Treating a black hole as a relativistic gas of microblack holes (planckions) which have fermionic character, expressions for some thermodynamic quantities are obtained. These have the same structure as those obtained by Hawking by other considerations.

Some clarifications about a model for the internal structure of black holes developed in an earlier paper are presented to remove confusion in the interpretation of certain results.

It is demonstrated that Kibble’s method of gauging the Poincaré group can be applied to the gauging of the conformal group. The action of the gauge transformations is the action of general spacetime diffeomorphisms (or coordinate transformations) combined with a local action of an 11-parameter subgroup of SO(4,2). Because the translational subgroup is not an invariant subgroup of the conformal group the appropriate generalisation of the derivative of a physical field is not a covariant derivative in the usual sense, but this does not lead to any inconsistencies.