House of Commons Hansard Debates for 14 Dec 1992

Mr. John McAllion (Dundee, East) : I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Midlothian (Mr. Clarke) for securing this important debate. I do not wish to exaggerate the importance of what will happen in the next one and a half hours or to suggest that all of Scotland is agog with anticipation of what hon. Members present this morning have to say. My hon. Friend the Member for Knowsley, North (Mr. Howarth) can certainly not be described as being agog with anticipation at the progress of the debate.

It is symbolic that the Westminster Parliament finds time to debate a matter so critical to Scots in the middle of the night when 99 per cent. of its Members are absent and in bed, most of them blissfully unaware that the subject is being debated. In those circumstances, the clear message is that if Scotland wants Scottish political issues to be treated seriously it must first remove those issues from the responsibility of this House and transfer them to a Scottish Parliament which will be established in our own country in the very near future.

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In his foreword to the consultation paper on the future of water services in Scotland, the Secretary of State for Scotland said : "The Government will reach a decision on the right way forward in the light of responses to this consultation paper."

If one takes that sentence at face value, one could be forgiven for believing that if the overwhelming majority of responses to the consultation paper were opposed to privatisation, the Government would simply accept the Scottish people's opposition to privatisation and drop their plans to privatise water services. However, when the Secretary of State made a statement to the House on the future of water and sewerage in Scotland and was pressed by my hon. Friend the Member for Paisley, North (Mrs. Adams) as to whether he would accept the results of the consultation, he replied :

"I will accept the findings of a general consultation, but I shall assess the strengths and merits of the arguments that are advanced."--[ Official Report, 17 November 1992 ; Vol. 214, c.157.] An important distinction has to be made. The Secretary of State said that he would assess the strengths of the arguments, which means that if 1,000 or 100,000 or 1million Scots respond to the consultation by saying that they oppose privatisation of water but the Secretary of State does not like their arguments, he will simply dismiss their response, but if only 10 or 20 Scots say that they are in favour of privatisation and the Secretary of State likes their arguments, he will give more weight to those 10 or 20 responses than to the million responses opposing privatisation.

That fact was confirmed when my hon. Friend the Member for Cunninghame, South (Mr. Donohoe) pressed the Secretary of State further and reminded him of the precedent of the hospital opt-outs in Aberdeen and Ayrshire before the last general election. Again, the Secretary of State replied :

"As with the hospital trust consultation period, I will assess the arguments advanced and reach a decision with my colleagues on the basis of those arguments."--[ Official Report, 17 November 1992 ; Vol. 214, c. 161.]

You, Madam Deputy Speaker, may not remember the response to the consultation process on hospital opt-outs in Scotland, but between 80 and 90 per cent. of those who responded opposed the opt-outs. Yet they were simply dismissed by the Government, who went ahead anyway because they were not prepared to accept the arguments put forward. If anyone in Scotland expects this consultation process to be open-minded or democratic in any sense, he can forget it because the mind of the Secretary of State for Scotland has already been made up, as has the Government's mind, because they are intent on privatising water services in Scotland.

All kinds of evidence supports the case that I am putting forward. Everyone recognises that a huge investment is needed in the water industry over the next 10 years. Both sides of the argument agree that some £5,000 million must be found to invest in water services over the next decade. If that money is to be found from within the public purse, the Secretary of State will have to find it from the money allocated to him by the expenditure system under the Westminster Parliament. The Secretary of State's block grant is allocated on a formula which determines Scotland's share of the equivalent spending in England and Wales. Until this year, Scotland used to receive about 11.76 per cent. of equivalent spending. It is important to remember that there is no equivalent

