The house of Industry : a new estate of the realm

FOREWORD xi

Conference called by the Lloyd George Government in rgtg. A salient feature of that report was the proposal to set up some form of permanent representative National Industrial Council. It is evident that those who framed the report were thinking more of improving the relations between employers and workpeople than of creating an organ for economic planning, co-ordination and control of industry. The proposed National Industrial Council, as was clearly indicated in the report, would have been concerned mainly, if not entirely, with the improvement of industrial relations and the prevention of trade disputes. It was to have been an agency to supplement and co-ordinate existing sectional machinery dealing with industrial questions; it was to have been advisory; and its object was to bring together the knowledge and experience of all sections concerned with industry and focus them upon the problems affecting industrial relations as a whole. It was to have been composed of 400 members fully representative of, and duly accredited by, the Employers’ Organisations and the Trade Unions, elected annually as to one half by the Employers’ Organisations and as to one half by the Trades Unions, and to be the normal channel through which the opinion and experience of industry was to be made available to the Government on all questions affecting industry asa whole. Among its more specific objects the following were enumerated: (a) the consideration of general questions affecting industrial relations; (6) the