MSC's draft plans for the next four years

In February 1982 the Manpower Services Commission published its DRAFT CORPORATE PLAN 1982–86 covering about 70 pages of office‐duplicated sheets of A4. Normally employers and managers learn about MSC policy in a rather piece‐meal fashion through glossy publications dealing with specific and limited parts of the system such as Open Tech or through the mass of Press Releases on individual items such as the setting up of some new Task Force. It is difficult to keep abreast of developments through these randomly‐published documents. Now this somewhat scruffy publication on the Draft Corporate Plan gathers all these scattered items together in one document. It is a truly amazing document — a record of how the Civil Service bureaucracy has taken over the training and manpower business and a description of what it looks like when they have. Whether this take‐over has been for good or ill you can only judge by reading the document, which has something of interest for everybody. The document itself is available on request from Manpower Services Commission, Selkirk House, 166 High Holborn, London WC1V 6PF. The passages we have extracted have been chosen to give as much information as possible in limited space and to give the reader some feeling of the vastness of the Government's intervention in the field of training and manpower development. The extracts are in normal type and the passages are numbered according to the original text. The passages in italic type consist of editorial comment.