Health Ministry and Nation , Sir Kingsley Wood is recognised
as one, of the most successful Ministers in the Cabinet, and his speech On the vote for his department. on Tuesday was an admirable record of sound administration. From the spate-Of statistics with 'which he somewhat overwhelmed the House several important facts emerged. The women of today,. for example, are having only half as many children as their grandmothers had, and in the next -15 'years the tote number of elementary school children may fall by as much as a million. Labour members attributed this to malnutrition, a subject which Sir Kingsley Wood treated somewhat cavalierly. - He admitted that the population problem demanded increasing public atten- tion, and added that he was considering how to obtain further statistics of fertility from individual parents. He had good news about the steady decline in tuberculosis and infectious diseases, and reminded the House that colds and influenza still accounted for nearly a quarter of the absences from work in this country. The debate ranged over such various but relevant subjects as maternal mortality, country cottages, advertisement hoardings, vagrancy, and playing-fields. Its least satisfactory feature was the disclosure by Sir Kingsley Wood of the extent to which local authorities are failing to put into operation various social services for which provision has been made by Parliament. The cause no doubt is reluctance to burden the local rates, but the result is that the population suffers. There are limits to what initiative at the centre can achieve unsupported.
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