I THE scope of this paper is not quite as wide as the title suggests. It will be concerned mainly with the future policy of the coal industry, but this is so much bound up with what may be expected to happen in the associated power industries that it is difficult to keep them apart. Briefly my thesis is this. Nearly everything written about the coal industry in recent years has been in terms of expanding demand, continuing shortage and the need to relieve this by increasing output to the maximum extent possible. The Ridley Committee 2 estimates coal requirements for the period I959-63 at between 257 and 267 million tons and 'to meet prospective demands over the next decade in full the N.C.B. may have to accelerate and expand their plans for future output' (p. I3). There can be little doubt of the pressure which the Committee would like to exert on the Board in this direction. On page I2 they say 'In the national interest, however, it may be desirable that the Board should plan for a greater reserve of mining capacity than might correspond to normal commercial practice since a shortage of coal supplies at any time can easily mean very heavy losses to the country as a whole'. Even the National Coal Board's own carefully drawn Plan for Coal provides for a planned output of 240 million tons of deep mined coal by I96I-65, its estimate of demand for the same period ranging between 230 and 250 million tons. I can claim no more, and probably much less, ability to probe the future than the very able persons who drew up these documents. But surely there is another side of the argument. Is it not possible that these estimates of future demand may prove to have been exaggerated and that the N.C.B. may be wise to think in terms of modest contraction rather than further expansion in the not too distant future? The Plan for Coal is not of course a rigid and inflexible document and some account may already have been taken of the arguments to which I shall draw attention.3 But only a limited