I stand here for the first time as the somewhat improbable result of an enforced union between the old constituencies of Rochester and Chatham and Maidstone. My godfather was the Boundary Commission, which ordained that the new constituency of Mid-Kent should be created out of parts of the other two. I am both delighted and proud to be here to represent it.

Like all the new Members to whom I have spoken, I have been warmed by the kindness to us of right hon. and hon. Members, but few could have been more assiduous in their kindness than my two predecessors. It will be my earnest endeavour to try to ensure that the constituents they have bequeathed to me will not suffer any loss from the change.

I have always heard it said that this is a difficult place in which to speak, not least because one always finds that what one wanted to say has been better said before one rises to speak. I cannot believe that it can often happen to a maiden speaker that he is called upon to follow a speech of such profundity, originality and wisdom as that of my hon. Friend the Member for Kensington (Sir B. Rhys Williams). If I find myself repeating in an inferior way some of those sentiments, I hope that I shall be forgiven.

I support the call for a fundamental change in the manner of financing the social services. As every Member knows, the potential demand for social services is infinite. Even if, as experience has taught us, the limits of what can be achieved by statutory services in the relief of misery are often disappointingly narrow, the optimism of compassion is reluctant to accept those limits and the temptation to try to create a "Ministry of Happiness" is one to which legislators and administrators are both prone. Yet the reality is that already the foreseeable demand outruns the foreseeable supply. We have a clear duty to consider the social services' budget this year, next year and to the end of the century and to find new ways of balancing the books. Otherwise, in a desperate attempt to make do and mend, to meet for example, the needs of the rapidly growing number of people in their eighties and nineties, we shall destroy all that we and our predecessors have tried to build.

All of us know that national insurance is not an insurance scheme. It is a pay-as-you-go taxation system. What is more, each time the employer's contribution is increased to pay for the services, more employees are dropped off the firm's payroll to add their claims to the pool. Everyone likewise knows that the eligibility system for benefits and services works in a way that penalises the principles of thrift and self-help which the Conservative party admires. "Unearned income" is a wicked phrase. It was coined by feckless and envious grasshoppers to give them an excuse to raid the larders of the frugal and conscientious ants who believed in setting something aside for their old age or against misfortune.

There is something obscene in a system which says, "Because you have frittered away every penny that you have earned you can have at once this service or that benefit, while you who have put by some of your earnings must wait or get less."

During the five years that I worked in Conservative Central Office much time and creative energy was spent on trying to devise a better system of collecting for and dispensing social services. In the end it was judged to be too expensive in the short term to make the change, but I believe that we must return to that effort. Otherwise, we shall find that every company in Britain will have its standing charges increased inexorably year by year, just when they should be coming down if these companies are to have any chance of competing.

In addition, we shall find that the pensions which millions of British people have scraped to set aside will be worthless on redemption and the party which rightly claims to believe in "a many generation society" will have sold our grandchildren's future to pay for our parents' old age.

All that I have sought to do tonight is to assert the need for a radical reassessment of the financing of the social services. I know that many of my hon. Friends will assent to that call, but the constraints are numerous and the difficulties immense. I end by mentioning two.

It is essential that we experiment with new concepts in the financing of the welfare state. I found myself in great sympathy with the speech of my hon. Friend the Member for Kensington. I also believe, however, that the 13·9 per cent. of Mid-Kent's population who are old-age pensioners or the near 14 per cent. who are unemployed will not take kindly to the proposition that they should be the chief or, indeed, the only guinea pigs in that experimentation. The challenge is huge, but it is essential that we do not run away from it.