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spending in England and Wales on water and sewerage as those services have already been privatised in those countries. Therefore, if the Secretary of State is to find the £5,000 million in the next 10 years--£500 million for each of those 10 years--he will have to negotiate that sum directly from the Chancellor of the Exchequer. The chance of the Secretary of State for Scotland negotiating with the present Chancellor an additional £500 million of public spending to dedicate to water and sewerage in Scotland is absolutely nil. In a recent public spending round, the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Scotland, the hon. Member for Eastwood (Mr. Stewart), boasted with other Scottish Office Ministers that they had successfully negotiated an extra £340 million over the next three years. That is about £100 million for each year to spend on housing, roads, transport, schools, the health service and all the public sector spending requirements in Scotland. If they regard that negotiation as a great success, how on earth can they realistically say to anyone in Scotland that they are seriously considering winning an extra £500 million for every one of the next 10 years to spend entirely on water and sewerage services in Scotland?

Mrs. Irene Adams (Paisley, North) : Is the Minister aware that that amount of money was almost exactly the amount that Renfrew district council found that it would need to bring its council housing stock up to a tolerable standard over the next five years? The amount that Ministers boasted of winning for Scotland would have served to save and bring up to a tolerable standard only the council's present houses.

Mr. McAllion : My hon. Friend makes a fair point. The reality is that the Government are simply not prepared to find the money required to invest in public services in Scotland. They are certainly not prepared to invest in the water and sewerage services in Scotland. They have already made up their minds that, if that money is to be found over the next 10 years, it will have to come from private sector investment in the water and sewerage industries. The Secretary of State for Scotland claims that the consultation domcument contains eight different options for the future of water and sewerage in Scotland, six of which are in the public sector and only two in the private sector. But only the two in the private sector are being seriously considered by the Government because of their desire to attract private investment into the water and sewerage industries in Scotland. Those two private sector options are outright privatisation on the model of the English and Welsh water companies or franchising by contracting out the water services to private companies.

It does not matter what anyone in Scotland says or thinks, because the Government have already made up their minds. If money has to be found on such a scale, it will be found by attracting private sector investment and selling the water industry in Scotland to the private sector.

Mr. Wray : Does my hon. Friend agree that the Government have no intention of providing the £5,000 million that is needed? They want to do the same as they have in England and sell all the assets of the water companies and the local authorities. They want to sell the 365, 000 acres of land. There have been 10,000 complaints to the Office of Water Services about water disconnections.

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Mr. McAllion : My hon. Friend makes a fair point. If the private sector is to invest in the water industry, it will do so at a price, which will be the profits that the private sector is able to extract from the water industry or, to be more exact, from those who pay for the industry-- the consumers.

Mr. Gordon McMaster (Paisley, South) : My hon. Friend the Member for Midlothian (Mr. Clarke) referred to privatised companies awarding their chairmen rises of 267 per cent. Did it occur to my hon. Friend the Member for Dundee, East (Mr. McAllion) that, in the House only two weeks ago, we voted on whether or not to allow the public sector--where Scottish water employees currently work--a rise of only 1.5 per cent ? Whatever that vote was made out to be, that was what it was about.

Mr. McAllion : My hon. Friend is right. This Minister voted to restrict low-paid workers in the public sector to a 1.5 per cent. pay increase, but he has patted on the back bosses awarding themselves huge pay increases at the expense of water consumers.

The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Scotland (Mr. Allan Stewart) : Does the hon. Gentleman approve of Strathclyde's recent decision to increase the salary of its director of water services by 20.9 per cent. ?

Mr. McAllion : I do not support that decision ; I would never support a decision of that kind, the more so since it involved a much larger increase than that paid to the low-paid people who work for Strathclyde region.

What will this decision mean for the ordinary people of my area ? First, it will mean that the price of water will rise for consumers in Scotland. In their consultation document, the Government provide figures for the average cost per household of supplying water and sewerage services in Tayside over the past three years. It works out at £94. Recent figures published in The Observer show that the average cost per household in England and Wales under the privatised system is £169, which is £75, or 80 per cent., higher than in Tayside. The comparable figure in Anglia is £227 per household, and in South-West it is £228. That is more than £130, or 140 per cent., more expensive than in Tayside. It is therefore easy to see what the result of privatising water services in Scotland will be. It will be to push up the price to the consumer of a service which will not be so good as the one provided by the public sector.

