Abstract
A BROADSHEET, "Review of a Programme", issued by Political and Economic Planning (No. 289, October 18 1948) is of general interest as, besides reviewing the progress of work outlined in a similar broadsheet in 1946, it describes the new work on which P E P is now engaged. Some of work, notably the inquiry into the future of British universities and that into the relations between Government and industry in the new context of central economic planning, is of special interest here. The first of these will draw on and develop the discussion of university training in the report on man-power policy now completed, as well as the examination of the administrative framework of the education system in the broadsheet on "Councils and their Schools". The group conducting the inquiry consists mainly of university 'dons' with a number of laymen and of corresponding members. The second inquiry, which is not yet properly under way, will examine first the assumptions that must be made about the nature of the instructions which the Government gives to industry and the conditions which make it necessary for the State to issue them. Next, the inquiry will examine in broad terms those measures of Government which affect the working of industry, before proceeding to consider the common purpose which business shares with industry, the nature of the general decisions which Government has to take, the division of responsibility between Government and industry for the execution of policy and the methods and machinery by which policy is drawn up in effective collaboration with industry. The central problem of the inquiry will be to discover how programmes can be met without the Government having to decide in detail what people are to make and where they are to work.
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Activities of Political and Economic Planning. Nature 163, 521 (1949). https://doi.org/10.1038/163521a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/163521a0