educational structures, through all stages of education and into employment. If anything is a matter for joined-up government, this is it.

My Lords, learning to speak another person's language is not just about being able to exchange words directly with another individual, important as that is. It has an added value, because in learning a language one learns about the culture, history and traditions that make that other person tick. It is therefore vital not only for jobs, as we have heard, but in developing international understanding and good will. That is why English alone is not enough. I thoroughly endorse that finding of the Nuffield report.

We are indebted to the noble Lord, Lord Williams of Elvel, for bringing this subject before us for debate today. Let us hope that what we have to say may help a little in the profile of language studies in this country.

I found a lot to agree with in the noble Lord's introduction to the debate and I have agreed with what many others have said, particularly those who are educational experts, which I cannot claim to be, in spite of my stint as a Minister in the Department of Education and Science, as it then was. I shall concentrate on the more general issue of motivation, which has also been touched on by many others.

I glanced at the Evening Standard last night and saw the headline, "Success—You're talking my language". The article went on to say that speaking another language automatically increases a person's job prospects and earning power. That is a good start. Can the Department for Education and Skills make a start by encouraging the Civil Service at least to request that applicants state on their forms their ability to speak other languages. On one occasion at the Department of Social Security I was horrified to discover that a young man who spoke fluent Japanese had been working in a social security office. I succeeded in getting him moved to the Department of Trade and Industry, which seemed a much more appropriate place for him. It would give an indication of the importance that the Government give to languages if the Civil Service considered putting it on its applications forms.

From my experience, the ability to speak languages—in my case French and Spanish fluently and just a smattering of German—has been of enormous value. I hesitate to say that I may not have been the best solicitor in the world, but I was rather more unique as a solicitor who also spoke Spanish and French fluently and was therefore able to work in those countries. My knowledge of Spanish also enabled me to obtain a fellowship to study in Latin America, which started my love affair with that part of the world. I also found it extremely useful as a Member of the European Parliament—unlike the example quoted by the noble Lord, Lord Quirk. Even now, I find that ability very useful as a member of the parliamentary delegation to the Council of Europe.

As others have said, British children are not more stupid than, for example, Dutch or Swedish children, who seem capable of holding intelligent conversations in three or four languages at an early age. Children from many other countries do not seem to think about it; they just get on with it. However, British children seem capable of learning the language of IT—the language of the computer and of the Internet. I can speak some foreign languages with some fluency, but I am not much good in computerspeak. Why is that? It is because I have not knuckled down and learnt how to use a computer or its specialised terminology and I have not really practised. It must he brought home to children that a knowledge of foreign languages does not come out of the atmosphere, as one's mother tongue seems to do—it has to be learnt. Good teachers who motivate their pupils are vital to achieving that, as the Nuffield report and others have said. Information technology may be another useful tool, as my noble friend Lord Lucas and others have said.

We must bring home to young people how important the knowledge of another language can he to succeed in finding a job and for their future careers. One of the most useful suggestions so far in the debate about how languages are taught came from the noble Baroness, Lady Massey. She said that languages should be taught in frequent short slots rather than for two long periods in the week. I found that a novel suggestion, but it seems a good idea.

I have a special plea to make, at which many of your Lordships will not be surprised. I declare an interest as president of Canning House, the Hispanic and Luso Brazilian Council. The noble Lord, Lord Watson of Richmond, referred to, I think, five global languages. I have been brought up to believe that after English, the most spoken languages in the world as mother tongues are Spanish and Portuguese, with Arabic coming close behind Portuguese. Spanish and Portuguese are certainly not sufficiently taught in our schools. I have had the opportunity to lead trade missions to Latin America and it has been clear that the members of those trade missions, however interested they were in obtaining work and links in the various countries of Latin America, had no idea about speaking Spanish or Portuguese. I wholeheartedly agree with the Nuffield findings and with many who have spoken that the United Kingdom needs competence in many languages, not just in French.

The final point that I would like to pick up was made by the noble Baroness, Lady Michie, in her excellent maiden speech. She pointed out convincingly that those who are brought up bilingual have a head start in learning another language. Many children in this country have that head start—not just those whose mother tongue is Gaelic or Welsh, but those who speak Hindi, Gujarati, Urdu and all the other languages enumerated by the noble Lord, Lord Quirk. We should not ignore that. Can the Government find a way to take advantage of it? I look forward to hearing from the Minister.

My Lords, it is normal in this House for a speaker to congratulate the originator of a debate on its timeliness. I hasten to congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Williams of Elvel, on bringing to our attention the important and disturbing report on language teaching sponsored by the Nuffield Foundation. It was of great value to have the chairman of that foundation to bring to our attention some of its salient points. However, I would not wish it to be thought that my commendation of timeliness extends to the Government's response to and handling of that report, which has been tardy and inadequate. I can only express the hope that the Government's words, and more importantly their actions, will from now on show a greater sense of urgency and commitment to remedy a situation that has continued to deteriorate since the report was issued.

The report rightly draws attention to the fact that the establishment of English as a—perhaps now trending towards the—global language is no adequate reason for the British to abandon all aspirations to linguistic competence in other languages. There is a paradox. The extent to which English is becoming the lingua franca—if that is not a contradiction—of the whole world is a huge asset to this country and one on which we need to capitalise to the greatest extent possible. It means that our universities are among the key service industries of the present and the future. It places added emphasis on the need to support the work of the British Council and the BBC World Service.

However, that spread of the English language—some references to that phenomenon err on the side of triumphalism—brings a risk that we will simply assume, like the MEP mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Quirk, that everyone who matters to us will be able to speak English anyway and we do not need to go to the trouble of learning any other language. Frankly, that is not the case. Our businessmen, our journalists, our academics, our diplomats and our military will simply not be able to function to full effectiveness if they are purely monoglot, if they turn their backs on and ignore the languages of the countries and the people with whom we need to work. We shall be progressively cutting ourselves off from huge resources of knowledge and information, and from the means of influence in any increasingly interdependent world; and we shall be doing so in a peculiarly selfish and arrogant way that will certainly arouse bitterness and, very probably, a backlash. One only has to look to see the sensitivities exposed by the present agonised debate in France over whether or not what is known as l'exception française has come to an end to get the flavour of that view.

So it really is important for us to de-couple in our minds the undoubted benefits that we derive from the spread of the English language and the need for a country like ours with global interests to sustain a substantial pool of people with linguistic knowledge that is not in any way diminished by the spread of English.

While we are on the utilitarian arguments for better language teaching and learning, there is another paradox of which most people seem to be unaware. It is one to which reference has been in this debate. Although statistics show that the employability of those who leave our schools and universities with language skills is very high, better, for example, than for computing, physical sciences, psychology or business studies—I am quoting from the 1998–99 Higher Education Statistics Agency figures—nevertheless, the numbers of those taking advantage of this employment-friendly trend is not increasing; it is decreasing. Perhaps that is not so surprising in a period of pretty full employment, such as we have experienced in the past. And perhaps the current slowdown in employment growth will affect it. But it is surely important that the Government and careers departments throughout the country draw full and frequent attention to the fact that language skills do help you get a job.

One of the most damaging consequences of the weakness of language teaching in this country and of the decline of A-level qualifiers in languages corning forward is the remorseless squeeze that this is putting on the language departments of our universities. Here I must declare an interest as pro-Chancellor of the University of Birmingham. As such, I was a member of a panel that reviewed the whole of our modern language provision in the university about a year ago. The situation is, indeed, a dire one. The supply of qualified students coming forward to study languages declines and, as it does so, the losses of the university's language departments mount and pressure comes on us to reduce the spread of languages that we offer. On that occasion, we at Birmingham were able to resist that pressure.

There is much that universities must do, in particular by recognising that the demands for single language and literature degrees is dropping and that more needs to be offered by way of combining language studies with the teaching of other professional skills, such as law, medicine, engineering or business. But, in the long run, if the supply of qualified students cannot be improved, the efforts of the universities will be nugatory. We shall find ourselves trapped in a vicious circle.

So what is to be done? I shall not try to re-invent the wheel and to improve on the excellent recommendations of the Nuffield report that we are debating this evening. But I shall focus on two of its proposals: the need to begin language teaching at an earlier stage in our schools; and the need to continue it longer, avoiding the sharp drop in 16 to 19 year-olds studying languages that is currently the case. Of the two, I suspect that the first is the more important. It seems rather fashionable currently for British politicians to sally forth from these islands to discover how those other Europeans, a mere 30 miles from us, are ordering their affairs. Well, a pilgrimage designed to discover how much earlier they begin the systematic teaching of foreign languages in their school curriculum could well be salutary. The answer varies, but the contrast with us is not, frankly, in dispute; and nor are the results that they achieve in language skills. The old Jesuit claim that if they could educate a child in its early years that was what mattered, surely applies to language teaching too. No one who has seen the ease with which young children are capable of acquiring language skills can doubt that this must be one part of any overall solution.

In concluding, I should just like to say a few words about the Diplomatic Service, to which I belonged for some 35 years. I was glad to see that the report commended the Diplomatic Service for the excellence and the breadth of its linguistic skills. I believe that that was well merited. I know from my own experience that our embassies and High Commissions around the world are the envy of their peers for being so well staffed with diplomats who can work in the language of their host country. But this does not come cheap. Scarce resources have to be diverted from other objectives to achieve it. I believe that that is a wise and proper allocation of those resources. But if the Diplomatic Service can recognise that it is in our national interest to have diplomats well qualified linguistically, why cannot this lesson be learned and applied more widely? I believe that that is the challenge facing the Government. I just hope that they will rise to it with a bit more vigour and purpose than they have displayed hitherto.

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Williams, has bowled an unusually straight ball at the Minister. I am looking forward to seeing her hit it back very hard. I shall try not to repeat what noble friends have said, but it is nearly two years since the Nuffield Foundation established the inquiry to assess language needs for the 21st century; and what has happened? Other noble Lords have drawn attention to the delay and it must be said that much of the evidence goes back four years to 1998. It really is unsatisfactory when a government seem to ignore serious research by eminent persons, and let down an entire profession without, apparently, having made any tangible response beyond the usual promises—that is, until the noble Baroness arrived and embarked on a national strategy. We are told that the Government have accepted it but not acted on it, although we have heard hints that they are about to do so.

However, let that not distract us from the real disgrace and embarrassment which has concerned many of us; namely, that the English-speaking world for which Winston Churchill did so much in literary as well as in political terms has, paradoxically, abused its special position and is lamentably failing in this one respect to contribute adequately to 21st century culture. "Arrogance" was the word used by the noble Lord, Lord Williams. That includes all of us who, despite our training, stumble through European languages whenever we travel abroad, to be rescued quickly by kind friends.

We, the British, as we heard from the noble Lords, Lord Watson and Lord Wilson, and my noble friend Lord Hannay, seriously underestimate the effect of our lack of language training on our ability to convince most of Europe and the rest of the world of our performance and good faith in commerce, foreign affairs, diplomacy, and many other fields.

The French, notably through L'Express magazine identified this problem years ago, but they have not convinced us or changed our Anglo-Saxon attitudes. With all the repercussions of 11th September, it is time that we put more resources, as the British Council is now doing in its own way, not only into more language training but also into achieving a wider understanding in Britain and perhaps in the United States of other cultures and traditions. I shall not expand on this idea. The noble Baroness, Lady Hooper, made mention of it and the Minister already knows of my interest in global citizenship.

