Miss Margaret Jackson (Lincoln)

I have the good fortune to represent a constituency of some distinction, perhaps occasionally even of some political notoriety, the city of Lincoln.

Lincoln is a beautiful cathedral city with a glorious past dating back to Roman times Its previous Member was Mr. Dick Taverne, but, as I am sure he in his time has made this House aware. Lincoln is not just an historic city with a glorious past. It is an industrial city, a city which is rightly proud of its fame and its skill in engineering, a city which is part of the wealth-creating industry of this country, a manufacturing industry.

This part of the debate on the Gracious Speech is about cities like Lincoln—with their past glories in historical pageant and technological achievement—but with great concern for their future. The proposals for industry contained in the Gracious Speech are directed towards their problems, the problems that beset industry not only in my own constituency but throughout the country.

Successive Governments have highlighted our industrial problems—under-investment, ill-directed planning and regional unemployment. All in turn have had earnest discussions with industry and have sought fresh incentive to tempt industry to invest and to expand in the regions and elsewhere, and successive Governments of every political persuasion have failed. It is true that there have been some small successes—one or two factories, a few hundred jobs—but nothing ever on the massive scale of reinvestment and redeployment that we need. Indeed, there are those among hon. Members opposite who, when they were in Government, were heard berating industry for its failure to respond to all the pressure, persuasion and pleas that that Government directed to them.

I believe that these policies have failed under successive Governments because they were founded on the same basis of misconception, namely, that industry would invest not only in depressed regions but anywhere, because it was in the national economic interest for it to do so. Successive Governments have set the targets for growth, talked of increasing and decreasing confidence, and made changes in investment incentive on that mistaken assumption.

I call it a mistaken assumption because it seems to me that it is, under our present system, not the job of those who run British industry to put the national interest first. Perhaps it should be, but it is not, and they do not, especially if it means risking a fall in profitability, even in the short term, and a bad result for their shareholders. It is their job to manage their businesses efficiently and to make as much reasonable profit for their shareholders as they can. That is their prime aim. When Governments exhort or persuade them to invest or expand, they do so if it is in their interests as companies, if it fulfils their prime aim, but not otherwise.

This is not a theory of mine or of my party. Indeed, a Select Committee of this House that had studied these problems published a report last year and found that the companies concerned had accepted and made use of Government incentives, when they had already decided to move into the regions to expand and to invest, because these plans were acceptable in their own interests. In other words, Government incentives had had little or no effect.

The cumulative effect of this failure in the process of persuasion is the failure of our regional policies. We lose, therefore, as a country the opportunities that we should take. We invest too late. We expand too little both for the general welfare of the economy and for the rational fulfilment of Government economic targets.

Our second basic mistake has lain in an outdated view of the ways in which companies decide whether to invest or to expand, and the factors that influence them—outdated because it fails to take into account the changes that have taken place in British industry, as elsewhere in the world, over the last 20 years.

I refer principally to the degree of concentration of ownership and interest. I do not propose to discuss on this occasion whether this concentration is beneficial, but its existence is a fact. Where years ago a sector of industry might contain as many as 20 or 30 companies, each competing for the market, today it contains about four or five. Where the market is divided among so little free competition, to base our industrial and regional policies on the assumption that free competition operates among these industrial giants is nonsensical. They base their actions on the need to hold their share of the market.

This frequently means that little or nothing is done that is out of line. If one raises his prices, they all do. If one advances plans for new investment in new plant, they all do; if one decides on a moderate degree of job expansion, they all do; because they are watching not only the world and the domestic economic climate but one another, making a kind of collective judgment about the prospects for their trade. Government wishes and judgment about investment and expansion take a secondary rôle to these other considerations.

The proposals in the Gracious Speech are designed to come to grips with these realities. They have been much criticised, and the grounds on which they have been criticised are extremely interesting. There are those who have based their criticisms on an understanding of the proposals, fearing that they will not work. I must add, however, that in most cases, even where there has been criticism on these grounds, there has been no rejection of the idea that the experiment should continue Most of the criticism, however, does not come on the grounds of what these proposals are meant to do or how they are meant to work—not even on the grounds that they involve taxpayers money. Taxpayers' money is quite acceptable so long as it is handed out without return in terms of influence or direction. They are criticised on the grounds that they are said to be dogmatic.

I have never understood the philosophical assumption that private ownership is intrinsically better than public ownership. No one can suggest that it is more fair. It tends to be defended on the grounds of efficiency—grounds that are subject to considerable question and considerable operation of selective judgment. The automatic assumption that there is something wrong about public involvement in industry, even without considering whether it can be made more flexible or used in different ways, has never been philosophically justified. It is my hope that we shall hear it so in this debate. I believe that it cannot be philosophically justified. It is an instinctive reaction, a gut reaction, a dogmatic reaction, on the part of our opponents.

Our proposals are based on the use of public ownership and of more informed public planning to solve the real industrial problems that this country faces. We hope, through planning agreements, to ensure that the Government are better informed about industry's plan and do not make wild assumptions about investment and jobs on which they base the wrong policy. We hope, too, to make industry aware through these agreements of the Government's needs and problems, and perhaps to make industry take them more into account at the planning stage. There is nothing dangerous or frightening about that; it is common sense.

Through the National Enterprise Board we hope in time to be able to harness the changing patterns of industrial interaction that I have described, to ensure that if the most influential nine or 10 companies in a sector are watching and following one another, at least one of them is concerned with the interests of Government planning, of economic planning, our interests. As companies are run in the interests of their shareholders, it seems only reasonable that the way to achieve this is through Government shareholding.

This policy, and that of planning agreements, is pursued in many other countries in the European Economic Community as well as other countries outside it; a Community whose policies and success have been extolled to us in the past by other hon. Members. Only in this country are the proposals for industry seen as elements of dangerous revolutionary tendencies, and then, I fear, only by those who are as ignorant of the real proposals in the Gracious Speech as they are of what is done elsewhere.

These policies are, nevertheless, an experiment here, although in some ways an extension of what has gone before, but I believe them to be a necessary experiment, a brave experiment. Certainly they form the only rational proposals before us. The industrial policy of Opposition Members appears to rely on the maxim of Bo-Peep: Leave them alone, and they'll come home, And bring their tails behind them. Our industrial future is of great concern to all of us, but especially to a constituency such as mine which is totally dependent for its survival on our industrial success and our industrial strength. For these reasons I hope that these proposals in the Gracious Speech are given a fair hearing and a fair trial.

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