The great gulf between the prices charged by the two sectors is no accident. The regional councils are allowed to borrow money from the public sector at rates much lower than those commercially available to the private water companies. It costs the private companies more to borrow than it does the public water authorities. That means that the former pay higher loan charges than the public sector bodies, and the resulting higher water charges are inevitably passed on to the consumers. Above all, private water companies have to make profits and pay out dividends to their shareholders.

My hon. Friends have rightly drawn attention to the fact that all this will not relieve pressure on the public purse. In England and Wales, the Government wrote off £5.5 billion of capital debt at the time of water privatisation, and gave the private water companies a further green dowry of £1.5billion. They also introduced tax allowances running into the next century which will be worth a total of £7.7billion. In all, more than £14 billion

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of public money was tied up in the privatisation of the water industry in England and Wales. In return, the public purse got only £3.5 billion from the sale--a net loss of £10.9 billion.

I do not underestimate the scale of the investment required in the water industry in Scotland over the next 10 years, but it is dwarfed by the public handouts that the Government have given to the private water companies in England and Wales. If Scotland could have less than half that sum, we should have no problem meeting the investment requirements of the industry in Scotland.

There will be consequences far more serious even than the financial ones. A book called "The Dundee Source Book of Scottish History" takes us back to the situation in Dundee before we had public water authorities. It describes what things used to be like before the water industry was brought into public ownership and massively improved. My first extract comes from a poem written by Thomas Hood about Dundee in 1815. It reads :

"The town is ill-built and is dirty besides"--

--much has changed since then--

"For with water it's scantily, badly supplied.

By wells, where the servants, in filling their pails,

Stand for hours, spreading scandal, and falsehood, and

tales.

And abounds so in smells that a stranger supposes

The people are very deficient in noses."

The people of Dundee are not "very deficient in noses", but that extract points out that the city's crude water supply at that time made Dundee dirty and smelly.

On the same page is a list of the causes of death in Dundee in 1833. Cholera stands out, with 137 deaths, and dysentery, with 15 deaths. Fevers, including typhoid, caused the deaths of 132 people. The lack of a clean water supply to the city caused more than 200 deaths that year. The elimination of typhoid and cholera is largely thanks to work undertaken by the public sector in the years since then--by corporations, town councils, county councils, water boards, and regional councils. Their work has been one of the great successes of the second half of the 19th century and of the 20th century--and it is all to be put at risk because of the Government's determination to privatise Scotland's water industry.

The Minister laughs, but I remind him that in Scotland it is currently illegal to disconnect a domestic water supply other than for technical reasons. It is illegal because in Scotland it is recognised as barbaric deliberately to put people's health at risk for private profit. We now run the risk of seeing the reintroduction into our communities of typhoid, dysentery and other diseases which were eliminated many years ago with the introduction of proper public water supplies.

When he made his statement to the House on 17 November, the Secretary of State for Scotland was pressed again and again to say whether he would change the law to provide for the disconnection of water supplies to domestic consumers. He answered :

"Disconnections are not legal in Scotland ; they have been legal in England before and after privatisation. We shall address Scottish circumstances in accordance with special Scottish needs." That did not satisfy hon. Members representing Scottish constituencies. When pressed again, the Secretary of State stated : "There is no legal consent available to disconnect water in Scotland. I have no plans to make any change in that. I shall

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be considering the range of options in the light of the submissions in the consultation paper, but at present that does not arise." Pressed once again, the Secretary of State replied :

"I have already said that I have no plans for disconnection but, clearly, the future structure of the water industry must be decided and, in due course, when one of the eight options--or one of the variants of those options--laid down in the consultation paper has been decided upon, the other factors relevant to that option will also have to be decided."