The Nuffield report is remarkably mild in its condemnation of Britain's inadequacies, while so prolific in its practical recommendations. That is why it is surprising that it has been so long ignored. As someone who spent nearly 14 years trying to learn foreign languages, I empathised at once with Kevin from Buckingham School, who says on page 72 of the report that "they can be quite tedious". The quality of teaching has improved enormously since my time. The shortage of teachers is, of course, a more critical problem.

I followed my mother's advice, not my father's, and gave up history to study French and German at university. I did so with great enjoyment, but it was rather too late. However, by reading Balzac and Goethe and Heinrich Böll, as well as working in Europe, I finally appreciated the wealth of knowledge that exists outside this offshore island of ours. Later, travelling to Asia and Africa, I easily fell back into the Anglo-Saxon intellectual lethargy which is still with me now. I even read Thomas Mann in English. On holiday, I try to read Le Monde or the Süddeutsche Zeitung, but, regrettably, not Racine.

My main point, like that of the report, is to emphasise the importance of learning languages in early childhood. We have all seen wonderful examples of very young children, as young as four or five, quickly picking up language ability. It is vital that the Government act on Recommendations 5 and 6, on early language learning, and run with them both in primary and pre-primary schools. Perhaps the Minister has evidence that that is happening already. The proposal is so simple and so urgent. The French have done it for years, and now they have offered us help—and quite right too. More teachers from Europe seems an obviously good idea.

The Nuffield report calls for a national action programme and makes the interesting suggestion of establishing international primary schools. Surely that is the least we can do for our children as they become the leaders and opinion formers in the middle of this century. But we must do it now.

Another recommendation focuses on basic competence in one language for 16 year-olds. I welcome the specialist schools initiative, which I have seen in action and endorse, but I would not personally invest a lot of resources beyond the age of six, let alone 16. Like the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, I agree that we should promote the use of technology, school exchanges, websites and related techniques of language teaching. I could list other recommendations, but other noble Lords have already mentioned them.

As I said at the outset, the Government have been given a great opportunity in this report. It is high time that they seized it.

My Lords, I join other noble Lords in thanking the noble Lord, Lord Williams of Elvel, for raising this very important issue. I also congratulate my noble friend Lady Michie on an excellent maiden speech.

This has been an excellent debate, although it has confronted us with many dire statistics—on the decreasing number of students studying modern foreign languages to GCSE and A-level, the decreasing number of university students and the closure of university departments. We have been told that one in 10 students drops languages after 16. I should think that the figure is even higher, as many students drop the subject at 14. Only five in 10 students are taking modern foreign languages to GCSE, and only 6 per cent—just over one in 20—are taking them at A-level.

One statistic is that 80 per cent of English people freely admit that they have no competence in any language other than English, compared with 13 per cent of people in Holland and a similar percentage in Sweden and Denmark. As we know, competence in other languages is important in smaller countries. However, as my noble friend Lord Watson reminded us, English is becoming a lingua franca around the world. Another statistic is that 200 million Chinese are learning English. Another statistic, however, is that—as the noble Lord, Lord Wilson, reminded us—the other 1.1 billion Chinese are not learning English. Perhaps we should be humble, not arrogant about the degree to which English is becoming a lingua franca.

The issue certainly matters. My noble friend Lord Watson gave a quote—I had it on my list—from Quentin Peel, who said:

"We think we understand what makes other people tick but only if they tell us in English".

That is certainly the case.

Tribute has been paid to the German ambassador, Herr Doctor von Ploetz, for all his efforts in this country to promote the extension of modern foreign language teaching. He has said that learning languages is the key to mutual understanding. Although it is true that we celebrate the cultural diversity of the European Union, as we do the cultural diversity of the world, we must know and understand something of the language, literature and history of those countries to share that cultural diversity.

I was interested that the noble Lord, Lord Williams, referred to the concept of international skills which emerged at the Lisbon conference. In relation to those skills, Ambassador von Ploetz said that,

"increasing awareness of cultural, communicative and analytical skills gained from learning a foreign language are vital to facing the challenge of the global knowledge economy".

The noble Baroness, Lady Hooper, pipped me at the post by giving an Evening Standard quote that I too had picked out. Even the Evening Standard is now telling us that,

"speaking another foreign language automatically increases your job prospects".

As the noble Baroness, Lady O'Neill, reminded us, even the British Airports Authority is having difficulty finding people with the necessary language skills to welcome people into this country. The same is true of the hotel and tourism industry.

The Nuffield report has won great acclaim, and I join others in praising it for its plethora of recommendations. A consistent theme, however, has been the need for a national strategy based on catching young people early and involving people in lifelong learning in every respect.

The French and the Germans have already moved forward on the Lisbon agenda. They are putting us to shame. The current aim in those countries is to introduce all primary school children to a modern foreign language and all secondary school pupils to a second modern foreign language, with the ultimate objective that all those leaving secondary school at the equivalent of A-level have two foreign languages. Furthermore, all students in those countries should be able to spend at least one semester abroad.

What are we doing in this country? I am sorry to tell the Minister that, like others, I really do not think that we are doing enough. We have established a national task force, but, at the moment, that is a talking shop and not a strategy. The Government would say that they have a strategy because they are establishing specialist schools. However, we have 3,400 secondary schools of which only 108—less than 3 per cent—are designated as specialist language schools.

The specialist schools are doing excellent work. We have one in Dorking that is acting as a hub, going into primary schools and helping with the continuing task in the local community. However, the school is in Dorking, not Guildford. What is happening in Guildford? We do not have a language specialist school, although we have a technology specialist school and an art specialist school. As a strategy, the scheme is full of holes. It is just not good enough.

The noble Lord, Lord Puttnam, mentioned the QCA's rejection of the notion of introducing modern foreign languages into the primary school curriculum. Yet there is increasing evidence that those who start languages early not only learn them very well, but benefit from them in their other studies. My noble friend Lady Michie made the point that those who are bilingual are helped rather than hindered by their language skills.

The shortage of teachers in modern foreign languages is reaching crisis level, similar to the situation in maths. More teachers are leaving the profession than joining it. Schools are having to cut back on language teaching so that there are fewer pupils enthused with modern foreign languages and going forward with them at university. The situation is dire and I do not think that the Government are doing enough about it.

What would the Liberal Democrats do? First, we would introduce a modern foreign language at seven. We would like all primary schools to offer children the opportunity to learn a modern foreign language from seven onwards. We think that that is a good idea because of emerging evidence. Although all children may not be suited to such study, we would like most children to be given the opportunity.

Secondly, those noble Lords who follow the education press may have noted that my honourable friend Mr Phil Willis spoke at the north of England education conference. He hit the headlines when he suggested that the Liberal Democrats would like to see an end to the GCSE. We feel that the GCSE constitutes a narrowing of the curriculum. We need increasingly to look to a much wider curriculum that runs from the age of 14 through to 19 and offers children the opportunity of a wider spread of objectives rather than the relatively narrow channelling of those objectives through what was originally the academic GCE exam for the 20 per cent who attended grammar schools. The curriculum was widened somewhat with the introduction of the GCSE, but not nearly enough. If a wider curriculum is introduced, one can move towards the Nuffield report's suggestion; that is, instead of GCSE exams one has grades as in music teaching, for example, grades one, two and three. That is what we would like to see.

Thirdly, we certainly endorse what the noble Lord, Lord Williams of Elvel, suggested in terms of the right of a student to have a semester abroad. As regards teachers, every year we send thousands and thousands of students abroad as teachers of foreign languages. The training is short. After four months' intensive training one can acquire a certificate stating that one is a teacher of English as a foreign language. Why cannot we welcome many students and young people from abroad into our schools and colleges to teach foreign languages and enthuse and motivate our students on the same basis? I look forward to hearing what the Minister has to say.

My Lords, I join other noble Lords in thanking the noble Lord, Lord Williams of Elvel, for so ably introducing the debate. I am sad that my noble friend Lady Blatch who is present is recovering from an illness and therefore will not speak. I wish that she were speaking as the House is deprived of her wisdom and experience and will have to listen to me instead.

We welcome the report, but I hope that I shall be forgiven if I take a pragmatic approach. The premise that we must improve the teaching of foreign languages in our schools is something with which we can all agree. The solutions to the problem set out in the report are, as the Americans say, "Mom and apple pie". It sounds almost heretical to offer any criticism. However, the Government in their response, which welcomes the report, merely state:

"The Nuffield report sets challenging aspirations and strong vision".

That and another telling phrase in the former Secretary of State's foreword to the response—

"we share its strategic aims"—

suggest to me that there might be a pigeonhole waiting for some of the recommendations.

I certainly do not criticise the authors of the report who have clearly put a great deal of work and thought into it. The fault lies in an ambiguity or an omission in their terms of reference. The report states:

"What capability in languages will this country need in the next twenty years if it is to fulfil its economic, strategic, social and cultural responsibilities and aims and the aspirations of its citizens?"

The inquiry seemingly took its terms of reference to refer only to the learning of foreign languages. Although we agree that that is important we also believe that item number one on its agenda, especially if it was to consider how to improve the economic and social aspirations of all our children, ought to have been, first, that they are all fluent in English.

All four of my grandparents arrived in this country early in the 20th century speaking not one single word of English between them. Their children, all born in this country, were sent to school where they were taught—as all other children were in those days—in English. There is no point in the authors of the report paying tribute to what they say is,

"the global role of English, now essentially the language of international science, law, banking, technology and much else"

when scarce resources are spent in teaching children, for whom English is not the first language, in a multiplicity of other languages in schools, because that is what they speak at home. Encouraging and perfecting their fluency in English will do much more to improve their integration into British social and cultural spheres, for which the committee's terms of reference call. I believe that such a process would make it much easier for them later to learn other languages.

The former Secretary of State in his foreword to the Government's response also acknowledged what he called,

"the dominance of English as a world language".

The report calls for a language to be a requirement for university entry and for designated vocational qualifications. I note that the Government's response does not endorse that. However, the most important linguistic qualification for university entry should be a working knowledge of not just English but also English grammar and English spelling.

The report calls for more resources for the teaching of foreign languages. That is something we can all support. The report wants languages to be designated a "key skill". The Government's response states:

"Language learning is indeed an important skill and we understand the rationale for the report's proposal".

However, it makes only vague proposals on future intentions. There is no indication at all of where the money is to come from. Perhaps that is not surprising. Under the previous Conservative government spending on education between 1992 and 1997 was 5 per cent of GDP. In the previous Parliament that spending between 1997 and 2001 was reduced to 4.7 per cent. That represents a shortfall in education spending in Labour's first term of nearly £13 billion. I remember the Prime Minister's assertion in 1997 that his first three priorities in office would be "education, education, education".

The report also calls for the appointment of a languages tsar, or "supremo" as it calls it,

"to ensure successful implementation of the national strategy for languages".

The Government's response merely offers "to consider the proposal". However, I should point out that there is already a "supremo" charged with the task: of ensuring that our children receive adequate language tuition—she is called the Secretary of State for Education.

