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THE 'MAN-POWER BUDGET'
It is proposed to establish a small central staff of experts, which will not be like the old Economic Council, of which I used to be a member and which met once a month. It never knew what it decided, or perhaps did not decide anything. We shall need continuous examination of evidence, papers and statistics, upon which the Ministers can come to their conclusions, not from some outside body, but with Ministerial responsibility. There are five broad categories which we shall need. There is the financial survey—and my right hon. Friend the Chancellor of the Exchequer will deal with that side of the matter in his speech. There is a very important survey which will be charged to my Department in future, called the Man-power Budget. This proposal we regard as absolutely vital. The Ministry of Labour hitherto has come in after the event, and paid the benefit. It was a misnomer to charge the Minister of Labour with responsibility for unemployment. He can only persuade. It is now proposed that there shall be supplied to the Ministry of Labour all the information necessary, so that the Minister can predict pretty well where employment will rise or fall, and it is not difficult to do. There are the credit position of the various industries, the forward bookings, the rise and fall of markets and so on. I would say to the employers of the country that I really believe if they have to sit down and make for us this forecast of their forward orders, that it will make them think what their forward orders really are, and it may cause a different approach altogether to this problem. When the information is in, and the Budget is prepared, it will be for the Minister of Labour to hoist the danger signals at once to his colleagues in the Cabinet.
Mr. Shinwell The trouble is that it is voluntary.
Mr. Bevin No, the returns of the human budget will be compulsory. We did not put down compulsion of this and that in the White Paper, but we have projected it for the Debate. The intention of the Government is that this kind of return, with the Census of Production, should be obligatory. You must have it or you cannot work the system, just as we get returns of people who are discharged, and the rest of it, at the present time.
Before the war, we had about 15,000,000 people insured against unemployment, of whom I have already said 1,700,000 were, on an average, unemployed. This total of 15,000,000 will be affected in a variety of ways at the end of the war. The raising of the school-leaving age will affect it, and so will increasing longevity. We have talked about the sixty-fives hitherto, but all the evidence goes to show, thank heaven, that we sixty-fives are much younger than we used to be. One cannot tell exactly what the numbers will be, but I estimate, taking the same categories that were insured before the war, with the women who will remain in industry and in the professions, that the number will be about 16,000,000. It will be almost sure to go up about another 1,000,000, representing those who will be looking for employment or going into the Services. We shall have to estimate what the basic industries, such as agriculture, coal, cotton and so on, need and can carry; they are the staple industries. We shall have to estimate how many will be absorbed by those industries, in relation to the increase in consumer goods.
The main purpose of the human budget is to be looking to the future all the time, and not merely registering facts that have occurred. We have gained great experience about this during the war. This long-term policy will, as I have said, depend upon stability and the right adjustment of taxation and insurance and all those complicated but co-ordinated needs. I join with the Chancellor of the Exchequer in saying, particularly at this period, that the Budget should be balanced over a period of years. I have seen some criticism in some of the weeklies because of this statement. I am not myself going to depart any more than he is, from the principle of reasonably sound finance. I think all these other measures can be supplementary and contributory to it, but I do not believe in using the wrong instrument for the purpose. After all, our credit position in the world will be a very important factor at the end of the war, and I would not like to pass this point, or to let it be assumed that any other colleague—the Chancellor of the Exchequer or anybody else—is not, like I am, a party to this proposal. I should like to hear the views of hon. Members upon it during the Debate.