State Policies and the Changing Geography of the Coal Industry in the United Kingdom in the 1980s and 1990s

Abstract

The UK coal industry experienced great changes in the 1980s. Three features are of particular significance to its future in the 1990s. These are questions to do with the volume of deep-mined output from collieries, and where this is mined; the ratio of open cast to deep-mined output, and the locations in which such open cast extraction occurs; and the balance of coal produced within the UK to imports. In this paper we seek to interpret the changing geography of coal production and trade in terms of the character of UK state policies toward the coal industry and the whole issue of energy supply. We identify a number of tensions which lie at the heart of the current direction to policy. These are the different treatment of coal and nuclear power as sources of primary energy; the problems caused by privatization of the UK's electricity supply industry and the proposed sale of British Coal to the private sector; environmental concern over energy consumption; and the strategic and balance-of-payments implications of increased import dependency. We conclude that present policieswhich are likely to lead to further dramatic reductions in UK deep-mined coal production-are far from rational either in the sense of the relations between the UK and the world energy market, or the appropriate use of valuable and finite UK energy