ABSTRACT
It is important from the outset to distinguish between the two key concepts regional policy and strategic planning. Regional policy has been a major concern in the UK since the discovery of structural regional disparities in the Great Depression in the early 1930s, and culminated from 1945 in post-war policy which used a combination of controls and incentives to steer industry from the prosperous South East to the less prosperous North of England, South Wales and Central Scotland. It applied only to manufacturing (with a short-lived extension to offices in the late 1960s) and became increasingly irrelevant with the decline of manufacturing employment; the controls were removed under Thatcher in 1982, and incentives now come through EU Structural Funds. Only for a short period in the 1960s did it become conflated with an attempt at regional planning within the context of a national plan, and even then somewhat imperfectly.