A main problem in attaining the objectives set out in the report is the dire shortage of teachers acknowledged in the Green Paper published in February 2001 and commented on in many of the excellent speeches tonight. The Government's response claims an 11 per cent rise in the recruitment of people into secondary initial training as well as the recruitment of foreign nationals. That is commendable. However, there are between 24,000 and 25,000 schools in this country. I should be fascinated to know where language teachers for each of those schools will come from. That assumes that we are talking about only one language, whereas the report mentions more. How could that extra demand be met? Incidentally, I agree with my noble friend Lady Hooper and the noble Baroness, Lady Massey of Darwen, as regards the importance of Spanish and with the comments of the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, on Chinese and all the other interesting languages that noble Lords mentioned.

I understand that the German ambassador recently said that there is a surplus of teachers in Germany who may be able to assist us, assuming that the money can be found to pay them. The noble Lords, Lord Radice and Lord Quirk, also mentioned that point. Other noble Lords mentioned the excellent work of the German ambassador in this field.

The Qualifications and Curriculum Authority was asked to examine the idea of foreign languages being taught in the compulsory curriculum in primary schools. It reported that a considerable investment in teacher training would be required. The Government's response to the report was that they had no plans at present to make foreign languages compulsory in primary schools. Foreign languages have been compulsory in secondary schools since 1992 when the then Conservative government introduced the national curriculum. But last September for the first time 61 places were funded in various IT colleges around the country to train primary teachers to specialise in French. Will the Minister tell us what plans there are to expand that excellent initiative? What plans are there to increase language laboratory facilities in schools and after school clubs?

Time does not permit me to discuss all of the details in the report and the Government's response but I draw the attention of noble Lords to one more point. The Government very properly take credit for the establishment of what they call specialist language colleges. There are 99 of them so far and more to follow. I remind noble Lords that it was a Conservative government who introduced specialist schools, including language schools. It is the greatest form of flattery that the present Government have continued with that policy.

The report's objectives are highly commendable and entirely desirable, and we on these Benches endorse them. However, the Government's lukewarm and highly qualified welcome makes it clear that the priority should be to concentrate on literacy skills in English and to resolve the teacher shortage. That includes the need to reduce the dependency on supply teachers and on teachers who are teaching subjects in which they were not trained. It is also the case that until a sufficient cohort of school leavers are competent in one or more foreign languages, it will not be possible to provide language teachers for 25,000 schools.

As my noble friend Lord Lucas and I said, unless technology can be harnessed effectively and on a very large scale, many of the report's recommendations will not be deliverable. It is not possible to detect from the Government's response to the report what precisely they intend to do or what their timescale is. I am certain that the Minister will do her best to enlighten us on what their programme will be.

My Lords, I begin by saying how delighted I am to see the noble Baroness, Lady Blatch, in her place. I look forward to many debates with her. I feel that the noble Baroness, Lady Miller, was being rather modest; I was delighted that she participated in the debate.

I, too, am grateful to my noble friend Lord Williams of Elvel for initiating this debate, and to all noble Lords who have taken part, especially the noble Baroness, Lady Michie of Gallanach. It is surely an indication of the importance that your Lordships' House places on language teaching and learning that our debate has been of such quality.

I say to the noble Earl, Lord Sandwich, that I perhaps hope to catch the ball rather than to bat it back. I share the view of my noble friend Lord Williams of Elvel and other noble Lords on the importance of language learning to our social and economic success. I say that especially to the noble Lord, Lord Wilson. I strongly feel that learning a foreign language is not just about verbal exchange; it is also about encouraging intercultural understanding and tolerance and a sense of international or—I say this to the noble Earl, Lord Sandwich—global citizenship.

An immense wealth of languages is spoken in this country. More than 300 languages are spoken in London alone, making it one of the most—if not the most—linguistically diverse cities in the world. Understanding that cultural and linguistic richness plays a critical role in promoting social inclusion, responsible participation and an understanding of cultural traditions in the UK and wider international communities.

My answer to the first question of my noble friend Lord Williams of Elvel is yes, the Government do appreciate the importance of language learning. I also say to the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, that, yes, we feel a sense of urgency. The Government were extremely grateful for the Nuffield report, which was summarised so succinctly by my noble friend Lord Williams and given greater explanation by the noble Baroness, Lady O'Neill. It laid out the issues and challenges that we face. We were pleased to respond to it. On my appointment I was delighted to find myself chairing the National Steering Group for Languages, which was charged with developing a languages strategy. I currently spend a great deal of my time on that, such is my view of its importance.

Even a cursory examination of the Nuffield report shows that there is much to do at every level of education if we are to turn the shafts of light that were described by my noble friend Lord Williams of Elvel—I could also refer to the rays of sunshine that were mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Wilson, and the ray of sunshine that was mentioned by the noble Baroness, Lady O'Neill—into brightness everywhere. We need to be mindful of the work that is under way to lighten the load of teachers and of the priorities and targets that we have set ourselves.

As my noble friend Lord Williams said, it is people who will make the whole system work. As many noble Lords—not least the noble Baroness, Lady Miller—said, resources are important. As the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, said, languages do not come cheap.

The challenge that we face is to build simultaneously two pillars. They are the "motivation to learn", which was mentioned by many noble Lords, including my noble friend Lady Massey and my noble friend Lord Puttnam, and the "opportunity to learn". We have the foundations for our pillars but, at the risk of pushing this analogy too far, we need to get the right kind of bricks, bake them, cut them to size, reinforce the structure and build it to the right height.

The noble Baroness, Lady Hooper, discussed her motivation to learn the computer and the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, discussed motivation in the Diplomatic Service. In those two examples—the noble Baroness, Lady Hooper, not learning the computer and the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, discussing the example of those in the Diplomatic Service—we have, in a sense, laid out before us the whole issue of motivation.

There is much to celebrate in our society: the fact that one in five primary schools already provides some opportunities for language learning; the innovative work of some schools in promoting and supporting community languages; the development of 126 language colleges; the use of ICT as a tool to teach languages, such as Japanese; the push of business to see language as an important factor in recruitment and promotion; and the support of our European partners.

However, I have chosen not to spend my time on what is already a success, in the knowledge that noble Lords will join me in congratulating all those who make an important contribution; rather, I want to use this opportunity to share our thinking with noble Lords. These thoughts are a long way from being proposals, but they are indications of the seriousness with which we take this subject and our willingness to be open to ideas. In other words, rather than being the worked-up answer, this is the part of the exam question where you, the examiners, see the workings out—and, later, possibly the crossings out, too.

I mentioned motivation. I am particularly keen to motivate those young people who are making decisions about their futures. What do I believe will motivate them, and where should we start?

Practically every noble Lord in this debate has discussed the need to begin early. The noble Baroness, Lady Sharp, suggested the age of seven and the noble Earl, Lord Sandwich, suggested nursery age. I have seen examples of all such kinds of teaching, including that from the earliest years. A child in a nursery can be enriched by the language and culture of other nations through the benefit of other children who speak those languages—that should never be overlooked—and the benefit of those who work with them. The opportunities to study languages—whether in primary school or before—to have developed an interest in and perhaps even love for language and to have had, over time, the chance to study different languages, both in and out of school, are important. I do not believe that all language teaching needs to be, could be, or should be in school.

As the noble Baroness, Lady Hooper, said, there needs to be greater recognition of community languages, and opportunities for children to share their language with others. That fits in well with our strategy for an enriched curriculum at primary level, not at the expense of, but as part of, our drive for higher standards.

Lest any teachers are listening, we are not proposing a new SAT. We believe that the primary stage is where we should begin. I say to my noble friend Lord Radice that we asked the QCA for its views because that is what we should do. It is important that we use organisations that can offer expertise. It did not believe that it was currently appropriate to discuss a mandatory language at the primary stage. I shall return to what I believe we should be beginning to do.

The second part of motivation is to understand the importance of language learning for the future careers of young people. As our young people reach the age when they make choices about their future studies, they need to weigh up the potential for their career that language can give them. I believe that we have a huge amount to do in that area. We need to build active partnerships with businesses that can help by communicating their need for employees who have languages and to demonstrate the implications—financial and otherwise—of doing so.

Those are the motivating factors on which I believe we need to concentrate. We need creative and innovative ways of delivering those opportunities to children. The factors that determine how many of our young people will continue with language study to good effect are whether we can offer opportunities for younger children, whether we can motivate them to learn and whether we can demonstrate to young people the benefits of languages. The noble Lord, Lord Quirk, discussed the potential of journalists, switchboard operators and others. I argue that there are probably very few young people who really understand the different opportunities within the different professions and jobs, and their potential to enhance their careers as a consequence of language ability. I am sure that the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, with his background in universities, will be interested to know that, of the number of graduates who obtained a first degree in 1999–2000, 60 per cent of those who had studied languages were employed six months after graduation as a result of their studies.

How do we go about improving this situation? I believe that during the debate 13 languages were mentioned as being of key importance. That raises some difficulties for me in terms of where we begin in relation to primary education; or, rather, it would do if we were not extremely creative.

The system referred to by the noble Baroness, Lady Sharp, is, in a sense, raised in the Nuffield report. The noble Baroness mentioned a matter that we have begun to explore, and it is one with which I am very taken; that is, the use of a system similar to that of accreditation in music. Schemes do exist that run along those lines, and all credit to them. Put simply, children and adults learn a variety of musical instruments in and out of school. In each case, they have an accreditation system, universally understood, called "grades 1,2,3" and so on. Why should that not be the case in respect of foreign languages, including, following such an eloquent maiden speech, Gaelic?

I start from the principle that such a system could be beneficial—not only to children but to anyone wishing to pursue languages at any point in their lives. Easily understood and recognised, it could provide a quality assessment—a matter referred to by the noble Baroness, Lady O'Neill—in terms of primary languages, where the provision of a language club is not what we have in mind. It would enable children to use their after-school and weekend activities and link them more easily to their school learning. It would help secondary schools to understand what their newly arriving students have learnt and help to keep them motivated, rather than, as happens too often, allowing those students simply to hang around while the others catch up.

Such a system would make better use of peripatetic teaching and better use of those within our communities who are able to teach languages in better ways. I believe that the noble Lord, Lord Quirk, referred to the wealth of talent in our communities that we are not able to access or use at this point. It would also allow recognition for children who already have more than one language. I think, in particular, of community languages. It would allow more choice than a GCSE or conversation-class route to language. It would allow us to put more on our CVs than "A smattering of French" or "I get by in Italian". It would also provide a route to life-long learning that is understood and accessible.

The thinking on this issue is at a very early stage and requires a great deal of exploration. However, I believe it to be only right and proper that I explain our current thinking to your Lordships and demonstrate that this is an area that we consider to be worthy of exploration. We are discussing the details of this matter with the subject associations and with CILT. But I am keen to demonstrate that we are looking for solutions that enhance the quality of learning not only for primary education but for life and, as the noble Lord, Lord Watson, said, provide opportunities to learn.

In that context, we need to consider the use of ICT. I was most grateful that the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, believed that I had waxed enthusiastically about ICT. I do indeed and intend to continue to do so. The noble Lord, Lord Puttnam, referred to what we are already beginning to think about. We have recently announced curriculum on line. That tool provides opportunities, still in a very fledgling state, to children and to all learners to develop their abilities, not least in language. If it is the success that we believe it can be, we shall be able to offer language teaching to a variety of learners, in a wide variety of languages. I also want us to consider the use of new technology, as the noble Baroness, Lady Miller, said, and its potential for epals, the twinning of schools on the Internet, and so on.

