ABSTRACT
In many ways the coal-mining industry experienced the antithesis of the good fortune which blessed the gas industry’s innovation programme. The industry was in no state to guide an intricate process of research and engineering development at the time of nationalisation. Nor did economic conditions favour the efforts the industry made. Demand was strong in the early years, but had weakened irretrievably by the time that the Coal Board’s programme of innovation began to take effect.
The industry’s weaknesses in 1947 were such as to make it more difficult to formulate a long-term strategy for concentration and technical change. Coal mining had had one of the worst records of any industry in Britain for labour relations in the inter-war years. As well as the recurrent strikes over pay and conditions, the issue of colliery closure in order to concentrate production was an explosive one. It would have been difficult to put forward a reasoned argument for any radical change in the industry without arousing antagonism between colliery owners and the labour force. Even the degree of mechanisation achieved provoked bitter struggles.
The collieries themselves were for the most part in poor condition. Economic hardships in the 1930s had been followed by the war; the fundamental restructuring of the industry which might have been judged necessary, and which had taken place in some of the continental industries, had been side-stepped as an issue. Although there were a few larger and more progressive companies, particularly in Scotland, there was none that could be called an industry leader, and ownership was highly fragmented. The professional institution of mining engineers had not been able to take a leading part in guiding the affairs of the industry. There was no growing tradition of research and development, nor of its practical application as a general service in the interests of the industry.
The demand for coal was strong for at least ten years after nationalisation. It seemed that the nation could burn every ton of coal produced, and the forecasts were that demand would grow until at least 1965. No one added up the difference that would be made to consumption by improved efficiency in electricity generating and in the use of coke for making steel, by the demise of the coal fire and by the transfer of railway traction, gas making and some power stations from coal as a fuel to oil. Had the decline in demand which176 began as early as 1956 been anticipated, the long-term planning of the industry might have been very different. It would not have seemed so necessary to keep open relatively uneconomic pits in order to maintain output, although this does not mean that closure and concentration would have automatically followed.
The Coal Board’s approach must be judged in the light of the particular difficulties which affected the mining industry in the postwar period, but there are grounds for arguing that the policy as it evolved over twenty-five years was not fully thought out. That policy was to modernise the machinery and update the working methods used in collieries, both underground and on the surface. In order to improve productivity, a major innovative programme was pursued over a period of more than twenty years to introduce total mechanisation at the coal face. Collieries were closed as their reserves ran out, or in order to rationalise the working of existing reserves between adjacent pits. Restructuring took place in the larger existing pits, sinking new shafts and driving new roads underground. A few new collieries were put into production.
Implicit in this approach to the problem was the judgment that the industry could be made viable simply by improving productivity at the existing pits. It is questionable whether this was at any stage a correct judgment, and experience has shown that the improvement in labour productivity which was looked for could not be achieved in this way. One must therefore consider whether the Coal Board’s policy showed a correct appreciation of the problem which had to be solved.
The factors which affect the productivity of labour employed in collieries differ according to the main areas of work, at the surface, working below ground behind the coal face, or working below ground at the coal face. At the surface labour productivity is related to the amount of capital equipment installed for coal handling, preparation and transport, and to the efficiency of maintenance and engineering services. Gains in productivity are to be expected from increasing the amount of capital equipment, from improving the techniques it employs and from re-organising working methods. These gains will be the more substantial the larger is the colliery output.
Below ground behind the face, scope for using capital equipment exists in coal transport, the driving of new headings and roadway maintenance and repair. More equipment and the re-organising of working methods can be expected to produce productivity gains, but again the greatest return to the introduction of these measures will result from their application to the higher output collieries, if collieries of similar natural conditions are compared. At the coal face, labour productivity is again related to the application of capital equipment and it was in mechanising the operation of mining at the coal face that the Coal Board made its outstanding innovatory contribution. There are, however, limits to the length of face that can be conveniently worked. Labour productivity gains result from being able to use the capital equipment to the maximum intensity (maximum number of machine hours per day) and from being able to operate it with the minimum number of manshifts. High machine usage and low manpower requirements are associated with the better geological conditions at some faces; poor face conditions can cut efficiency at the face to a half or a quarter of the national average. Thus the productivity gains to be expected from scale are limited and the major determinant of efficiency is the nature of face conditions.
