Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
of consumption and welfare in disadvantaged regions, more than production and
improvements in productivity. There were aids to private manufacturing industry,
but of greater regional effect were the monies paid in welfare to the regions, and
in support for the nationalized industries. Because of the location of these
industries, there was a strong regional dimension to aid.
If the state took over some industries, it still did not use the official planning
machinery to undertake strong planning. In Britain, as in most of the developed
world, planning was “indicative”, guiding developments rather than specifying
them. Economic planning could thus never be very powerful. What was carried
out carefully and successfully was physical planning, meaning the planning of
land use, containing urban growth, designating conservation areas and green
belts, and creating “new towns”. This continues to be a strong element, but is not
accompanied by strong economic measures to ensure that firms and types of
production are located at speciflc points.
In retrospect it is possible to see that much of the policy, overt or covert, was a
failure. Overt policy tried to attract firms to distant, often unwelcoming
environments in industrial districts with much derelict land. The firm's
commitment to such areas was understandably not high, and many factories were
branch plants of companies with main factories in the south. The policy was not
sufficiently detailed, either, to bring together structurally related clusters of firms,
so that each new factory was isolated in the development zone. Attractions were
set at the same level for biscuit factories and for car tyre manufacturers; thus a
major industrial estate at Drumchapel, west Glasgow, from 1960, has been
abandoned for several years, both the biscuit factory and the tyre manufacturer,
Firestone, using the site with no reference to each other or to other local firms. In
the same period, the Rootes organization (later absorbed into Chrysler), based in
the Coventry area making cars, was induced to establish a new plant at Linwood,
near Paisley in Scotland, with the idea of forming a new kind of industrial
complex in the west of Scotland. However, the factory failed to attract new
component manufacturers, and components continued to be supplied from the
south. In the end, closure of the factory was inevitable. At the level of the
nationalized industries, the policy was also regionally flawed. British Steel had a
major plant at Ravenscraig, east of Glasgow, but it was closed in 1993 in an
economy drive by the company. This huge integrated plant had been located in
Scotland in 1954, as a sop to Scottish complaints that Wales was being favoured,
but contrary to economic dictates. In the end, the factory closed, and the period of
40 years could be seen as merely delaying the restructuring of an industrial
region. For a country like Britain, with a consumption of around 20 million tons
of steel annually, the most efficient size of mill was about 10 million tons, and
thus only two mills were really needed, with a few small ones for special steels.
Ravenscraig would always be in excess of requirements.
In general, as the state industries were those having problems (i.e. the older
industries inherited from the nineteenth century), the help the government could
give was towards retaining old industry, rather than bringing in new
