I am sure that the whole House will profoundly agree with the last remark of my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Newport (Sir F. Soskice). I should like to say how much I appreciate the fact that the Economic Secretary opened his speech in the way he did rather than contenting himself with a mere formal recital of the contents of the Bill. He referred to the original War Damage Act, and paid tributes to which I hope to refer later.

My right hon. and learned Friend has said that this is an unhappy memory that we are recalling tonight. It is also a very proud memory. One might be pardoned for quoting Milton and saying: Nothing is here for tears…". We are looking back for a moment on a very significant aspect of the last war.

I want, first, to take the opportunity provided by the Bill of expressing the thanks of Southampton, which was a great town until yesterday and today is a great city, for all the good that has been done to it and the other blitzed cities of England by the War Damage Act, 1943. To me, this debate has something of a touch of nostalgia. My maiden speech was a plea for the blitzed cities which had borne the brunt of the Second World War. We had some help, but not enough, we thought then, and still feel, from post-war Labour Governments as well as post-war Conservative Governments.

The cities which had been destroyed, or half destroyed, were battling against the problems of reconstruction, problems of reconstruction common to all other places as well as ours but made much more severe by their war losses, including the loss of thousands of houses. In Southampton, a quarter of our schools were damaged and one-third of our docks and factories, and we suffered the destruction of hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of property and lost thousands of pounds of rateable value.

It is interesting that it should have been the Economic Secretary who opened the debate. I remember taking to his father, when he was the Minister of Housing and Local Government, a deputation of Parliamentarians from blitzed cities and having really sympathetic and considerate treatment from the former Prime Minister, even if we did not get all we asked for.

What saved Southampton citizens, as distinct from Southampton city, was that individual citizens in the blitzed cities were covered by the War Damage Act. Under that Act, by a piece of specific national insurance, Britain as a nation underwrote the grievous loss sustained by individuals or businesses, and even communities when churches, houses and schools were damaged and destroyed. Every British citizen paid his insurance premium, and the lucky people were those who did not have to cash the policy at the end. I am glad that the Economic Secretary pointed out that embarking on this insurance scheme in 1943 was a declaration of faith that Britain would survive the war.

Claims were handled fairly and efficiently, and most, but not all, of the claimants also claimed fairly. Those who had lost their homes got, wherever possible, not a cash value for their house, but a replacement. Those who suffered severe damage had the damage made good. Those who lost their belongings were compensated for the loss. It is worth remembering, however, that very few of the citizens who lost their homes really got back what they had lost.

It is also worth recalling, if only for a moment, the courage and devotion of those who stuck it out in the London blitz, the Coventry blitz and the Southampton blitz—the housewives as well as the factory workers; the children of Britain; the 1 million evacuees; the children who came home from evacuation because the blitz happened much later than we thought; the teaching of children under terrible conditions in the blitzed cities; the civilian courage which equalled the courage of men in the fighting line. No War Damage Act could hope to compensate for. That courage and that grim loss of life.

I hope that it will not be considered a Constituency speech if I recall my own city, which was blitzed to bits and yet was the foal point through which more than 2 million Americans passed on their way to Europe; with its civic and industrial life continuing right through the war, and for 10 years after it—and only those who lived in our blitzed cities after the war can know how depressing it was to live in them then. It is not too much to say that during all that time the sympathetic treatment of the War Damage Commission was like a beacon light to the citizens of our blitzed towns and cities. Tonight, we are winding up what I regard as a great national, humane and socially just enterprise.

One of the distressing features of war damage was that very often it did not reveal itself until years after the war. It was very difficult for blitzed persons to claim correctly, and it was difficult for surveyors to estimate correctly. All the estimation and the claiming, or much of it, was done under war conditions, in the earlier stages. I know from the experience of many of my friends in the blitzed cities that very often a house which, apart from a few broken windows or shattered roofs, looked all right, years later would reveal severe structural defects caused by the shaking it had had during the war which were not evident at the time. In the first impact of disaster, many people were happy enough to have just a home or a shelter over their heads or first-aid repairs, and, in spite of all that the Government did to make the work of the Commission widely known, they did not claim all that they were entitled to.

Therefore, hon. Members who, like myself, have been representing the blitzed areas have been presenting year by year and month by month to the War Damage Commission late claims. In my own city the latest was last year, in respect of the famous Church of St. Mary—the church of the Bells of St. Mary—which sustained very grave damage which had escaped notice until about three or four years ago.

I pay tribute to the War Damage Commissioners for the way in which they handled the monumental first task that we gave them of the distribution of more than £1,000 million and also for the very careful and sympathetic consideration that they have given to all the tricky cases which hon. Members have put to them in later years.

I realise how difficult it must have been to separate the wheat from the chaff; to separate those who in genuine ignorance failed to claim their entitlement, those who later genuinely discovered damage of which they were unaware in 1945 or 1946. from those merely trying to scrounge from the insurance fund every penny they could get, including money to which they were not entitled. I am sure that those connected with St. Mary's Church. Southampton, would particularly wish me to thank the War Damage Commissioners for their very sympathetic treatment of this latest claim, possibly the last that will be made from Southampton.

The time limits provided in the Bill are reasonable, and the Bill itself is drafted in the fair and sympathetic way that has marked the whole of this episode in the life of our nation. It is, perhaps, wise now to wind up the Commission, and to transfer its functions to the Inland Revenue and the Board of Trade, as this Measure does, but I hope that, as we wind up the Commission, the whole House will echo the tribute paid by the Economic Secretary—a tribute that I have tried to underline—to successive chairmen of the Commission, to the great chairman who started it, Sir Malcolm Trustram Eve, and to the Commission's staff, for a piece of work well done.

All those connected with the Commission have had a very complex, a very difficult and very thankless task. They have acquitted themselves well. I am sure that I speak for all the members of the old non-party blitz committee, consisting of hon. Members fighting for the blitzed cities, when I say how much we have appreciated the courteous, sympathetic and just way in which all our requests were treated.

I would, finally, underline what my right hon. and learned Friend has said. In this Bill we enact that after four years no further claims can be made, and I hope that as a result of this debate the date of the time limits which we are fixing will become widely known throughout the country and that the Government will see that, as far as is humanly possible, no citizen is deprived through ignorance of what is his due.