Consultants, Lawyers and Industrial Relations

Introduction In Britain, discussions of the role of third parties in industrial relations have almost entirely concentrated on Government or quasi‐government bodies concerned with administering incomes policy or offering conciliation and arbitration services. Such discussion has rarely, however, been extended to include private third parties, such as consultants and lawyers. This deficiency seems somewhat surprising, not to say unfortunate, as one would expect that both consultants and lawyers have considerably expanded their role in the British industrial relations system from the 1970s, largely as a consequence of the increased legal regulation of the system. This is not, of course, to suggest that such individuals did not play an often important role in some situations, prior to that decade. For example, consultants certainly figured in the build‐up to the Fawley productivity agreements, although according to Allan Flanders,