To the President of the Board of Trade
Sir,
You announced in the House of Common on 11th March, 1945, our appointment as a Working Party. Our terms of reference were :
to examine and enquire into the various schemes and suggestions put forward for improvements of organisation, production and distribution methods in the Hand-Blown Domestic Glassware Industry and to report on the steps which should be taken in the national interest to strengthen the industry and to render it more stable and more capable of meeting competition in the home and foreign markets.
It was, however, made clear that matters concerning the relations between employers and employees, which are dealt with by employers federations and trade unions, should be outside the scope of our enquiry.
You left us to decide what area our investigations should cover. We decided unanimously to consider the hand-blown lead crystal glass industry in this country as a whole, and not in the Stourbridge area only.
We now submit our report.
We appointed Sub-Committees dealing with Finance, Design, Production, Marketing and Recruitment of Labour. These Sub-committees have held 23 meetings, whilst the Working Party itself has met on 20 occasions. All but six of these meetings were held at Stourbridge.
We sent missions to study the domestic glassware industries in Sweden and U.S.A., and we have found the reports which they submitted to us on their return of much value when preparing this report.
Though well aware that many of the difficulties with which the glass industry is, has been, or may be confronted are by no means confined to this section of the industry, we have none the less briefly referred to these general difficulties and made such recommendations for overcoming them within our own craft as seemed possible. Obstacles to prosperity having a special significance for the glass industry sometimes indeed peculiar to it or else internal and domestic in nature have been studied with particular care as required by our terms of reference.
Past history has only been recalled in so far as it seemed essential to an understanding of the present, and none of the great mass of evidence taken or information accumulated is here quoted, or even referred to, except when it appeared to be strictly necessary to justify some conclusion reached or to explain a recommendation.
Generally we have felt that, now wise after the event, it is fairly easy to see the causes of depression in the past. Sometimes it has been the policy of our own or other Governments, sometimes fashion or technological changes, new trade currents, or some other cause or combination of causes. But the industry itself cannot escape some responsibility, for it must be admitted that it has failed to anticipate some of the trends and to organise itself to meet them.
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