Industrial Organisation and Development Act 1947

The Industrial Organisation and Development Act 1947 enabled the creation of industrial development Boards with powers to raise levies from specific industrial sectors in the United Kingdom for co-ordinated action, particularly in research, marketing and industrial re-organisation. These Boards were to report to the Board of Trade and have equal representation from trades unions and employers alongside independent experts.

During the Second World War the Board of Trade made plans for post-war industry boards that would report to an Industrial Commission, each with significant powers. The boards would be "responsible for a range of closely inter-related projects ... all concerned with various aspects of industrial efficiency in the widest sense – re-equipment, re-organisation, development of new ideas ..." and granted powers of compulsory purchase as a last resort.

In the event, the Act made the relations of the industrial concerns to the boards largely voluntary, excepting powers to oblige them to register with the Boards and pay levies to pay for the boards’ activities. Historian Corelli Barnett quotes Harold Wilson, then President of the Board of Trade, as saying: "[they] largely depended for the success of their efforts on securing the agreement and co-operation of the individual undertakings in an industry". Barnett concludes that:

Given that the British industrial system was deeply, doggedly resistant to reform, and no parts more so than those most hidebound and therefore in need of reform, such agreement and co-operation proved hard to find.

Slow progress in setting up the Development Councils caused frustration among trades unions, and particularly the Trades Union Congress, who warned in that the establishment of development councils could not be delayed much longer "without harming the immediate future and long-term prospects of industry" The TUC, in the face of the need to increase domestic exports and production, believed that:

War-time experience showed that it was well worth while to appoint a special committee—a joint production committee—to concentrate on production problems. The form which regular consultation should take must vary from industry to industry; what is wanted is the initiative to agree upon the machinery and the will to make it work

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