Aspects of Industrial Productivity

Abstract

ELSEWHERE in this issue (p. 789), a summary is given of the first report of the Committee on Industrial Productivity, under the chairmanship of Sir Henry Tizard. This report shows clearly the way in which the work of the Committee falls into the general pattern of the scientific effort of Great Britain. Its early work largely continued and expanded the work of the Research and Productivity Committee of the Advisory Council on Scientific Policy, and although now an independent body, the Committee is still closely linked with that Council and also with the Defence Research Policy Committee. Other links through its membership with the Federation of British Industries, the British Employers' Confederation and the Trades Union Congress indicate that in approaching a wide range of complex problems the Committee should be competent to advise on the ordering of the country's scientific and industrial effort where that is not already adequately secured. It is clear, too, that the Committee is alive to the importance of securing reasonable economy of manpower in the membership of new panels or ad hoc study groups, and that it is of set policy attempting to use the appropriate existing organisation, whether a Government department, a research institute or association, a professional institution or a university department, wherever possible, and is only creating new ones when absolutely essential.