Introduction

At the same time as post-war governments were seeking to encourage employers to move to DAs, they were also embarking on a longerterm strategy to redistribute populations and employment away from the large conurbations. The Second World War had exacerbated the housing problems of Britain's cities and demonstrated the potential effectiveness of decentralisation strategies. The resulting development of New and Expanding Towns (NETs) in the post-war period was to become one of the most significant spatial development programmes ever undertaken in any European country. This chapter assesses the rationalities and practices involved in the building of the NETs and focuses on the key relationships that were established between employment and community-building. It shows how development agendas were underpinned by particular imaginations of place and specific understandings of how labour markets operated and could be constructed through policy programmes. Migration was seen as a mechanism for sustainable labour market-building and the optimisation of economic growth and social activity.

The chapter argues that NET policy was indicative of a wider politics of mobility and fixity that involved contested understandings of what constituted a balanced place and how this was to be defined. In debates that mirrored those in DAs, decisions were made concerning the types of worker mobility that should be promoted and how this should be done. Policy-makers had to decide on how processes of selection should function and how different socioeconomic groups should be spatially distributed in order to fulfil wider policy objectives. Questions were raised over the form and character of state regulation and what role the state should be playing in the creation of new places. The chapter begins by examining the rationalities underpinning the NET policy and how selective interpretations of the concept of balance were interpreted and deployed in policy discourses. It then assesses the relationships between employment and community change and how the priorities and objectives of policy changed as processes of mobility became increasingly complex and difficult to steer. The example of the Industrial Selection Scheme is used to highlight some of the rationalities and practices of labour mobility policies in the NETs and the regulatory challenges that such schemes raised for policy-makers and development agencies.