Orders of the Day — Finance Bill

Part of the debate – in the House of Commons at 12:00 am on 28 April 1959.

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Photo of Mr Hervey Rhodes Mr Hervey Rhodes , Ashton-under-Lyne 12:00, 28 April 1959

Is the aim of the investment allowance to stimulate investment so that people buy machines for the sake of buying machines? Is the aim to help the engineering industry to get a full order book so that workers will have wages, so that they can stimulate the consumption of consumer goods? If that is so, let us start to think out this problem afresh, as any investment we stimulate should result in the installation of machines with the highest productivity. If, as many economists have stated, under-employment in many factories and industries is 15 per cent. below capacity, for what do we stimulate industry to invest in unless it is in machines of higher productivity?

Is not the easy way out for manufacturers to go to the Government and ask them to increase purchasing power, then to swing back into production the machines which exist, and carry on for another spell? There is a reckoning coming to this because, whether we like it or not, we have problems like the Common Market coming along, which, if we are wise, we shall foster and prepare for. It can be that money has been spent on the wrong machines, anyway. Some hon. Member might say that people who are spending the money surely ought to know the best way in which to spend it, but that does not follow. Repeatedly, in the House, we have been told that many plants in Lancashire with new and up-to-date machinery have been stopped. Either the machines were wrong, or the management should not have been in management but in something else, or their judgment was wrong.