The

"other factors relevant to that option"

include the disconnection of domestic supplies. My hon. Friend the Member for East Lothian (Mr. Home Robertson) put it to the Secretary of State that

"the only way in which the privatisation of water services in Scotland can possibly work is if powers to disconnect domestic premises are introduced".

The Secretary of State replied :

"That is not an issue that I have yet addressed. The time at which to address it will be the time at which we decide on a particular option that might make it necessary."--[ Official Report, 17 November 1992 ; Vol. 214, c. 155-61.]

The

"particular option that might make it necessary"

is the privatisation of the water industry. The reality is that the Government intend to privatise the water industry and, once they have done that, to change the law in Scotland to allow for

disconnections--and to put at risk all the medical advances made in our country over the past 100 years.

Since privatisation in England and Wales, there have been 50,000 domestic disconnections. Between April and September, domestic disconnections increased--exactly contrary to the comments made by the Secretary of State for Scotland in his statement on 17 November. What will people do when their water and sewerage services are cut off and they cannot afford reconnection? If they take water from the streams, but use the same streams as lavatories, we risk seeing the reintroduction into our communities of diseases unheard of in our country for many a long year. That is the risk that the Minister and his like are now running. That is completely unacceptable to the people of Scotland and we shall do whatever is necessary to stop the Minister and the Government from proceeding with their proposals. 4.9 am

Mr. George Galloway (Glasgow, Hillhead) : I note the mirth on the Conservative Bench. I say "Bench" rather than "Benches" because I think that the public, when they read the report of our debate, should understand that behind the Minister and his lackey are rolling acres of green leather : not a single Scottish Conservative has turned up to defend the Government on this vital issue.

My hon. Friend the Member for Dundee, East (Mr. McAllion) spoke of the history of urban Scotland before the days of municipalised water--a time of more enlightened men than the Minister, although they may have been of the same political stripe in terms of their attitude to capitalism. The Minister simply cannot understand that Opposition Members--speaking for far more than the 75 per cent. of electors who voted for the Opposition parties in Scotland at the general election--believe that there is something morally wrong with the proposal to hand over the water that God gave the Scottish people in abundance to any cheap speculator who will put his equity into Scottish water in the hope of making a profit.

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The Minister seems not to grasp that there will be no other reason for speculators to do that. The city fathers--they were all fathers then--who decided to standardise and municipalise Scottish water supplies did so because they knew that, if left to naked market forces, that would not be done. They knew that the great epidemics to which my hon. Friend referred would become the norm, that the health of the work force would deteriorate and that that work force would not be able to produce the profits that the entrepreneurs wanted. Enlightened self- interest made them go along with standardisation, and led them to make the necessary investments through public expenditure. If it was true then that water could not safely be left to market forces, surely it follows that it is at best dodgy to contemplate returning it to market forces now. Surely even the Minister can understand the logic of that.

My old grandfather used to say that if the Tories could bottle the air that we breathe, they would give us masks and oxygen bottles with a coin slot and a meter so that we could pay for the very means of sustaining life. I used to laugh at that, thinking it an example of my grandfather's extremism : he was even more left wing than I am. But it is not so very far fetched, is it ? Today, the Government are seriously contemplating taking the rain that God sends--the Minister laughs, but I doubt that he laughs at the idea of God on Sunday mornings ; he probably goes along with the concept then.

Who, if not God, sends the rain from the skies ? Yet the Minister proposes to change that rain into just another commodity. Perhaps he--right down to his mutton-chop sideboards--knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. He knows the price that water will fetch on the market, the price of the bribes--dowries of all kinds--that he will stuff down the throats of the speculators, and the price that water will fetch in profits over the years for the speculators who steal it from us. The Minister appears to find those moral points funny. He should be aware, however, that the Government's minuscule support in Scotland is in grave danger of disappearing altogether if they proceed with their proposal to steal Scotland's water.