In the short time available, I also want to consider briefly our secondary schools. I trust that I have already indicated our belief that the earlier children start to learn languages, the better, and our belief in the need to think extremely creatively about how to ensure that opportunities exist in the wider community. But the reality is that at present most children come across the formal teaching of a foreign language for the first time at secondary school.

Motivation needs to continue to secondary school. That is why the new key stage 3 strategy is important. It is designed to improve classroom teaching and learning for 11 to 14 year-old pupils in all subjects, including languages. In essence, it is a major programme of professional development for teachers. We are supporting the strategy with an investment of £489 million over the three years to 2003–04. We shall run a pilot specifically for languages as part of the "teaching and learning in the foundation subjects" strand of the key stage 3 strategy. The pilot will run from summer 2002 until spring 2003, and we are investing £1.2 million in it.

A number of noble Lords referred to the specialist school model. We believe that that is important. My noble friend Lord Radice said that we have approximately 100 but, in fact, we have 126 language colleges—a number that we expect to see grow. Part of the purpose of that model is to allow other schools to access the knowledge and support of specialist schools, including links through ICT. That is one answer to the questions raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Sharp, in her example of Guildford.

We want to see the links between language colleges and primary schools strengthened, as part of the community links that specialist schools are already required to make. I am also interested in looking at the role of specialist schools as the professional home for language assistants who come to this country and who can provide great support in teaching and learning for our children.

Noble Lords know that we are looking carefully at the curriculum for 14 to 19 year-olds. There will be many opportunities to debate the consultation document on that matter when it is ready. However, I believe that the agenda of motivation and opportunity is the important course to follow in this issue. As the noble Baroness, Lady Sharp, said, many young people do not study languages beyond the age of 14. I believe that that returns us to the question: what will make young people recognise the twin motivation of having languages experience as a young person and knowing that it will be of benefit to their futures?

A few moments ago I raised the issue of language assistants. That gives me the opportunity to focus on the question of my noble friend Lord Williams of Elvel about our links with the embassies of our European partners. We have received a number of proposals from our European partners and from the ambassadors of those partners. There is a regular dialogue between us and we are very keen to discuss issues with them.

The possibility of the Education Bill reaching your Lordships' House in good time has prevented my planned visit to Madrid—I should say to the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, that it would have been a one-day visit—to discuss these issues. However, his Excellency the German Ambassador has been in discussion with officials and Ministers at the DfES. We are grateful to him for his ideas. Our task is to weave those ideas into realisable plans that fit together.

We are interested in looking at the opportunities provided by teachers coming from our European partners and other countries who can offer languages. I say to the noble Baroness, Lady Miller, that we have not only 61 but 100 places available for primary languages. I agree with the noble Baroness that this is an important initiative and one that we wish to promote.

I want to end by talking about the languages steering group and future work. I say to the noble Lord, Lord Watson, that not only do I have a steering group but I also have a focus group looking specifically at primary languages. However, more realistically, within the languages steering group we are talking to and working with partners not only from organisations which are deeply involved in languages, such as Nuffield, but also with our colleagues across government: the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the Department of Trade and Industry. Of course, we are very mindful of the issues—

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Baroness for giving way. She explained to the House that she was sharing with us this evening some of her background thinking and some of the crossings-out as well as the ticks. However, can she also share with us when she hopes to arrive at a strategy?

My Lords, indeed. I shall. This is a slightly long-winded answer and I apologise to the noble Lord, but in replying I want to make two points. The first is that it is very important to the work that we are doing that we have a strategy that is well resourced and that meets with approval from those who will have to implement it. Much criticism is heaped on all governments in all societies for coming up with ideas that have not been tried and tested. It is not our intention to do that.

Secondly, for the next few months the languages steering group will continue to deliberate on the different parts of education. I hope to be able to come to your Lordships' House with a thought-through strategy by the autumn. I say that on the basis that we have already begun to think about that languages strategy. Noble Lords will be aware of that because I know that such documents are in existence. But we need to talk to many colleagues to discuss and debate what the issues might be. I know that the noble Lord will hold me to that, and I look forward to discussing the matter in the autumn.

I shall be brief in finishing. As the noble Lord, Lord Wilson, said, it is important that this is joined-up government. However, it is also important that we recognise that a political will exists to take action on this matter. I say to my noble friend Lord Radice that we need to be careful about mixing need with political will. We should approach this because it is of value and important to our society, not just simply on the basis of need.

We wish to move to a strategy based on practical action that we can undertake. We shall be exploring all the proposals I have indicated. We are mindful that noble Lords will have other ideas. I look forward to speaking with noble Lords, both in your Lordships' House and outside.

In conclusion I do not pretend that there is anything other than a lot to do. We are fortunate in the partners with whom we are working, including the Nuffield Foundation, CILT, subject associations, business, teachers, students and others. We are determined that our solutions will stand the test of time, can be resourced properly, are not rushed and are well thought through. I hope that I have given your Lordships some indication of our commitment. Once again, I thank my noble friend Lord Williams of Elvel for initiating the debate.

My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend the Minister for replying in extenso. I note that we have a date in the autumn. Perhaps I may advise her that that date will be met.

My noble friend has given us many ideas. There are many things which both she and the department are studying. As yet we have not had any action on, or a strategy for, the Nuffield report. It is a question of waiting until the autumn. I am sure that noble Lords who have taken part in the debate will hold my noble friend to that. I hope, too, that the Government 'will provide time for a debate on the matter in the autumn.

Meanwhile, I am grateful to all noble Lords who have taken part in the debate. It has been a useful exercise. I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Michie, for her speech, which was not in Gaelic. Perhaps I should have replied in Welsh. It was a most distinguished maiden speech and we look forward to hearing from her on many occasions on all sorts of subjects at which she is expert.

On a personal note, I echo the comments of my noble friend the Minister. I am glad to see the noble Baroness, Lady Blatch, in her place. She was much missed and I am glad that she has returned. My Lords, I beg leave to withdraw my Motion for Papers.

My Lords, I beg to move that this Bill be now read a second time.

I start by offering an apology to your Lordships, particularly to the noble and learned Lord the Leader of the House, for the fact that this is the second week running in which he, particularly, is required to sit on the Government Front Bench and to speak on the tricky subject of Lords reform.

On the other hand, I believe that discussion has moved on since the two day debate of last week. It has become clear, not least from the debate in the other place last Thursday, that the White Paper, entitled The House of Lords, Completing the Reform. will not complete the reform. It is, perhaps, a step on the way. It has provoked argument—which is a good thing—rather than agreement. Therefore, it is appropriate to look further, not so much tonight at the question of composition of the reformed House, which has dominated past debates, but much more, as I should like to do in the context of my Bill, at the powers and functions of a reformed House, a subject which has had much less attention.

I do not expect myself, a single Back-Bencher, to change the British constitution, though it would be pleasant if one were able to do so. However, I hope to use tonight's debate as a lever to get greater thoughts from the Government as to their position on the question of increasing the powers and functions of a reformed and partly elected upper Chamber.

Almost exactly 90 years ago, Winston Churchill, then a young and pretty bumptious Home Secretary in Asquith's Liberal Government, after winning two elections in 1910, and in discussion about what became the Parliament Act 1911, wrote to Asquith on 3rd January 1911, after the second election stating:

"If the Parliament Bill does not make proper progress, we shall clink the coronets in their scabbards".

That is what we spent a large part of the 20th century doing. I suggest that that process occupied us over the past 90 years. At 40-year intervals, the powers of this upper Chamber were steadily diminished because of the dominance in it of hereditary, aristocratic Peers. Surely that has now finished. We move on to a different chapter. The hereditaries now form only 12 per cent of the composition of the upper Chamber. Just as their presence required in the last century our powers to be diminished, surely the possibility now exists that the opposite is true.

The argument works in reverse. We now have a vast majority of life Peers. In my judgment, we shall soon be joined by a proportion of elected Peers. At that stage, the upper Chamber must, at least in logic and reason, be considered as more representative, therefore more legitimate, although I accept that that is a difficult word to define. Therefore, it is appropriate to consider in that context whether the powers are adequate or should be increased. At the same time, in the process of considering reform of the upper Chamber, in my judgment we should endeavour to institutionalise to a greater extent the powers of a partly-elected upper Chamber, so that we become less dependent on unwritten conventions and last-minute discussions and agreements between, for example, a Home Secretary and a shadow Home Secretary, which Members of the upper Chamber hear only by whisper and of which they are told the decision literally minutes before being required to go to a final vote.

I accept that both the Royal Commission and the White Paper thought that our powers were adequate. Apart from a small diminution of our powers in relation to statutory instruments, they recommended no change. However, at the same time, reading carefully the language, there was a hint that part of the problem for them was that it was all too difficult to make a real change in our powers. That argument has been put to me by several noble friends on these Benches; that is, it is just too difficult to try. Is it right to accept that at this moment of potential reform? Are our powers adequate?

Compared to international examples of other bicameral legislations, our powers are relatively weak. In the United States, the Senate and the House of Representatives, both of which are elected, are equal in legislative power. I often remember a remark attributed to one of the founding fathers, in which he was asked to describe in his judgment the difference between the Senate and the House of Representatives. He drew an analogy with a cup and saucer. He said that the House of Representatives was there as the cup and the Senate as the saucer to catch the overflow from the cup. That is a nice way to put it. We should consider whether or not we are a good enough saucer.

I refer to Australia and Canada, which have more recent constitutions. The United Kingdom played a part in the formation of those constitutions. Australia has an elected Senate. I believe that Canada has a fully nominated Senate. In both cases, they have considerably stronger and greater powers than ours. The upper House may amend or reject any ordinary Bill and may amend financial Bills. In neither case is there any specific limit on the amount of delay that the upper House can impose.

In Germany, the most recent constitution of substantial size—again, one in which after 1945 our British advisers played a considerable part in forming—Bills where the two Houses, the Bundestag and the Bundesrat, do not agree, must be submitted to a joint mediation committee of both Houses. That committee is composed of 16 Members of each House. Interestingly, they serve on it for only one parliamentary session. It is considered to be a very powerful committee. It has to come up with a compromise that is acceptable to both Houses. I suspect that in the long run, after we have a reformed upper Chamber, that is the kind of remedy that we shall arrive at. There will be a joint mediation committee that will try to settle disputes. Obviously that will take a long time to arrive at. In the short term, it is much easier to concentrate on the length of delay that the upper Chamber can impose on ordinary Bills—not money Bills—coming up from the lower Chamber.

I must confess—perhaps I should not—that as Government Chief Whip under a Conservative Government about 10 or 11 years ago, I found the delaying powers of the upper Chamber irritating, but not a great deal more than that. Mea maxima culpa perhaps, but that is the truth of the matter. Other people might say to me, "Well, all that has changed now. There is a large Labour majority in the lower House. In this House there is a close balance now between Conservative and Labour Members and Cross-Benchers, with the Liberal Democrats adding a good dash of pepper and salt. So the situation is totally different to what it was when you were Government Chief Whip in the Commons". But, having been here now for rather more than four years, have things changed very much? I do not get the impression that they have. We are still very hesitant to use the limited powers that we have. Therefore, in my little Bill, I have concentrated on this delaying power and have sought to extend it in order that, fundamentally, we should have more influence and a stronger negotiating position with the lower Chamber.

