Ministers and Mandarins

The Clow episode showed how much the Whitehall view of the permissible level of intervention in the affairs of public corporations had changed since before the War. The relationship between Ministers and the new Electricity Boards, though laid down by statute, was not rigidly specified, but large powers of fuel policy coordination, and of oversight of finance and general policy, were given to the Minister. He could use these to intervene on virtually any aspect of policy, though, in practice, as we have seen, his prospect of imposing a policy against the united opposition of the Boards was slim, and there was a widespread commitment to at least the principle of independent management for public corporations. None the less, this was a significant change from the days of the old CEB, which (though hedged about by precise legal requirements on matters such as pricing) had not been subject to government limits on finance (choosing to raise its fixed-interest capital without government guarantee) and had ignored ministerial requests when it felt they were unjustified (being protected against the sanction acquired by the Minister in 1947: the power of dismissal). The rule of law in the 1926 Act had, in a real sense, been replaced in 1947 by the rule of the Minister. The examples given in Parliament 1 of areas where the Minister would feel free to intervene — the military implications of power station siting, research policy and the development of rural supplies — were to be only a small part of ministerial initiatives in the evolving relationship between the alternative centres of decisionmaking power enshrined in the Act.