Epilogue

Abstract

In 1963 the Scottish Boards could look with a greater confidence than they had felt for some time towards their future. In England and Wales, too, the engineers and managers in the electricity supply industry could view their future optimistically, as they surveyed past achievements and recent changes on the fifteenth anniversary of nationalisation, 1 April 1963. Nor was this purely bloated pride. In February 1963, their senior men had finished a gruelling period of intermittent examination over more than a year before the Commons Select Committee on Nationalised Industries, which for the first time was showing its teeth seriously.² The Committee’s report, published in May of that year, was generally complimentary about the industry’s achievements, and gave support to the general direction of policy on which they were embarked, even supporting the industry’s views against that of Ministers on some issues where the two differed.³ The industry’s presentations to the Committee had been an accomplished public relations achievement in the best sense of the word: they did not skate over difficult issues, but confronted them logically, so that their doubts and hesitations could be shared and their priorities rationally appraised.⁴

… The exercise of undue pressure by governments and their failure to treat public enterprises reasonably would be bound to call forth countervailing power. Governments must consider themselves lucky that the responses to what at times has been a pretty dirty game have been so reasoned and well ordered.

John B. Heath, ‘Management in the Nationalised Industries’, Nationalised Industries Chairmen’s Group Occasional Paper No. 2 (1980) pp. 1–2.

This is not in any sense a history of these fifteen years, but rather an attempt to show how some major issues covered in earlier pages evolved in this period. In an industry in which investment decisions have an unusually long lead-time, and operating lives of plant are also unusually long, this seemed essential to provide a perspective on the longer run results of the events described. For the most part, however, this chapter is based on published materials only.