The contents of my Bill are very simple. It is only one page long. The effect of Clause 1 is to restore the powers of the House of Lords to delay public Bills coming from the Commons for two years rather than one year. It is a power that existed after the Parliament Act 1911 but was removed by the Parliament Act of 1949. It applies only, as I have said, to public Bills, ordinary Bills that are not money Bills.

There are two important limitations on this. The first clause does not apply to public Bills that come to us from the Commons in the third or subsequent Sessions of a Parliament—in the second half of a Parliament. Therefore, given that most Parliaments last for four or five years, my reason for putting that in was that if a Parliament runs its normal course of four years or more, no new power is being given to the upper Chamber to kick a Bill from the Commons over to the other side of a general election. I thought that that was an important continuing curb and restraint.

The second limitation is in Clause 3 of the Bill. That comes into force at midnight on the day of the first popular election of Members to the upper Chamber.

I have chosen this particular route for a partial restoration of the power of the upper Chamber because the greater the power to delay, the more influence the upper Chamber will have over the lower Chamber, which I fully accept is the primary legislating body. I am not suggesting any alteration to that basic primacy of the Commons. I accept that what I am suggesting is both modest, because it gives the Chamber a greater opportunity to increase its powers to revise and amend only in the first two years of a Parliament, but it is also radical. It is radical because it is the first time that for 90 years we would see a minor increase in the powers of the upper Chamber to coincide with the arrival of elected Members.

I have tried—I want to be in this context—to be constructive, rather than confrontational. I was much struck and much believe in the first sentence in the Prime Minister's opening statement in the White Paper. He said:

"A credible and effective second chamber is vital to the health of Britain's democracy".

That is what we in this period of reform really need to try to achieve.

I end by reminding your Lordships of the remark by Walter Bagehot, the great constitutionalist. He said:

"With a perfect lower House it is certain that an upper House would be of scarcely any value".

As we all know, the Commons is not perfect. I know of no MP who thinks that it is perfect. Greater ability to ask the executive to think again and greater wisdom is needed. That is why I recommend to your Lordships the small return of delaying power to the upper Chamber that is described in my Bill. I commend the Bill to the House.

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Renton of Mount Harry, for introducing a Bill which gives us the opportunity to discuss the way Parliament works and what the functions of a second Chamber should be. I wish the Bill well. I trust that it will be very fruitful in all its subsequent stages.

I suspect that the Labour Party, which I notice is barely visible tonight, except on the Front Bench, has not asked itself the right questions. It seized on an obvious anomaly—namely, the hereditary peerage—and asked how this could best be removed. Labour failed to ask: What are the proper functions of Parliament? How can the two Houses best divide the necessary tasks and work together like a pair of organs in the human body? Labour overlooked the consequences of the absence of independents and the effects of rigid party discipline in another place. It seems not to have reflected on the constitutional impact of the "payroll vote" in that place. The combined phalanx of Ministers, junior Ministers, Whips and PPSs together ensures that few, if any, non-governmental amendments are approved in another place. Labour overlooked also the effect of the heavy burden of constituency work on Members of another place. Much of this burden, in my view, relates to matters that are primarily the concern of local authorities. Or, like education, health and housing, they should rationally be devolved to English regions.

I believe that I have touched on some of the factors which account for the low esteem in which politicians are currently held and for the trend towards an ever lower turn-out at general elections. These factors may explain why we in your Lordships' House not infrequently receive letters from people who prefer our reasonably non-partisan debates and our independence of outlook. They may also throw light on the situation in which it was necessary for this House last year to approve 4,761 amendments to Bills. I believe that that is the correct figure. I am sure that someone will correct me if I have it wrong. The onus of revision and refinement is therefore thrown very largely onto the second Chamber. We have also been subjected to almost annual education and criminal justice Bills. With better scrutiny, both before and after legislation, this could surely be avoided.

For these reasons, I support the den-Land of the noble Lord, Lord Denham, and others for a Joint Committee of both Houses, to consider the parliamentary implications of reform. The interactions of the Houses need to be fully considered on a joint basis, with the minimum of ministerial pressure. The Government said plainly that that would happen, and now they seem to be drawing back. They should bear in mind that the interests of good legislation are permanent and above politics; they are a public need, as important as the interests of justice.

That brings me to the purpose and functions of the second Chamber. It should be complementary and capable of taking a longer-term and more strategic view of policies. Its advice on constitutional matters and on minority and human rights issues should continue to command the respect of all. It also has the supplementary role of constantly calling the executive to account and holding it responsible for the consequences of its decisions. For legislation, the second Chamber is, and should be, primarily a revising one. That is not to exclude Private Members' Bills, private Bills and some government measures originating here. The huge flow of secondary legislation makes necessary a sifting mechanism, to draw attention to significant and controversial orders. There should be power not only to delay secondary legislation, but to reject or amend it as may be desirable.

The second Chamber, as many have said, should retain the right to reject any measure breaching the entrenched quinquennial Act. The task of examining Bills in draft or outline form and of considering the effect of Acts after they have been in force for a period should be shared with the other place. A Joint Committee of both Houses should also consider how the various stages of Bills can most effectively be spread between the two Houses, bearing in mind the variable length and content of legislation. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Renton of Mount Harry, about mediation and conciliation in disputes between the two Houses. That is most important.

Your Lordships must ensure that the present accumulated experience of European policies and legislation is not diminished. In that context, I have suggested that the British Members of the European Parliament should have the right, when they wish, to attend and speak, but not to vote, in the new second Chamber. On to the existing competence in European matters it would be wise to build a new function of examining treaties, especially those of global significance, as the noble Baroness, Lady Williams of Crosby, and others have proposed.

The various ombudsmen, inspectors and regulators should all report to Parliament. Their activities could be considered first by the Joint Parliamentary Committee on Human Rights, which might decide to steer many important points towards the second Chamber. Scientific and ethical issues are also issues in which it has specialised and should continue to specialise.

Nearly three years ago, in evidence to the Royal Commission, I agreed with those proposing a Chamber of some 450 Members. Now, it seems that the target is 600 or more, to accommodate part-timers and to diversify the party political elements. I also advocated the indirect election of a majority, to overcome the inherent lack of democratic credibility of a mainly hereditary or a mainly appointed House. In that, I agreed with the Fabian Society, but I know that the more vocal parts of the public who met the Royal Commission dislike the idea.

I believe that the concept still has merit. It overcomes problems such as the timing and multiplicity of elections and the level of turn-out. It would also reduce the influence of national political parties. That might be helpful. It could help to improve the participation of women and members of ethnic minorities in a reasonably democratic and non-paternalistic way. I do not say that all have to be elected indirectly; a direct percentage would be acceptable, and nomination would still be important if we are to achieve the widest spread of experience and independence.

I shall give two examples of indirect election in practice. It has been suggested that the British MEPs should elect a number of people, not themselves MEPs, to act as a long-term liaison group between Brussels and Westminster. Again, we might consider how the main religious faiths should be represented. I would like that to be done by lay people, rather than—with due respect to the Bishops—by clergy, as at present. The existing Anglican Bishops would retire, and the various faith or denominational groups would be asked to elect a quota of, say, 30 in proportion to the membership of each electing group.

I conclude on the terms and conditions for the second Chamber. It should be called the senate and its members senators, thus finally severing the link between aristocracy and Parliament. I recall the telling phrase used by the noble Lord, Lord Renton of Mount Harry, who quoted Churchill's phrase about the clink of coronets. The terms of service should be long and should be the same for elected and nominated Members. All Members need not serve for the same length of time, but the terms could range from seven to 15 years. If lists must be used, they should be open ones. The system of daily expenses should be continued for as long as it can attract good quality Members with diverse experience. The nominating body for appointed Members and any other necessary purposes should be essentially a parliamentary one, once again without Ministers. It could, of course, include some non-parliamentarians to represent the wider national interest.

I conclude by putting two questions to the Government. Will they encourage the early formation of a Joint Committee of both Houses to consider the parliamentary implications of reform? Secondly, will they please not dismiss indirect election out of hand, but rather consider its possible merits?

My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend Lord Renton of Mount Harry on introducing his Bill to amend the Parliament Act 1949 and limit its application as soon as the first popular election is held to elect Members of your Lordships' House.

The principle underlying the Bill is clear. It is that the powers of the House should not be inhibited to the extent described in the Bill and by my noble friend once the composition of your Lordships' House has been changed to include an elected element. The obverse side of that coin is that the powers of the House should be increased after reform, as proposed in the White Paper or in any other proposals that include an elected element. Judging by the polls, I understand that many people want to see an elected House of Lords. I venture to suggest that what they want is the House of Lords at its traditional best, but elected by them. Of course, they do not want a replica of the other place. That proposition would find favour with the electorate and possibly with the majority of your Lordships.

The underlying assumption in any election is that those elected are given a degree of pre-eminence, and, in politics, that means power and influence. Voters do not vote for nothing. They expect those for whom they vote and who are elected to be able to serve their interests. My noble friend's Bill removes one of the restraints on the power exercised by your Lordships' House. Some of those restraints were self-imposed, over the years, because the House was conscious of its unelected status.

It is curious that the Government have only belatedly realised that they have opened a Pandora's box by proposing an elected element. In the Government's White Paper it is 20 per cent, but according to a report in tonight's Evening Standard under the heading "Blair hints at U-turn on Lords reform", there was a private meeting of Labour MPs at Westminster with the Prime Minister. There was talk of a revised blueprint and the newspaper suggests that that would include a bigger elected element.

Therefore, the ratchet is slipping and there are those who will not rest content until they have an entirely elected House. Such is the threat that the Leader of the House in the other place devoted a substantial part of his opening speech in last Thursday's debate to countering such a proposal. He said:

"No written document would be strong enough to withstand the challenge to the supremacy of the Commons by a second Chamber that felt it had equally good democratic legitimacy".

He went on to conjure up the prospect of a,

"democratically elected House of Lords … which might sometimes find itself pressing for changes with the support of public opinion".—[Official Report, Commons, 10/1/02; col. 707.]

Mr Cook certainly did not think that statutory restraints on the powers of the House could withstand the test of time in such circumstances, and I believe that he was right.

Curiously, the non-elected, appointed element in the composition of the House has suddenly become all important. It is the Government's last line of defence against more democracy, more accountability. After the two days of debate in your Lordships' House and the one day in the other place, no one is under any illusion as to the purpose of the Government's reforming strategy. It is to remove the Conservative majority and substitute their own as best they can.

Mr Cook put it very succinctly when he enunciated his two core principles of reform—getting rid of the hereditaries and reflecting the state of the parties in the country. He said:

"The Conservative party remains the largest single party in the House of Lords, despite successive record defeats in general elections. I hope that, even among the Conservative party, this debate will establish that there is a consensus that a modern second Chamber must more fairly represent the balance of how Britain votes".—[Official Report, Commons, 10/1/02; col. 703.]

That last phrase raises the very interesting question of how the non-voters, the abstainers, at the last election, for example, are to be represented. There were some 40.6 per cent of them. Are they to be represented by independents, or not at all? I leave the question open.