177Labour productivity in mining is thus related mainly to the natural conditions encountered, the amount of machinery employed and the size of colliery output. Capital productivity of collieries is mostly affected by the capital costs of the pit and its associated workings. Difficult conditions encountered during sinking and development can cause forecasts of the capital costs of output to be upset, but, other things being equal, collieries planned and laid out for large outputs can be expected to have lower capital costs than those with smaller outputs.
The Coal Board tackled the issue of applying machinery to coal production, but did not adopt a clear-cut policy of concentration of output. Indeed it could be argued that the issue of concentration was once more avoided. There were several reasons for this. Up to the mid–1950s the policy objective was to maximise coal output, and only a few very small and inefficient pits were closed. Few very large new pits to assist in meeting the industry’s output target were developed, partly on the ground that development was slow and uncertain. Some pits were enlarged and some concentration took place when falling demand caused pit closures, but by the 1960s the industry was facing such severe retrenchment that a faster rate of concentration was unacceptable. It remains to ask why the industry did not plan, in 1947, to produce from a much smaller number of much larger pits; perhaps as few as 200 collieries to produce 200 million tons might have been desirable by 1960, and a reduction to under 100 collieries by 1975 would have been needed to equal concentration in the mining industries of other countries.
The answer would appear to be that, for all the centralised structure of the Board, decision making on such matters of technical policy was diffuse. Mining engineers in colliery and Area managements all over the country would have had to favour concentration as a major priority in order to make it work. It may well have been the case that a consensus of opinion would have been against such a policy direction and it was certainly the case that no adequate machinery existed to sound out technical opinion, to present the issues so that the conflicts of objectives might be seen, and to resolve satisfactorily the question of what course of action was best for the industry.
The lack of an administrative structure to perform this function is in marked contrast to the gas industry, where the fourteen members of the Council could speak with considerable authority about the choice of production techniques. The Coal Board’s difficulty in creating a technical policy structure stemmed from the nature of the industry. Cohesiveness, co-operative approaches to industry problems and the opportunity to resolve conflicts on technical policy had not been encouraged by the ownership structure, and they were not induced by the diversity of mining conditions to be met in Britain. A much greater degree of co-operation spread gradually through the industry under public ownership. One of the major mechanisms to bring about this change was the Board’s innovative programme. The factors which marked the emergence of a more structured approach to technical policy making were the build-up of the research function, the launching by the Board of the mechanisation drive in 1956, the move to spread mechanisation practices through conferences, committees, working parties, etc., and the steady growth of the influence of the production department at headquarters. The decision in the mid–1960s to concentrate output on a much reduced number of high output faces was perhaps the178 most successfully executed technical policy decision ever adopted by the Board or the industry.
In areas other than the determination of overall technical policy the procedures of the mining industry showed greater strengths. A fairly wide range of technical solutions to face mechanisation was examined. The underlying federal nature of the industry in technical matters allowed different approaches to be developed thoroughly and tested in practice. Some aspects of the research programme, particularly the powered support concept and the refinement of the use of power loaders at the face, illustrated the successful application of research to the practical problems of production techniques. But there was some difficulty about deciding which types of coal cutter best suited the industry’s needs; this did not only result from diverse geological conditions, but also from disagreement, which continued for several years, concerning the merits of large and small coal in the industry’s output. 1
The rapid reduction in the number of working pits during the 1960s and the failure of productivity to reach the anticipated levels by the early 1970s placed a severe strain on labour relations, which had been remarkably good during the previous history of public ownership. The future for miners looked insecure and their earnings were held back by low productivity. The two major strikes which followed were bad for the industry’s mechanisation programme, but they had more serious effects as well. It had been becoming easier to achieve general agreement in the industry on the setting of technical priorities and more favourable conditions were appearing in which to re-examine the issue of concentration. The labour relations problem of the 1970s meant, however, that any determined effort to reduce still further the number of working collieries would have been resisted very strongly. Although the better prospects for demand for coal led to plans for the expansion of the industry, through the addition of new capacity on a large scale, the issues of productivity and concentration still remained as the major problem facing the industry.