The Minister knows my constituency and knows that its socio-economic composition is such that, were it in many parts of England, it would undoubtedly be a Conservative constituency. My hon. Friend the Member for Strathkelvin and Bearsden (Mr. Galbraith) represents a similar constituency. Yet in both my hon. Friend's constituency and in mine, people are queuing, and I mean queuing, in the street for 10 minutes or more at a time to append their signatures to petitions protesting at this larceny against the Scottish people--this offence against everything decent that has been built up in Scotland over centuries. Many of them are the kind of people whom, in times gone by, the Minister would have expected to support the Conservative party, and who he--supreme optimist that he is--must surely hope will one day return to the fold.

I warn the Minister : there is no support for the proposals, even among the 25 per cent. minority in Scotland who support the Conservative party. The Government proceed with the proposals at their peril. The House may say, "Why don't we sit back and let them do it?" We cannot do that because too much is at stake. In the hands of the barbarians who will buy it, our water cannot be depended upon. We cannot trust them ; our water

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cannot be safe in their hands. That is our contention, and it is a contention shared by many more people than voted for us on 9 April. The question of a mandate goes to the heart of the matter. When my hon. Friend the Member for Dundee, East was referring to the number of times that the Secretary of State had said that he had no plans to change the law in Scotland to allow the disconnection of private water supplies, did it not strike the Minister that that is exactly what his colleague the Under-Secretary, the hon. Member for Edinburgh, West (Lord James Douglas-Hamilton), said on 21 March 1989--that the Government had "no plans" to privatise Scottish water? Does the Minister feel no moral qualms about the fact that, just a few months ago, he fought an election in Scotland denying that the Government had any plans to privatise Scottish water? The hon. Gentleman is shaking his head : clearly, he has no moral qualms. Perhaps it was naive of me to expect that he had.

t strike the Scottish people as an offence against anything that could be called democracy that a Government seeking re-election should hide their enormously important and controversial intention--the Minister will concede that it is controversial, at least--to steal our water from us and should fail to put their proposal to the electoral test. At the general election, the number of Scottish Conservative Members increased from the nefarious nine tthe embarrassing 11 who face us across the Chamber, when they can bebothered to muster here. Had the Government told the Scottish peoplethe truth, which was that they intended to embark on a course that would lead to the privatisation of Scottish water, their ranks--had they been large enough, which they were not--would have been decimated. They lied their way back into the House by failing to acknowledge-- Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Janet Fookes) : Order. That is not an acceptable expression, as I am sure the hon. Gentleman knows.

Mr. Galloway : I am not suggesting that any hon. Member is lying in the House, but, collectively, the Conservative party in Scotland lied its way through the general election by omission, by refusing to acknowledge its plans to privatise Scottish water. It is impossible to withdraw that contention, for I feel it in my bones. It is an allegation, not specifically about the conduct of any hon. Member but about the whole Conservative party.

I am running short of time, but I wish to conclude on a point that is not shared by every section of my party. Two Fridays ago, I was going house-to- house in Earl street in Scotstoun in my constituency, where there is water all right. It is in the form of black fungus, growing through the walls and wardrobes and into the clothes and children's toys belonging to my constituents. They ask me, "Why can't we have the capital investment to dry our houses and keep our families warm and dry ?" I say, "It is because of a number of reasons connected with the kind of Government we have." They say to me that just 12 miles from that street, the first of four useless hunks of black metal sits on the River Clyde. It is a Trident submarine--one of four which together will cost the British taxpayer £33 billion. Those four useless pieces of metal are pointed nowhere and are bristling with nuclear weapons aimed at nobody.

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I say to my constituents and to the Minister that, if we need £5, 000 million to make Scotland's precious water even more beautiful and clear, we can take that money off the Trident budget, scrap those useless pieces of metal and beat them into the ploughshares that can make a better world for all our people.

