Mr Edgar Granville: The hon. and gallant Gentleman the Member for Macclesfield (Air Commodore Harvey) has raised a number of extremely interesting and important points, all of them related to the subject under discussion and to this Third Report. I am sure that he will forgive me if I do not follow his argument in regard to the Brabazon and for more transport aircraft. I was glad that he emphasised the problem...
Mr Edgar Granville: Can the right hon. Gentleman give the House a rough estimate of what he thinks it might cost to make these temporary Festival buildings suitable for another year?
Mr Edgar Granville: Which would be covered by this Bill?
Mr Edgar Granville: I understand that the hon. and gallant Member for Richmond, Yorks. (Sir T. Dugdale), and his hon. Friends do not intend to divide the House on this Bill and therefore we can all of us make constituency speeches. I do not altogether blame the hon. and gallant Baronet for going back a little into the past. The right hon. Gentleman made some play with it, and the hon. Baronet was, I think,...
Mr Edgar Granville: We are all indebted to the hon. Member for Gloucestershire, South (Mr. Crosland) for having introduced this debate today, and also for the very able speech to which he treated us and his exposition of a very difficult and complicated subject. Those of my hon. Friends who did not have the opportunity of hearing him would be advised to read his speech closely in Hansard. We also enjoyed the...
Mr Edgar Granville: I am sure that the right hon. and learned Gentleman would improve upon that. We expect great things from him. We believe that he is one of the successes of the present Government and we hope that he will meet with success in this problem. My hon. Friends and I will give him our support in tackling the subject more vigorously. In the matter of resale price maintenance, the emphasis is upon...
Mr Edgar Granville: The hon. Gentleman has mentioned higher priced seats. Can he define more clearly what he means in that respect?
Mr Edgar Granville: I wish to refer to one point, and to one point only. It is the question which has been raised by some hon. Members regarding storage. In referring to stockpiling yesterday, the Minister of Supply said that the Government were already using aerodrome buildings and temporary buildings of wooden construction for this purpose. As has been said, it is extremely important that the Ministry of Food...
Mr Edgar Granville: Certainly; I was referring to an aerodrome at Leiston, and there is also one near Halesworth, both in my constituency. I visited both aerodromes, and one had only to look through the keyholes of these buildings to see them alive with rats. The rats were running about all over the place, eating grain which I believe was imported from Russia and brought up by road transport from Ipswich and...
Mr Edgar Granville: The Parliamentary Secretary will take into consideration that the Chancellor has made it clear in this House that the position is such that it will only be towards the end of the year that we shall begin to feel the pinch of devaluation and higher prices?
Mr Edgar Granville: I will detain the Committee for only a few minutes, and it is not my intention to follow the general argument which has been going on from one side of the Committee to the other on whether the Government can be severely criticised for having stockpiled dollars as against vital strategic raw materials which are in short supply. Nevertheless, I do not think we shall settle this problem of the...
Mr Edgar Granville: In view of the announcement of the Chancellor with regard to our balance of payments position next year, it is quite obvious that it will be only with the greatest difficulty that the Government will be able to satisfy the requirements of raw materials for consumer goods and the export trade and, at the same time, supply the re-armament industry and build up a stockpile for strategic...
Mr Edgar Granville: I am sure the hon. Gentleman said that with some knowledge of the inside working of the Board of Trade, and it may be useful to my argument. It is no good waiting before doing something in this direction. If we do, we may go into the market too late and have to pay higher prices. We may even find it impossible to get raw materials unless we go to America for them. I should have thought this...
Mr Edgar Granville: To make that assurance completely effective, will the right hon. Gentleman delete the references to the past which make it political and give us an assurance that his Department will do what he says in the future?
Mr Edgar Granville: If, as the Minister says, the whole thing depends upon America supplying us with vital machine tools and bearing in mind that America has enormous demands upon her production of machine tools for her own re-armament programme, and if we must get these tools over and above our ordinary orders, can the Minister give us an assurance that representations have been made to Washington at the...
Mr Edgar Granville: The right hon. Gentleman has raised an extremely interesting point. Is not this parallel with civil aviation where we have the B.E.A.C. and the British Overseas Airways Corporation, two bodies set up by the Government, and we have in this House a Parliamentary Secretary who answers for those two Corporations? Surely it is the same in this case.
Mr Edgar Granville: Surely, this is simple. Would it not be a proper policy to send a directive from the Colonial Office to the Corporation on all these schemes of policy to the effect that where the taxpayer is footing the bill, no grandiose scheme or capital investment in a big way should be embarked upon until proper pilot schemes have been tried?
Mr Edgar Granville: Can the Minister make available to the House, with regard to these new appointments, information concerning whether they will be in an advisory capacity to his Department, whether they will have effective powers with regard to the allocation of machine tools, and to whom they will report—to the right hon. Gentleman or to his Department?
Mr Edgar Granville: I shall not try to answer the hon. Member for Ealing, North (Mr. J. Hudson), nor shall I incur the displeasure of the Chair by arguing whether we can have this wholesale call-up and build 300,000 or even 200,000 houses a year. But, as the hon. Gentleman said when he moved the Amendment, the fact remains that there will be a tremendous building programme, requiring a large number of building...
Mr Edgar Granville: rose—
