Catalogue description Records of the National Economic Development Office

The National Development Office

The National Economic Development Office (NEDO) was the secretariat of the National Economic Development Council. Its first director general was appointed by the Chancellor of the Exchequer on 18 December 1961; it was disbanded along with its parent body on 31 December 1992. Its function was to service the NEDC, to carry out the NEDC's programmes of research and investigation, and to produce reports on its findings. It began life in 1962 in the former St Stephen's Club building on the Thames Embankment before moving to Millbank Tower in 1963.

NEDO was a little more closely tied to the machinery of government the NEDC. It was publicly funded out of the votes of, at various times, the Treasury, the Department of Economic Affairs and the Cabinet Office, and it acted in close co-operation with the economic ministries and the Office was organised on civil service lines

Even so, NEDO lay outside the civil service. It was responsible to the NEDC rather than to a government department and the intention was that the directors general should be non-civil service appointees. NEDO's staff, was largely drawn from industry, the trade unions, universities, research bodies and trade associations. A minority was recruited from the civil service. There were 120 NEDO employees by 1964 and this figure had risen to around 200 before being halved in 1987.

At the outset its director general chose to organise the Office into separate Economic and Industrial Divisions, each headed by a director. They remained the principal operational components of NEDO until the closure of the Office in 1992.

The Economic Division, until 1964 the larger of the two original divisions, had a mainly academic staff. Its initial concern lay chiefly in the field of macroeconomic forecasting and planning, and its study of broad economic trends formed the basis for the NEDC's growth programme. From October 1964 NEDO's contribution to the formulation of economic policy was much reduced as the economic director and most of his Division were moved to the newly-created Department of Economic Affairs.

The remains of the Economic Division concentrated on narrower fields of research and longer-term forecasting. From 1968 the division was responsible for the NEDC Committee on Finance for Investment. At the time of NEDO's abolition the Economic Division was sub-divided into a Policy Analysis and Statistics Section and an Industrial Economics Section.

The Industrial Division, which recruited most of its staff from industry, was from 1964 the largest part of NEDO, usually accounting for more than half of those employed in the Office. It focussed on the performance of individual industries, gathering information and identifying areas for improvement

From 1963 it was responsible for establishing, managing and servicing the Economic Development Committees - a function which came to represent the bulk of its work. Its structure was revised on various occasions. In its final form it was made up of three sections covering process industries, consumer industries, and electronics, engineering and construction.

Economic Development Committees

Seventeen different industries were chosen by the National Economic Development Council (NEDC) in 1962 as subjects for the Industrial Inquiry which formed the basis of the 'Green Book', The growth of the British economy, 1961-66'. The NEDC concluded that contacts with individual industries should be maintained on a formal footing. To this end the NEDC at its meeting in December 1963 accepted proposals for setting up a number of Economic Development Committees (EDCs), each dealing with a particular industrial sector

The first EDCs were to be set up for the seventeen industries with which contacts had already been established. There were nine EDcs in place by the General Election of 1964 and by the end of 1965 a total of twenty had been set up. New EDCs were added thereafter, but others were disbanded. The total number of EDCs in existence at any one time usually stood at around twenty until 1983, when the number more than doubled as a result of the SWPs losing their separate identity.

By July 1987 the EDCs, now known as Sector Groups, were reduced from the forty two of 1984 to a total of fourteen. At the same time four Working Parties were set up to deal with certain matters of cross-sector interest. Eleven Sector Groups and four Working Parties remained at the time of NEDO's abolition

In composition and terms of reference the EDCs were small versions of their parent body and were thus known as 'Little Neddies.' The work of creating, supervising and servicing an EDC was almost invariably carried out by the Industrial Division of NEDO.

Consultation between NEDO, the sponsor department (the economic ministry most closely associated with a given industrial sector), unions and trade associations preceded the establishing of an EDC, which typically might consist of an independent chairman (who could not be from NEDO), up to six representatives each from management and trade unions, a representative from the sponsoring department and up to three independent experts, one of whom would be a senior member of NEDO's Industrial Division present as the director general's representative.

During its lifetime the Department of Economic Affairs was represented on each Committee by one of its industrial advisers, and its Office did not exercise close control over the EDCs but each chairman was responsible for reporting periodically on his Committee's work, and an EDC was expected to undergo a biennial review.

Operating instructions issued to the Committees prior to 1979 by the NEDC set out their role in general terms. From 1979 the EDCs were subject to the terms of reference given in the Steering Brief produced yearly by the NEDC Co-ordinating Committee. The function of each EDC was to investigate the condition and prospects of its particular industry and identify any impediment to growth or efficiency. This was undertaken in the first instance to supply NEDO with evidence for its reports and analyses, although individual EDCs produced reports of their own. An EDC would frequently take on a more general role as a forum for discussion within its given industrial sector.

Sector Working Parties

On 5 November 1975 the government and the NEDC launched their Industrial Strategy. This was to be implemented by Sector Working Parties (SWPs), established by NEDO's Industrial Division for each of thirty more or less homogeneous industrial sectors. It was intended that the SWPs should cover industry more systematically than had the Economic Development Committees, which had been established piecemeal at the prompting of various interested parties

However, in practice some SWPs were simply EDCs renamed, some were broken up to form SWPs covering smaller industrial sectors, and some were entirely new. SWPs continued to be created during the course of the Industrial Strategy, and by 1977 there were thirty-nine in being. Most survived the end of the Industrial Strategy in 1979, but in August 1983 the NEDC agreed that the remaining SWPs no longer required a separate identity, and were thenceforth known as Economic Development Committees.

In common with the EDCs the SWPs were to examine the prospects and problems of their industrial sectors. From 1979 they and the EDCs were subject to the same Steering Brief, but the former were established specifically to effect the macroeconomic improvements which the ISSG sought by bringing about microeconomic improvements in their individual sectors.