4.21 am

Mr. Malcolm Chisholm (Edinburgh, Leith) : I should like primarily to address water privatisation, but I cannot forgo commenting on the Secretary of State for Scotland's amazing interview at the weekend in which he said that decentralisation of power to a Scottish Parliament was quite unnecessary as it was to be decentralised to new local authorities instead. As everybody knows, power has been drained from Scottish local authorities and all other local authorities over the past 13 years, and the restructuring of Scottish local government is fundamentally about further erosions of the remaining limited power. I am not interested in redrawing the map of Scottish local government ; I am interested in giving back powers to the various bits of that map and in creating a Scottish Parliament within the United Kingdom to oversee the map as a whole. That is what subsidiarity is all about--decision-making as close to the people as possible, as the preamble to the Maastricht treaty puts it--and that is what thousands of people were demonstrating about on Saturday in Edinburgh.

Referring to water privatisation, the first thing to say is that no devolved Scottish Parliament would even consider it, as there is overwhelming opposition to water privatisation within Scotland. The second thing to say is that the Tories cannot even claim a spurious Scottish election mandate for it as there was no mention whatsoever of Scottish water privatisation in their election manifesto. They did not mention it, nobody wants it, so why are we getting it ? The reason involves ideology, profits and the public sector borrowing requirement.

The ideology reason is not susceptible to logic--the private good/public bad myopic chant that has been repeated so insistently and so destructively since 1979. A consequence is the belief that adding to the PSBR is unacceptable, although private borrowing is okay. In each case, however, the sums involved are far from enormous. On some of the details, I might disagree with my hon. Friend the Member for Dundee, East (Mr. McAllion).

Investment of £5 billion is required in Scottish water over the next 15 years, which means an average borrowing of £333 million each year. However, the borrowing consent for water this year is £218 million, so we are talking about an extra £115 million on a Scottish Office budget of £13 billion. The annual loan charges on that £115 million would be about £12 million--equivalent to a 5 per cent. increase on current water charges. The small amount of extra borrowing required would not be covered by the Barnett formula, as there is no comparable programme in England or Wales. It could be negotiated directly with the Treasury, which is where the problem may lie.

Some of the £115 million extra a year could come from the European development fund, a source that would not be available if water were privatised. There is, therefore, no argument in terms of investment, and to prove that further

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we can look to the record in England where there has been no source of cash since privatisation that was not equally available before it.

The more we look at the argument from the point of view of public money and investment, the more ridiculous it becomes. It is the Government's fault that investment to meet the EC directives is still required. The relevant directives were issued in 1976 and 1980, but in the 1980s the Government did nothing. When the Government eventually decided to spend more public money in England, they threw it in completely the wrong direction. Some £5 billion of debts were written off for the new privatised water companies in England and Wales ; £1.5 billion was handed out to those same companies ; property and land worth £233 million was just given away ; and £160 million was squandered on consultants and others to float the assets. None of the water companies had to pay corporation tax for 17 years--a clear £2 billion loss to the public purse.

Who has gained? Certainly not the Treasury or the public. Average bills have increased by 50 per cent. since privatisation in 1979. Last year, the number of complaints went up by 131 per cent. and, most importantly, the number of disconnections went up by 177 per cent. Since privatisation in England and Wales, 50,000 homes have been disconnected, which is the ultimate obscenity. If it came to disconnections in Scotland, I would support and become involved in direct action to stop any of my constituents from having their water turned off.

