A Ministry of Planning
Lord Reith, as Minister of Works and Planning, will take over powers hitherto exercised by the Ministry of Health, and under a Bill which is being prepared will assume other powers to give effect to planning as a national policy. In the past year Lord Reith's department has been busy. So much emerged from the important House of Lords debate last week. Fact-finding is the essential preliminary to planning, and his assistants have been at work preparing a survey of land-resources for the whole country, now nearly complete, and they have been attending to the matter of establishing standards of design. The Ministry will work, as did the Ministry of Health, through the local authorities, but Lord Reith shows that he is fully alive to the necessity of combinations of planning-authorities and larger regional units. It is essential that planning should be on a regional basis. The task of the Ministry will be to ensure that local and regional schemes accord with the supreme plan for the whole country—a plan which must be made to fit into and facilitate the
major social policy of the Government. It concerns the physica: aspects of reconstruction, and has to take into account the move. ments and balanced distribution of industry and population, ra.il and road communications, the preservation of suitable land fo: farming and recreation, as well as the whole problem of housing and rehousing. Everything will depend as much on the drive which the Minister puts into the work as on the new powers which the Bill should confer on him. It is essential that the preparatory work should be well advanced before the war comes to an end.
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