The Attlee governments of the period 1945–51 are popularly associated with the establishment of the National Health Service, the implementation of the Beveridge Report, and the nationalisation of major industries. What is generally less well known is that the Attlee governments also presided over a period of economic planning unique in British peacetime history. While the postwar rationing of food remains a keen memory for many, and is a staple of popular television and radio documentaries, there is less awareness of other aspects of postwar planning. The duller details of the operation of price controls, import controls, and building licences are understandably less memorable. Yet, at the end of World War II, the potential ability to combine these and other controls into an effective system of economic planning occasioned much excitement in political circles. Economic planning and nationalisation appeared to offer an opportunity to reconstruct and modernise an economy more efficiently and effectively than the free market could ever do.

This book examines the development and effectiveness of economic planning and nationalisation during the Attlee governments. The particular concern is with industrial policy and the impact of economic planning on industrial fixed capital investment. There is a slightly anachronistic ring to ‘industrial policy’, a term more common today than in the 1940s. Yet, a system of economic planning which forced government to make decisions concerning the allocation of resources, also forced government in practice, if not in theory, to develop what we would now recognise as an industrial policy.