CONVIDER THAL
the recommendations of the Textile Council's Productivity and
Efficiency Study, completed in 1969, which is undoubtedly tho
most comprehensive and self-critical examination of its problema
that the industry has undertakon. Launched with the Government'o
encouragement, and partly financed by it, the Study aimed at
finding at long last- a basis of stability for the industry.
It suggested that a viable, though much more compact, industry
could develop by 1975 if the Government would establish more
stable market conditions (notably by ending duty-free entry for
Commonwealth cotton textiles in place of the existing quotas,
which in the Council's view would not in the long term give
the industry the confidence or the incentive to undertake the
investment needed to make itself more competitive) and would
provide additional incentives to re-equipment; and if the
industry would improve its efficiency by modernisation, more
multi-shift working and vertical integration. At the samo
time it forecast that employment would fall from 125,000 in
1968 to 75,000 in 1975, and that the number of mills would fall
from 715 to some 300. The recommendations wera endorsed by
most of the industry's forward-looking leaders.
THE 1969 POLICY
8
In accepting most of these recommendations the Labour
Government made it clear that its purpose was to foster an
industry able to stand on its feet in an international environment.
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