Part of the debate – in the House of Commons am 12:00 am ar 20 Rhagfyr 1973.
I entirely share the hon. Gentleman's view on that matter and on the Sunday Observance Acts. Emergency legislation would be needed to amend them and one or two other matters. It is no good waiting until the time when one hopes the emergency will be resolved. For that reason the House should return early in the new year.
I share the concern about the flexibility and clarity in the regulations. When they were introduced last Friday I was away in the north of England but I returned on Monday morning to find that bedlam had been let loose. I had inquiries from the horse racing industry, the greyhound racing industry, tractor drivers and a large number of constituents with factories, particularly those engaged in making cement and similar products. It is obvious that the Government had completely overlooked the fact that a large number of people have their own generators and have conserved their own fuel oil. I had meetings in the early part of the week at the Department of Trade and Industry and elsewhere about these grave problems.
Happily my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry made a statement, but it was impossible to put questions to him. He made the statement, which covered many subjects, between 9.30 p.m. and 10 p.m., and as he had influenza he vanished to bed afterwards. Consequently the statement was not clear. However, my right hon. Friend said that generators could be used, with certain arrangements for fuel, except for sporting and recreational purposes. This compounded the confusion. First, the horse racing situation was not clear. Weatherby's has its own generator and had set aside its own fuel. Publication of the paper on which all the events depend is essential to horse racing.
We have had an authoritative statement—although not confirmed in any way—that horse racing can continue and that Weatherby's will be allowed to use its generator and fuel. It cannot be seriously contended that the Racing Calendar is not for sporting and recreational purposes, so it seems to me to be an exception to the statement, although it is true that a registered newspaper is a commercial newspaper.
I turn now to the astonishing situation affecting greyhound racing. The industry not only has 42 generators, one for each of the tracks, but has sufficient stocks of its own fuel set aside to enable it to use them. The important fact, which has not yet been stated, is that it was directly as a result of the request of the Department of Trade and Industry in 1972 that it should install generators in case there was a fuel emergency that the industry spent nearly £500,000 to do so. It is now paying high interest on over £200,000.
It is an unattractive argument to say that floodlighting should not be used because it might create impressions in people's minds that somebody else was getting something they were not getting. That is not acceptable to the British people. If they were told that any outdoor sport which continued to use flood-lighting was allowed to do so only if it generated its own electricity and already had its own fuel supplies, they would understand that no one suffered.
The Government must give way on this matter and see that an industry which they have asked to behave in a decent manner to ensure that there will be no difficulties about fuel in the future, and which carries out the suggestions which have been made, does not thereby suffer the economic ruin that it will suffer if it has to close altogether in the next few weeks.