I join the Under-Secretary of State in the two tributes that he paid. The first is to Sir Monty Finniston and his committee. The committee must have been much overworked. To produce such a large report with so many recommendations in a relatively short period must mean that the gentleman in the driving seat was driving the committee extremely hard. I, too, pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Bristol, North-East (Mr. Palmer), on whose initiative the committee was set up. In July 1976 he wrote to the then Prime Minister suggesting an inquiry, and we listened to his contribution with great pleasure.

I join hon. Members on both sides of the House who say that it is a pity that such an important subject should have had so small an attendance. Looking at the Press Gallery, one notices that the lack of attendance is not confined to hon. Members. In a strange way, perhaps the Finniston report is essential if only to bring about a different attitude and atmosphere in the engineering industry.

If I may be forgiven for capping the splendid Kipling quotation by my hon. Friend the Member for Dunfermline (Mr. Douglas): Lord, send a man like Robbie Burns to sing the Song of Steam! or whatever came later. It occurs to me that Kipling did not say "send a man like Alfred Lord Tennyson to Sing the Song o' the Internal Combustion Engine ".

Apart from scansion, there was another reason why a Scot was chosen. The Under-Secretary of State in his journeys around the world will have observed many traces of British engineering. Also, he talked about engineering at the end of the nineteenth century—the Chinese railway and so on. I suspect that most engineers who at that time were engaged in work abroad were Scots. The reasons for that were that they came from a country that had to export its brains and the status that they received in other parts of the world was often greater than that in their own country.

There is a lesson there for us in the twentieth century. I am glad that the Minister paid tribute to British engineers. The demand for British engineers abroad is still very strong. We are not dealing with an industry that is producing duds. We are dealing with one that is in great danger in our own country.

This debate is certainly due, perhaps even overdue. The Finniston committee has tried to remedy the deficiencies of half a century or even a century. However, at least we have all become aware of the problem. The quality of speeches in this debate has been extremely good. I do not wish to sound patronising. I am not an expert, and sometimes I find that listening to experts is not the most interesting occasion, but on this occasion, when so many hon. Members knew what they were talking about, the debate has been one of the most interesting in which I have participated. In a way it is a pity that we have been almost unanimous in our views. Only the hon. Member for Poole (Mr. Ward) raised the flag of revolt. I wish that the Secretary of State had been present, because his seal of office would have added something to our discussions. The Minister has pointed out that there is a plethora of Ministers on the Front Bench, and we take it that the three who are there are almost the equivalent of the Secretary of State.

I turn to one of the points raised by the hon. Member for Poole, when he talked about the manufacturing industry. Personally, I was rather taken by paragraph 12 of the Finniston report in which a study is quoted, and the suggestion is made that half of those employed in non-manufacturing sectors depend for their jobs on their links with the manufacturing industry. That is an important observation, and it is not obvious until one goes into it.

Finniston diagnoses certain symptoms in our industry with which we need to deal urgently. Our manufacturing performance has been overtaken by our major overseas competitors. Our share of world markets has slipped in almost every sector : cars, ships, chemicals and steel making—we have gone right down in all of them. In the same period, whole manufacturing industries have simply vanished—motor cycles, cutlery and typewriters. That is the position, and there are consequences that none of us can afford to neglect. Import penetration has grown to the point where we have become, almost unbelievably, a country that imports more manufactured goods than it exports. That, in turn, means that this country, once the workshop of the world, is becoming its supermarket. That bodes ill for all of us.

In the light of the Finniston report, what can be done to try to halt and reverse the spiral of industrial production? I have a certain amount of common ground with other hon. Members. Unless we take our engineers more seriously than we have in the past and harness and utilise their skills and talents, the position will get worse and eventually become disastrous. The fact is that things either get worse or they get better. It is an axiom of life that they never stand still. That is our present position.

What I felt was a little troubling about the Minister's speech—which otherwise I enjoyed, as the whole House did; it was a very thoughtful and good speech—was that it did not seem to give that punch, that decision, that we would wish. It may be that in a few weeks' time the Minister or his right hon. Friend will say "It is all there, we are going ahead ", but the fact is—my hon. Friend the Member for Wolverhampton, North-East (Mrs. Short) pointed this out—that there have been many previous inquiries, widely acclaimed at the time, and perhaps even endorsed by the Government of the day, that have then been left, as the hon. Member for Poole said, to gather dust on the shelves.

In this instance that must not be allowed to happen, particularly when one realises that it is not only in this House that there is a large majority in favour of these measures. It is a large majority right across both sides of the House. There is also a large majority in favour of them in the TUC, the CBI, the Engineering Employers' Federation, and some of the learned societies. Therefore, we are talking about a global view.

That brings me back to the immediacy of the problem. I hope that the Secretary of State will not allow any more dust to gather. It is a matter of only a few weeks before the House rises for the Summer Recess, anyway. I hope that we shall have a definite, clear indication that we shall go ahead with the recommendations.

When the report came out, I said that the Labour Party, including myself personally, wholeheartedly supported it, and that if the present Government did not implement it a Labour Government would do so. However, because this matter is so important for all of us, I hope that the Government will accept the report and go ahead as quickly as possible to bring in the necessary legislation.

The trouble is that legislation takes time. With the best will in the world, time is one of those commodities that we do not seem to have. Therefore, I support the suggestion to set up a shadow authority, which should start work as soon as possible on defining its functions and the methods of work, until the necessary legislation can be passed. In that way we can save a great deal of time. I recommend that course of action.

There is an awful lot that can be said about so many parts of the report. Incidentally, when the Minister was talking about the Government and employers and what their relative roles should be, it occurred to me that out of 80 recommendations in the report, there are 18 that employers are advised to carry out. Therefore, there is there a clear recognition of what must be done by both sides. That is all to the good.

I want to make some detailed comments on the proposals. First, I believe that the authority must have on it a majority of professional engineers. They must be independent of their individual institutions. This is a case in which I do not believe in a mandatory form of selection.