Planning for growth

Engineering doesn’t take place in a vacuum. Because it is so tied up in the development of products and processes, it’s intimately tangled up with the mechanisms of the economy — contributing to balance of payments; to the import and export of raw materials, equipment, products, information and talent; to national and international finance; and to the country’s place in the world community.

It’s hardly surprising, then, that engineering is the subject of a whole raft of laws, regulations and initiatives which have a major effect on how companies and individual engineers, particularly in the manufacturing and energy sectors, go about their business. Most of these are intended to help: to provide incentives for R&D, to help companies secure intellectual property rights for their inventions, and to help gain investment to grow companies.

This, however, is a relatively new development. For many years, since the late 1970s, industrial policy was almost a dirty word in the British political establishment. Laissez-faire economics was the order of the day: the best way to help industry, it was thought, was to interfere as little as possible and let it develop in its own way.