Under the White Paper proposals, because of the closed list system of choosing candidates for election and the basis of appointment, 80 per cent of Members would be directly or indirectly appointed by the political parties. That was pointed out by the noble Lord, Lord Butler of Brockwell. Therefore, what we might be faced with here in the event of a Labour defeat at the polls would be a hangover of Labour domination able to block Conservative measures for some years to come. Alternatively, if Labour continues to win, its measures will be able to pass through this place unscathed. The Government would be assured of victory in the Division Lobbies and the executive's power will know no bounds.

But of course the ratchet has not stopped. The Conservative leader, the right honourable Iain Duncan Smith, has proposed that 80 per cent of his smaller House should be elected on a first-past-the-post basis. His proposals are part of a larger scheme of reform of both Houses designed to increase the accountability of the executive. He, too, has acknowledged that the House should have additional powers. It would be similar in some ways to the American Senate. All his proposals would, of course, be put to a Joint Committee of both Houses, which is to us on this side of the House a sine qua non for the consideration of that proposal.

The point, surely, is that once there is a body with an elected element, especially if that element exceeds 50 per cent of the whole, it will inevitably seek more powers. It is happening already in the Scottish Parliament, in the National Assembly of Wales, and I am sure that it will happen here.

If my noble friend's Bill does no more than highlight the close relationship between elections and powers and hint at the shape of things to come if the Government persist with their plans, it will have served a useful purpose. But I hope that it will do more than that which I have just said.

My Lords, I join in this debate in order to draw attention to a significant omission in the House of Lords paper, Completing The Reform. It is an omission that I believe could possibly mislead. I refer to paragraphs 29 and 30. The cross heading is "Parliament Acts".

Paragraph 29 deals in general terms with the effect of the Parliament Acts and states correctly,

"The effect is to give the Lords a delaying power, exercised only in exceptional circumstances, but not an ultimate veto. The Government agrees with the Royal Commission that this should continue to be the case".

I turn, more importantly, to paragraph 30:

"The Parliament Acts of 1911 and 1949 were responses to immediate imperatives. Accepting the principle of a reserve delaying power of about one year, the framing of the power might be rather different if it were done afresh. For example, the Royal Commission looked into the question of whether the time limits set out in the Acts were any longer appropriate. They also considered whether the Acts should he applied to Bills starting in the Lords. In both cases they concluded that the changes were far from simple to enact, and the practical effect insufficient to justify the Parliamentary time and effort required. The Government agrees. It therefore proposes no changes to the legislative or conventional framework governing the relationship between the two Houses".

That is all very fine and large but there is no hint of any dissent from the Royal Commission's recommendations in "Changes to the Parliament Acts" and, in particular, paragraph 5.15. That paragraph states:

"That seems to strike the right balance. Any change to the detriment of the second chamber would risk leaving it with insufficient powers to carry out its overall role effectively. We therefore recommend that the Parliament Acts should he amended to exclude the possibility of their being further amended by the use of Parliament Act procedures. This would, in effect, give the second chamber a veto over any attempt to constrain its existing formal powers in respect of primary legislation. On the basis of expert advice, we believe that this could be achieved by a simple and straightforward amendment, for example, by inserting the words 'to amend this Act or' after 'provision' in Section 2(1) of the 1911 Act. This would avoid opening up the whole of the Parliament Acts to debate and amendments".

I turn now to formal Recommendation 19:

"The Parliament Acts should be amended to exclude the possibility of their being further amended by use of Parliament Act procedures".

The short paragraph 5.16 states:

"This recommendation would also secure the second chamber's veto over any Bill to extend the life of a Parliament, since that provision is written into the Parliament Act 1911. Our consultation exercise revealed overwhelming support, from all the main political parties and from the public, for the preservation of the House of Lords' existing veto over any such Bill".

Recommendation 20 states:

"The second chamber's veto over any Bill to extend the life of a Parliament should be reinforced. Our previous recommendation would achieve that".

In the Government's paper there is no indication of their attitude towards that. Indeed, if one read it quickly, it could be thought that they fully accept the proposals. However, it is reasonably clear that they have not done so up until now. On 1st February 1999, the then President of the Council and Leader of the House in the other place, Margaret Beckett, said:

"Should the [House of Lords] Bill be actually obstructed in the Lords, despite being a clear manifesto pledge, or should it appear that the consensus and good faith for which we hope are lacking, then it is to this simple Bill that we would wish to apply the Parliament Acts so that the legislation can be carried in this Parliament, albeit after delay.—[Official Report, Commons, 19/2/99; col. 610.]

Almost a year later, on 19th January of last year, the noble and learned Lord the Leader of the House, replying at col. 1330 on behalf of the Government—at the time he was the Attorney-General—to a Second Reading debate on the Parliament Acts (Amendment) Bill, which I had introduced, made it perfectly clear that, from the Government's point of view, any attempt to clarify whether the 1949 Act was ultra vires was unnecessary and any attempt to entrench the provisions of the Parliament Act 1911 as amended would be either unnecessary or would not be accepted. That was made quite clear.

I ask the question: what is the Government's position today? Of course they seek a consensus on terms which are satisfactory to them. I make no criticism of that. But if they secure consensus and agreement, after having enacted that consensus will they move on and treat it merely as the basis for further negotiation or further intimidation or further unilateral action? We need to know, because I cannot help but think that the main parties, even though they are the main opposition parties, could not go along with a consensus which was in fact only an interim measure and thus left the other House in a position, in effect, to renege on it, or at any rate, to move on to an entirely different basis.

If the Government do not get a consensus, what are their intentions then? Will they try now to use the Parliament Acts procedures to push through what they believe to be in the best interests of the country as a whole? If that is the case, I ought to warn them that I have no doubt at all that that would be resisted in the courts. Whether the courts would take the view which I am inclined to take; namely, that the amendments apparently produced by the 1949 Act are in fact ultra vires, or whether they would uphold the Government's position, I know not. But it does not really matter because in constitutional terms we ought, if we possibly can, to avoid a situation in which the courts become involved in such an exercise.

On the Bill as it stands, I make only two points. The first I shall apologise for because I am sure that it will be dismissed as a pettifogging legalism. I do not think that the 1949 Act can be amended and produce any results at all. That Act, whether it was good or bad, is spent; it amended the 1911 Act. If the mover of the Bill wishes to move on from there, he will have to amend the 1911 Act. However, that point does not matter too much since no doubt the Bill could be altered. I thought that I would simply make the point.

On the Bill's merits, I am bound to say that I do not think that this is the time to decide whether we should alter the powers of this House. The time to consider that decision is when there is some clear consensus or determination by the Government as to what are the duties of this House in the parliamentary context; that is, in the context of this House, the other place and of an all-powerful executive. What is the function of this House? Having decided those matters, and seeing what the composition will be—a revised composition—it will then be the time to decide what powers are appropriate. For the moment, however, I go along with the view taken by the Royal Commission. Subject to entrenchment, there is no case at the moment for altering the powers of this House.

My Lords, I greatly welcome the opportunity afforded by the Bill introduced by the noble Lord, Lord Renton of Mount Harry, to discuss the powers of this House. I listened with great interest to the cogent speech of my noble and learned friend Lord Donaldson, who approached the subject from a different angle but, I believe, with the same general objective as that of the mover of the Bill; that is, to find a way of limiting the executive power being exercised on behalf of the so-called supremacy of the House of Commons.

The debate held last week was concerned solely with the composition of the House, except for the contribution of the noble Lord, Lord Saatchi, who did refer to the powers of the House. That followed the lead of the White Paper. In my view, composition and powers are the two blades of the same pair of scissors. I understand that the principle lying behind the Bill is that powers should be proportional to composition. The more authority or legitimacy the House of Lords acquires, the greater should be its powers. This Bill suggests a small, practical step to give effect to a very large principle.

The noble Lord, Lord Renton, reminded us that the Parliament Act 1911 was intended as an interim measure to curb the power of an entirely hereditary House of Lords pending a more radical reform of its composition. It was in that context that a suspensory veto of two years, reduced to one year in 1949, replaced the absolute veto on non-money Bills. Now the House has been recomposed, but ironically the interim measures have achieved the status of holy writ.

The reasoning behind the Parliament Acts was simple. It was wrong that a chamber whose members were there by accident of birth could thwart the will of an elected government. The offence was aggravated by the fact that the hereditary Peers were predominantly supporters of the Conservative Party. Your Lordships' House was memorably dubbed, "Mr Balfour's poodle" in the constitutional crisis which led to the Parliament Act 1911.

I am not sure whether it was the accident of birth or the Conservative allegiance that accompanied it which rankled most with the Liberal and then Labour governments. Had the accidents been more randomly distributed among the political parties, with an occasional inclination towards progressive causes, I suspect that the animus against the hereditary peerage would have been much less. Be that as it may, the two Acts of Parliament were understandable and properly justified in the circumstances of the time.

But those are not the circumstances of today. Practically all the hereditaries have gone and the rest will soon he given their marching orders. There is no Conservative majority. As the Lord Chancellor pointed out, this House now has 220 Conservative Peers, 200 Labour Peers, 65 Liberal Democrats and 189 Cross-Benchers and others. In short, the reasons which led to the two Parliament Acts no longer apply. In strict logic, they ceased to do so from the moment the balance started to shift from accident to merit with the Life Peerages Act 1963. Yet the Government, with widespread support in last week's debate—the only point on which they did have widespread support—have insisted that the relationship between the two Houses set up by those Acts is sacrosanct.

So what are the new reasons for maintaining the status quo? One argument is that even a second House appointed on merit would lack the legitimacy of an elected House of Commons. The Lord Chancellor rightly rejected the suggestion that such a House would have no legitimacy at all. He pointed out that election was not the only route to legitimacy, giving the judiciary as an example. He might have gone further. Spiritual authority has never depended on election—and I doubt whether we would be altogether happy if our hips were replaced by elected doctors or our aeroplanes flown by elected pilots. In the euro-zone, the legitimacy of the European Central Bank is thought to depend precisely on its not being democratically accountable.

The Government in fact propose a hybrid House, with a relatively small elected element; the Liberal Democrats would go further with an almost wholly elected House; and the Conservatives have now jumped onto that particular bandwagon with the idea of a Senate, of which 80 per cent of its Members would be elected. I recognise that in a democracy an appointed or a hybrid House would have an inferior mandate to a wholly elected one. Parenthetically, we should not swallow entire the doctrine of the mandate. The main function of democracy, as I conceive it, is not to implement the will of the people—because what is the will of the people?—but to give voters a chance of choosing their rulers. That is a hallowed tradition in political theory. So I would not overstress the doctrine of the mandate. But, accepting it for the moment, would the mandate of the House which the Government propose be so inferior to the mandate of the House of Commons as to justify maintaining the Parliament Acts in their full rigour? That is the question to which the Bill of the noble Lord, Lord Renton, draws attention and which deserves a wider airing.

Behind all the fine talk about maintaining the supremacy of the Commons lies the barely concealed aim of maintaining the supremacy of the executive. We have come to regard the arrangements which make this possible as the bedrock of democracy. But in no other advanced democracy is power concentrated so exclusively on the executive. All other countries have mixed or balanced constitutions. In Britain, there are no general formal checks and balances on the House of Commons at all.

