National Economic Development Council

The National Economic Development Council (NEDC) was a corporatist economic planning forum set up in 1962 in the United Kingdom to bring together management, trades unions and government in an attempt to address Britain's relative economic decline. It was supported by the National Economic Development Office (NEDO). Both were known as Neddy and subsidiary sector-based organisations dealing with individual industries or sectors of business were termed "little Neddys".

It was outlined to the House of Commons in July 1961 by then Chancellor, Selwyn Lloyd, and first met in 1962.^[1] It was modelled on the French Economic and Social Council, and it remained an influential player across the 1970s governments of Edward Heath, Harold Wilson and James Callaghan in terms of setting future strategy for UK business and industry, though not in terms of industrial relations. It was headed by a series of consensual industrialists Sir Geoffrey Chandler and Bernard Asher and ex civil servants e.g. John Cassels and one academic Walter Eltis.

Margaret Thatcher distrusted both planning and corporatism and mainly ignored the body throughout the 1980s. It was finally abolished by John Major in June 1992.

However within the European Union the United Kingdom is a member of a similar international body, namely the European Union's Economic and Social Committee.

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