The people who require and benefit from disconnections are, of course, the shareholders and the company executives--the sole beneficiaries of water privatisation. Beneath the rhetoric, as always, lie the profits. In 1990-91 in England, pre-tax profits were £1.369 billion--£400 million of that went out in dividends. In the case of Welsh Water, that money went into luxury hotels, while £50,000 from Thames Water went into the Tory party coffers. Thousands and thousands of pounds went to the various water company chairmen. Between 1990-91 and 1991-92, the salary of the Welsh Water chairman went up from £76,000 to £143,000, the salary of the chairman of Southern Water went up from £78,000 to £142,000, and the salary of the chairman of Thames Water went up from £73,000 to £160,000. Over and above that, last year, the 10 chairmen made £7.42 million through share options--buying shares cheaply and selling them at a profit. Instead of windfall gains at public expense, we need a policy that centres on public investment and fair charging. Next year, in Scotland, water charges will be related to council tax bands, which is a step in the right direction. Post-privatisation we will be faced with either a high flat-rate charge or water metering. Both cause hardship for low-income families and both bring disconnections in their train.

Water belongs to us all and the supply of water is a fundamental right. We in Scotland will not stand idly by while the water is stolen and that right is abolished. If the Government were wise, which they are not, they would listen to the people of Scotland on this issue. If they were wise, they would not just consider the popularity of our case and the justice of our cause ; they would think about the political repercussions for themselves of treating the Scottish people with such undisguised contempt.

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4.28 am

Mrs. Irene Adams (Paisley, North) : When I made my maiden speech in 1990, I referred to my late grandfather who had come here some 60 years before, not as a Member of the House, but as a hunger marcher. When he arrived here he was quickly marched off to the nearest railway station and put on a train back to Scotland.

I asked myself then, and I do so now, what has really changed in that time? After all, the rate of unemployment is higher now than it was then, and more people are now homeless. We can conclude that very little has changed.

That, however, would be singularly untrue. There were great changes that were not handed out by the great and good here at Westminster but were hard fought and hard earned by people such as my grandfather, who marched all that way on an empty stomach.

For example, wages councils achieved great changes in working conditions, and changes improved local government so that it is directly elected by people to serve them, yet the Minister is now determined to take that system away and hand out quangos to his friends. There were slum clearance changes and massive municipal house building programmes. We saw the national health service come into being, and equal rights for women.

Those are but a few of the things that changed in that time, but in 1979 a Government were elected with a vision--the survival of the fittest and the weakest shall go to the wall. That Government set about dismantling each of the gains that people had fought for and won. That vision was not acceptable to the people of Scotland. In the election earlier this year, the Government asked the Scottish people whether they wanted to maintain the status quo--the Union. The Conservative party was the only party to ask that question. Twenty-five per cent. of the Scottish people said yes, but 75 per cent. said, "We may not all want the same thing but we do not want the status quo."

We are continually told that this is the listening Government and the consulting Government. They were not so keen to listen to that 75 per cent. of the Scottish people, so they said, "We won't bother with them. We will get a couple of dozen of our mates round to breakfast and hear what they have to say." Unfortunately, they forgot to tell the rest of us what they had to say ; we are still awaiting the outcome of that breakfast meeting.

The Government consulted people on hospital trusts. The people told them that they did not want them, so the people got them. The Government are about to consult people on the privatisation of water, which they forgot to mention in their election manifesto. They did not tell the Scottish people that they intended to do anything with water. They are now telling people that they will consult them, but they are not that sure whether they will accept the answer the people give--they will weigh up all the arguments first.

We have heard that 50,000 people have had their water disconnected in England and Wales. That is not only a disgrace but morally wrong. Water is a right of the people, not something to be sold to the people. It is something to be paid for and administered by the people, but not to be taken and sold back to them. It reminds me of the story of the white men saying to the Indians, "We will buy your land for this string of beads." The Indians laughed,

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because they had no concept whatsoever of such ownership. But the Indians were right, because nobody should own the land or water apart from all the people.

Mr. Stewart : I congratulate the hon. Lady on her ringing call for the nationalisation of housing.

Mrs. Adams : The Minister apparently heard that, but he does not hear anything else that the people of Scotland have to say. Did he hear the 25,000 voices in Edinburgh on Saturday? Perhaps he will comment on that later--but I doubt it. The 25,000 voices that were heard on Saturday wanted many things, but they did not want the status quo. Apparently the Government had their ear plugs in when those voices were speaking.