That was not always the case. Before the executive gathered unto itself all the powers hitherto distributed between the Monarch, the Lords and the Commons, there was a balanced constitution. Eighteenth-century political theorists looked to the British constitution as a model of a balance-of-power constitution in devising their own constitutions. But that has gone completely. The process was quite relentless, it was unplanned and it was made possible by the lack of a written constitution. You may say that this accretion of power by the executive was accidental—as accidental as the accidents of birth to which such objection has been taken.

The Government's case amounts to this. By a series of accidents we have reached a situation of executive supremacy with which Ministers are wholly comfortable; "Let us not change that". I fear that historical accidents are no longer quite so fashionable as they were as a basis for constitutional thinking. Once you start stirring the constitutional pot, who knows what kinds of accidents and anomalies will start floating to the surface.

The alternative to accidents is simple—it is logic. The noble Lord, Lord Renton, has dipped his toe into the treacherous stream of reason. I believe that we would find it rather invigorating—though perhaps un-English—to follow him at least part of the way.

My Lords, I support my noble friend's Bill. I voted against the 1949 Act—indeed, I may be the only living person who did so—and I confess that, although we feared very much at the time that it would do a lot of harm, both Houses of Parliament have learnt to live with it. But we must remember and bear in mind in all our future decisions on this matter of the composition and powers of your Lordships' House, in particular, that over the past 50 years—especially in the past five years—there have been important changes in composition, particularly in regard to the other place.

For most of the years since 1949 there has been enough talent, experience and expertise in the other place to accept the decisions of your Lordships' House and to realise that they are well founded. As the noble Lord, Lord Hylton, said, we make several thousand amendments each year to government legislation and. luckily, so far the other place has always accepted all but a very small number of them. But in considering this particular matter of the law, we must not ignore the changing composition that has already taken place in the House of Commons and which, if the wrong decisions are made, could take place in your Lordships' House.

As I said in the debate last week, the House of Commons no longer has the people accustomed to responsibility that it needs, whereas there are people in your Lordships' House who are accustomed to responsibility of almost every imaginable kind. That is a factor that we should bear in mind in relation to this legislation and in relation to the composition of the House.

Let me make one or two brief comments about my noble friend's Bill. By the way, he is not the noble Lord, Lord Renton; he is the noble Lord, Lord Renton of Mount Harry. I would not wish him to be, so to speak, diminished merely by having to use my name.

My Lords, I apologise.

Clause 1 is plain enough, but it is fairly far-reaching and we should bear that in mind. Clause 2, strictly speaking, is not necessary, but it has the advantage of removing doubts which might arise. Those are the only two clauses of substance in the Bill.

Those are the only points I wish to make. I hope that the Government, my own Front Bench and members of all parties, in considering the future composition of your Lordships' House, will bear in mind that its powers and the powers of the other place should be related to the talent, experience and expertise available in each House.

My Lords, we may be suffering from a certain amount of "reform fatigue" when we get to further discussions on the future of the House of Lords. After all, we had two days of debate last week in which there were no fewer than 81 speakers, of whom I was the 79th and the noble and learned Lord the Leader of the House was the 81st. Nevertheless, the noble Lord, Lord Renton of Mount Harry, has performed a useful service by introducing his Bill—although, as he admitted, the Bill is, in effect, a peg on which to hang a debate rather than a Bill introduced with any hope of proceeding into legislation. The noble Lord has performed a useful service because last week's debate was overwhelmingly concerned with composition, whereas this one is primarily concerned with the function and powers of the second Chamber. My noble friend Lady Williams of Crosby said last week that reform of your Lordships' House must be considered in the context of reform of Parliament as a whole. I believe that almost everyone agreed with that sentiment but almost everybody devoted themselves largely to considering the composition of the House. In this evening's short debate, we have had the chance to consider the House's functions and powers.

My noble friend Lady Williams made it clear that we want an extension of the functions—rather than powers—of the House. We could usefully perform many functions that we do not. Most obvious among them is the creation of a Select Committee for scrutinising treaties. There is the possibility of non-legislative participation in debates on fiscal issues. There is a great deal of taxation expertise in the House. It is unfortunate that there is no possibility of that expertise being used in debates on budgetary issues. I am not suggesting for a moment that we ought to have any powers over money Bills but at least it should be possible to establish a Select Committee to look at fiscal and budgetary issues.

There is a strong case also for a Select Committee that would undertake proper scrutiny of secondary legislation and to strengthen the scrutiny of European legislation—matters raised by the noble Lord, Lord Hylton.

Different factors come into account when one considers a clawback of powers to block or delay legislation. I believe that particular debate was settled by the Parliament Acts of 1911 and 1949 and that it would not be appropriate at this stage to reopen it. I do not believe either that this House wants to challenge the primacy of the other place. No suggestion was made in last week's debate that we would wish to do so. We certainly do not want to restore any possibility of legislative gridlock.

One of the anomalies in the Bill is that a measure introduced relatively late in the second Session of a Parliament would take longer to reach the statute book than a measure introduced early in the third. That is a minor matter. There may be a few constitutional issues on which this House should have a power of veto or the power to call a referendum. I agree with the noble and learned Lord, Lord Donaldson of Lymington, that there is a strong case for entrenching the existing powers of your Lordships' House—including the power of veto over any attempt to lengthen the life of a Parliament—by requiring the consent of this House as well as that of the other place before any such provision could be enacted.

Extending a general delaying power for Bills introduced in the first two Sessions of Parliament goes well beyond that proposal. I cannot agree with the noble Lord, Lord Skidelsky. Whatever might have happened if there had been no First World War and an elected second Chamber had come into existence in 1916 or 1917, that was a long time ago. Far too much water has passed under the bridge since then. It is too late to claw back additional delaying powers over those that your Lordships' House has now.

The noble Lord, Lord Roberts of Conwy, referred to the views recently expressed in an article in The Sunday Telegraph by the Leader of the Opposition, which—as I understand it—represent in substance the Conservative Party's official line. I strongly agree with the view expressed by Mr. Robin Cook in the quotation given by the noble Lord, Lord Roberts—that membership of the second Chamber should represent the way in which the electorate voted, not the way in which those votes were transmuted into seats in the other place. That would simply create in this House a clone of the other place. While we welcome the conversion of the Leader of the Opposition to the idea of a mainly elected second Chamber, the methods of election that he proposes are unacceptable.

A first-past-the-post election based on counties of unequal size, with a balance tilted towards rural areas, would give the Conservatives a substantial and effectively permanent advantage in elections to the second Chamber. In normal times, they would preserve—although perhaps not continually—the Conservative majority that has existed in this House since time immemorial. That is not a democratic system and we would be entirely unable to support it.

My Lords, it is my great pleasure to conclude on behalf of Conservative Members this wonderful debate on an important subject. I add my congratulations to my noble friend Lord Renton of Mount Harry on the simple and careful drafting of his Bill and on his impeccable timing in bringing forward this measure at a moment when he knew that your Lordships would be focused on reform of the House.

I say right away that we want to see a stronger and more secure upper House. We hope that the Joint Committee on the reform of your Lordships' House—if it is formed as we hope that it will be; the noble Lords, Lord Renton of Mount Harry, Lord Hylton and Lord Roberts, also said that they would like to see such a committee established, as did so many other speakers last week—will consider my noble friend's proposal as an important contribution to their deliberations. I assume that the Government will want to lend the same kind of support to it in principle because it conforms with the views of the noble and learned Lord the Leader of the House that the new House of Lords is more democratic, more legitimate and better equipped to do its proper job of holding the executive to account.

My noble friend Lord Renton of Mount Harry has introduced a modest Bill to give effect to that aim or at least to test its sincerity. The Bill proposes to disapply the Parliament Act 1949 for the first half of a Parliament. In other words, for the first half of a Parliament the House of Lords would have a greater period of delay than for the second half, when the 1949 Act would apply.

That arose because after the 1911 Act Members of your Lordships' House still had the power to frustrate legislation approved by the Commons in the last two years of a full Parliament's life. During debate the noble and learned Lord, Lord Donaldson, and the noble Lord, Lord Skidelsky, both drew attention to the fact that both Acts were, as the noble and learned Lord said, "responses to immediate imperatives" and as the noble Lord, Lord Skidelsky said, to "historic accident".

I believe that it is worth taking a moment of your Lordships' time to describe what actually happened which, I believe, only the noble Lord, Lord Renton, himself will be able to recall. In his memoirs the Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, described exactly what happened and what were the Government's motives with the 1949 Act. He wrote:

"The Government attached much importance to the achievement of its purpose of nationalising the iron and steel industries within the life of the current Parliament. A Bill brought forward for the first time during the 1948–49 Session would not benefit from the protection of the Parliament Act 1911. It was [he says] with this immediate and particular objective in view that the Labour Government brought forward its Parliament Bill which proposed to amend the existing Act of 1911 by reducing the delaying period from two Sessions to one".

During the Bill's passage, Lord Salisbury moved an amendment which declined to give a Second Reading to the Bill,

"for which the nation has expressed no desire".

Lord Salisbury said,

"We believe that the power of a second Chamber to refer back to the electorate doubtful measures which deal with issues of the first importance is absolutely vital to the survival of democracy. We believe that that power provides probably the most essential safeguard in the constitution … and that equilibrium can be maintained only by some power of delay".—[Official Report. 27/1/48; cols. 644–47.]

I believe that what Lord Salisbury was saying was that it was precisely your Lordships' power to delay late and controversial legislation to a general election that was the means of referring such issues to the people.

This debate tonight has been about the proper scope of your Lordships' power of delay, but it is only one of several issues recently raised in your Lordships' House concerning the Parliament Act. In the past 12 months this is actually the second Bill and the third debate that we have had on the subject of the Parliament Act.

The first of two Bills seeking to amend the Parliament Act was introduced by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Donaldson, and received its Second Reading on 19th January last year. I am most grateful to him again this evening for pointing out the "serious omission" on entrenchment that he detected in the White Paper.

It was only a week after that on 24th January that the second debate was initiated by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Simon of Glaisdale, calling attention to the Parliament Act in the light of constitutional changes.

The third such debate was on the Second Reading of a Bill which I had the privilege of introducing into your Lordships' House; namely, the House of Lords (Financial Powers) Bill, which brought about a redefinition of a money Bill for the purposes of the 1911 Act so that the present blanket disqualification of the House of Lords in public finance is partly lifted.

The question is: why have all these Bills concerning the Parliament Act suddenly appeared in the past 12 months? I believe that it is simple. As the noble Lord, Lord Desai, explained, with its changes to the composition of your Lordships' House,

"the balance of power has been disturbed"

between the two Houses of Parliament.

The result is that Members of your Lordships' House, as tonight with this Bill, have focused their minds on two particular aspects of the Parliament Act which set the balance between the two House during the last century. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Donaldson, showed, during the course of the Second Reading of his Bill—the noble Lord, Lord Skidelsky, reminded us of exactly the same point tonight—that the Parliament Act 1911 was,

"an interim measure … pending a constitutional change".

I believe that the noble Lord, Lord Goodhart, agreed with that understanding of the Parliament Act 1911. If I quote the noble Lord correctly, he said that the preamble makes it clear that the Parliament Act was seen as an interim step leading shortly to a full revision of the composition and powers of your Lordships' House.

