The House will be grateful to my hon. Friend for bringing before it in so cogent a manner, the grave difficulties in which both our building programme and also our furniture programme are placed because of an impending timber shortage. Recently the Minister of Health reduced the amount of timber required for a house from two standards, which was the normal amount before the war, to the present level of 1.6 standards. Despite that fact, we are still faced with grave difficulties in providing the necessary soft woods, in particular, for our housing programme. Consequently, we have to consider whether at the present time we are doing everything possible to obtain, from all available sources, the maximum amount of timber. I cannot help feeling that largely through the intransigence of the Russians, we have not Deen able to obtain the soft woods which we normally consider to be the staple of our programme from the Soviet Union, and from Eastern Europe and North-West Europe. In the past, we derived the great bulk of our soft woods from sources which are now controlled by the Soviet Union. I think we made a small contract for about 25,000 standards of timber, but I believe that the bulk of that quantity has not been shipped to us.

Therefore I would like to ask the Parliamentary Secretary specifically whether he has made any approach to the Soviet Union for shipments of a quantity of that timber from the open water ports of the Soviet Union, from which, before the war, the Russians used to ship even when the Baltic was closed by ice. I am thinking particularly of Odessa and Murmansk. Before the war I had some association with the timber industry, and shipments were in fact made, by arrangement, from the Southern ports, and from the ice-free Northern ports. I would also ask whether the Parliamentary Secretary has impressed on the Russians our need for timber shipments from those ports, and finally whether he has tried to make any reciprocal arrangements with the Russians for the supply of portable saws, so that the Russians could cut the timber on the Yenisei River round the port of Igarka. I ask that, because I believe that if these two steps were taken for obtaining timber from the ice-free ports and developing the areas which have been undeveloped in the past, we might be able to obtain a substantial contribution from them.