When I, like my grandfather, go home to Scotland on the train every week I wonder why I return empty-handed from the Westminster Parliament to the people who elected me--from a Government who are in the minority in Scotland, yet who continue to force their views down the throats of the people of Scotland. I tell them now that they had better be the listening Government. If they are not, there will be little of the Union left.

4.35 am

Mr. Ian Davidson (Glasgow, Govan) : I share the concern expressed by my hon. Friend the Member for Midlothian (Mr. Clarke) about the fact that a debate of such magnitude has to take place at this hour and in such circumstances. I agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow, Hillhead (Mr. Galloway) that it is deplorable that only one Scottish Conservative Member is here.

I also greatly regret the fact that no hon. Member from any of the other Opposition parties in Scotland is here, either--although I believe that a Liberal Democrat came in for 30 seconds while my hon. Friend the Member for Paisley, North (Mrs. Adams) was speaking. It is unfortunate that no one from the other parties is here, because it would have been helpful for us to be able to show that all the Scottish Opposition parties are united in the call to oppose the privatisation of water.

Like the other hon. Members who have spoken, I want to raise my voice to express what the people of Scotland are saying. There is widespread opposition to the Government's proposal, but also widespread cynicism about whether there is any value in contributing to the current consultation. There is a view that the Government have already made up their mind, that they are working through a political project, which we are also seeing in local government. That project involves the centralisation of many powers to the Scottish Office and its civil servants, the destruction of many local authority services, the privatisation of many of the services that are not being destroyed, with many of the services that remain handed over to quangos stuffed full of Conservative cronies.

That is a disappointing vision of how the governance of Scotland is to operate in future--but the people of Scotland have every justification for believing that that is the perspective that the Government have in mind for them.

I accept, as do most hon. Members, that something has to be done about water and sewerage in Scotland. We realise that bills will have to be met for the necessary work, but the Government must give us a commitment that they

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will genuinely seek the best way to provide the service, rather than starting from what happens to suit their dogma.

I am disappointed that the Government have not published the Quayle Munro report. Clearly there is information there that would enable people prepared to examine the subject without preconceptions to establish which of the options is most likely to meet the needs of Scotland's people at the minimum affordable cost. The fact that the report has not been published leads us to the conclusion either that there is something in it that the Government want to hide, or that it would reveal to us that they had already made up their mind. That is regrettable, because there is now a cynicism in Scotland that goes beyond the ranks of those who would normally oppose the Government and all their works. Like many of my hon. Friends, I have been surprised by the enthusiasm with which people are queuing up to sign petitions against water privatisation. But I am also despondent about the degree to which they feel that what they do will not make a blind bit of difference anyway. That is not healthy in the Scottish body politic.

The Government are playing with fire ; they are alienating the vast majority of the Scottish population from the political process. They may manage to get through one manoeuvre or another ; they may manage to perform a particular action--but in the longer term what they are doing is unhealthy for the democratic process. I believe that the Government will be surprised at what they are sowing for the longer term.

There is alienation not simply from the Minister's party, but from the political process itself. The Government are forcing people outwith the bounds of normal democratic politics, which is not a healthy development. We have already seen among the ranks of some of the Opposition parties fundamentally undemocratic currents and elements that choose to operate in an undemocratic manner. Like many other people, I am not especially happy about that, but I recognise that that is the direction in which those groups feel obliged to move.

The Government must take account, to a far greater extent than they have been prepared to do in the past, of Scottish opinion. I hope that, when the consultation views come in, the Government will give evidence, after they have produced their conclusion, that they have actually listened to what Scots have said and not simply proceeded on the basis of doing what they had already made up their mind to do before the exercise began.

4.40 am

Mr. Henry McLeish (Fife, Central) rose --

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