Tonight my noble friend Lord Renton and the noble Lord, Lord Skidelsky, reminded us of a second relevant aspect of the history of the Parliament Act 1911, which is that its raison d'être was the hereditary nature of the composition of the upper House. The then Prime Minister, Mr Asquith, made that crystal clear by introducing the Parliament Bill into another place in 1911. However, as was clearly expressed by my noble friend Lord Renton and the noble Lord, Lord Skidelsky, the Government have now removed the hereditary Peers. They have gone. The Government have cut this House in half in the most dramatic change in 600 years. For the first time, elected Peers are to be introduced.

Yet I fear that the Government's response to calls for changes in the powers and functions of this House will be the same tonight as it has been previously. Even when those calls come from all sides of this House, even when the case is argued as superbly as it was by my noble friend Lord Renton, even when it is argued with images as clear as if they were two blades of the same scissors, the point that composition and powers go together is met with a blank on the part of the Government. I hope that my noble friend's Bill will not receive the same dusty answer as others of us have received.

The view of the noble and learned Lord the Leader of the House, which he expressed on the previous occasion when we debated this subject, is that:

"Essentially nothing has changed that requires any modification of the Parliament Acts".—[Official Report, 24/1/01; col. 299.]

He went on to say that the primary legislative powers of the House as circumscribed by the Parliament Acts should remain unchanged.

Is it not a real mystery that a Government who so despise the forces of conservatism, and who are led with such distinction in this House by the noble and learned Lord—a self-confessed questioner and radical—should be so anxious to uphold history and tradition that they use the events of 100 years ago as the basis for their policy? Why are they so resistant to change? Is it not because, in the mind of the Government, the real analogy is not with cups and saucers, but more in line with the words of Hartley Shawcross in 1946:

"We are the masters now"—

in other words, servants and masters rather than cups and saucers?

The trouble is that if the servant is dressed up in smart new clothes, he may start to think better of himself and think less of his master. The bad luck for the Government in terms of timing is that, just as the servant has been given his new, modern dress, the master has begun to look a little faded around the edges. The noble Lord, Lord Hylton, reminded us of the low esteem in which Members of another place are now held. So, splendidly, did the noble Lord, Lord Jenkins of Hillhead, in last week's debate, when he said:

"The House of Commons has recently reduced itself to a lower level in public esteem, a less effective watchdog of the executive … than I have ever known, whether in my own direct experience of 54 years in Parliament or in my modern historical writing and reading".—[Official Report, 10/1/02; Col. 701.]

The noble Baroness, Lady Williams, said much the same.

The noble Earl, Lord Russell, summed the matter up perfectly. He said that we now have the most uncontrolled Ministers in the western democratic world. So the master may have inadvertently participated in one of the oldest stories in literature, which tells children of the mayhem caused when geniis leave bottles and Pandora's Box is opened. This is why the Government are so keen to keep a lid on this debate as on all three predecessor debates. That is why they wish to keep the Parliament Act unchallenged, its iconic status intact.

The noble Lord, Lord Skidelsky, said that the Government's motives were barely concealed. Perhaps I may bring them out into the light. The Prime Minister's view of the Parliament Act can be summed up in a syllogism: "I like to be in control. The Parliament Act gives me control. The Parliament Act is good".

You can make a House of Parliament more legitimate and you can give it more power; or you can make a House less legitimate and give it less power. But what you surely cannot do is to make a House more legitimate and simultaneously reduce its power—which is what the Government are proposing.

The power of delay is a crucial one. We should be grateful to my noble friend for drawing it to our attention by introducing his Bill. I hope that the Joint Committee, when it is formed, will consider it worthy of its consideration.

My Lords, I am also most grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Renton of Mount Harry, for introducing the Bill. I had a nightmare the other evening and I woke up thinking that a day might pass without us devoting our attention to the subject of greatest interest to many of us—our own future. Fortunately, he has saved me from that gloom.

I am sorry to tell the noble Lord, Lord Renton, that I think that he has inadvertently fallen into error. I think that the noble Lord, Lord Shawcross, is still alive, so he can remember the passage of the Parliament Act 1949 as well.

My Lords, I was talking only about those who voted against it.

My Lords, I should not have teased the noble Lord, Lord Renton.

I also sympathise with the noble Lord, Lord Renton of Mount Harry, who has expressed my general view of the reason for our existence in this temporal world—namely, to cause mischief and irritate those set in authority over us. He certainly succeeded in doing that.

It would be unreasonably economic if I simply attended to the Bill. I do not think that any of your Lordships have limited yourselves in that way. We have revisited the saga of the 81, to which the noble Lord, Lord Goodhart, referred. My only observation on the Bill is that its odd consequence would be that the delaying power would be more effectively given late in a particular Parliament rather than early. For the reasons given by the noble Lord, Lord Goodhart, that strikes me as a shade on the bizarre side, to put it at its kindest. The Government will not oppose the passage of the Bill through this House, but it will come as no surprise to your Lordships that we do not agree with the proposal that forms its central core, which is that the powers of a government with a fresh Commons mandate from the electorate are more circumscribed than they are later in that Parliament. That seems wholly bizarre.

A number of questions have been asked. I was asked why the White Paper did not deal with powers and functions. I do not think that that is right. The White Paper says on page 4 that the House of Lords should be:

"A revising and deliberative assembly—not seeking to usurp the role of the House of Commons as the pre-eminent Chamber".

Whether we are right or wrong, the noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor and I have made it plain that we think that the duties and functions of this House are to scrutinise legislation, to revise legislation, to give advice to the Government and to the other Chamber arid to have general debates. The noble Lord, Lord Goodhart, is right in pointing to functions, not powers. We have functions that, it has always seemed to me, we could deploy more effectively, but that is a matter for your Lordships' choice. For example, we could sit in the morning and not have two and a half months off in the summer. I have put those points so often in the past that I dare say that your Lordships are getting rather bored with them. That would be a way of deploying our functions much more effectively than we do at the moment.

Arguments have been made this evening about whether we should scrutinise secondary legislation better, whether we should scrutinise treaties at all and whether we should look at European-derived legislation. There are many views about those topics, but they have nothing to do with the Bill.

The noble Lord, Lord Hylton, asked a question—echoed by the noble Lord, Lord Saatchi, and others—about the Joint Committee. I repeat what I said recently in the 81-speech debate. I said that we had been perfectly willing to have a committee to deal with the parliamentary implications. However, I repeat—I think for about the sixth time—that we were riot able to agree terms of reference. On every occasion that I have said that I have never been contradicted, so I doubt that this evening will be a first.

Questions were raised by the noble Lord. Lord Skidelsky, and others about legitimacy. I repeat the view that I expressed in the earlier debate. Election—direct or indirect, with open or closed lists—is not the only route to legitimacy. If the reformed composition of this House, with its powers and functions, is part of a constitutional settlement, that constitutional settlement, approved by both Houses, confers legitimacy.

One then—I hope—asks: legitimacy for what? I would suggest it is legitimacy to carry out those roles and functions that I described earlier—not to have primacy on taxation, and not, ultimately, to be able to insist in the context of primary legislation if the House of Commons, after the Parliament Act, due reflection and delay, decides otherwise.

I believe that the noble Lord, Lord Saatchi, asked a few rhetorical questions. There is always a danger about the latter because sometimes they are actually implied. Why is it that we now keep talking about the Parliament Act? A more cynical creature than myself might say it is because we no longer have 400 Conservative Peers in the House. The Conservatives have a majority over the Labour Peers, but they do not have the 400 in-built majority which they rejoiced in, treasured and clung to for so many years. The noble Lord, Lord Saatchi, gave vent to hyperbole saying that, by inviting the hereditary Peers to go, we had accomplished the most dramatic act in the past 600 years. That is not so—not if I remember the Lord Protector's activities with any degree of accuracy.

The noble Lord, Lord Renton, was quite right to say that Clause 2 is not required. I shall say no more about it because it seems to me not to have any effect.

We shall certainly need to consider the way that we operate. The sort of inquiry that the noble Lord, Lord Norton of Louth, is carrying out is capable of being most helpful to your Lordships, especially in the post-devolution context and perhaps as regards how we manage our relationships with devolved assemblies. At present, we rely significantly on concordats, but they depend on good will which may not always obtain. It seems to me to be a legitimate question as to whether, as the years unfold, we should perhaps consider more formalised arrangements even if, after consideration, we come to the conclusion that they are not required. I said "as the years unfold" and thus reminded myself that this must be the only legislature in the world where an interim measure is still regarded as such after such a short passage of time as 91 years. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Donaldson of Lymington, was right to observe that we did not accept the recommendation of the Royal Commission as to entrenched powers. I should like to make it perfectly plain that we still do not accept that proposition.

Perhaps I may correct the noble Lord, Lord Roberts of Conwy, at this point. I should point out to him that we have an open mind on lists. The matter was not set out in the White Paper as something upon which we had decided. I am happy to repeat our position in that respect.

I am sure that Clause 3 of the Bill is not intended as a tease, but it certainly has that effect. If there is a "popular election"with however limited a component of popularly-elected Peers—it implies that that would be some sort of watershed. I do not believe that to be correct, either in principle or in theory. Indeed, I do not think that it would be correct in practice.

All in all, I have tried to deal with the issues raised this evening, extraneous as they may be to the purpose of the Bill. I repeat: the purpose of the Bill is to give an incumbent government less power in their early stages than in their later stages. I find that very strange as a constitutional doctrine.

My Lords, before the Minister sits down, perhaps I may put just one question to him. He referred to a possible settlement of the problems that arise at present. If such a settlement is achieved, can the noble and learned Lord say whether that would merely be the starting-point of further demands by the other House, supported by the Parliament Act?

My Lords, in the absence of a written constitution and bearing in mind that our constitutional development has always been organic and incremental, it seems to me that whatever settlement both Houses arrive at on this occasion—that is, if there is one, as the noble and learned Lord says—it could not conceivably be regarded as the end of the journey; nor ought it to be. In the absence of a written constitution, I believe it would be a sign of terminal decline, not to say death, if either of the institutions to which we have been referring were not able to change, whether it is in composition or in the way that they actually function within the parameters of their respective powers.

My Lords, before the Minister sits down, are we to conclude from his comments that he agrees with the notion that our arrangements are inescapably interim?

My Lords, our arrangements share the characteristic of being inescapably interim with all human life and all human activity.

My Lords, I thank all those who have taken part in this very interesting debate. I am glad that we had it. I am also glad that it saved the Leader of the House from another nightmare by allowing him to spend a few more hours listening and commenting on the subject.

For me, the noble and learned Lord's most interesting comment was the one that he has just made—that "certainly we will have to look at the way we operate". I believe that that is at the heart of the matter. I do not think that this is the end of the story, and I am very glad that we should go forward in such consideration.

Both my noble friend, Lord Roberts of Conwy, and the noble Lord, Lord Skidelsky, spoke very powerfully about the key point in my little Bill: the close relations between elected Members and powers. I think that that is the discussion and the argument that will continue. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Donaldson, said that in his judgment this is not the time to go into the detail of that issue. I can only ask when the time will be. Surely power and composition must be dealt with at the same time. If we do not do so, we may not have another chance for another 40 years. I do not want that to happen.

I thank very much all those who participated in the debate. I was delighted that the noble Lord, Lord Skidelsky, told me that I dipped my toe into the stream of reason. I am not quite certain what I have to do to get my major limbs into the stream, but, as we are neighbours in Sussex, I shall doubtless find out in due course.

I ask the House to give the Bill a Second Reading.