How successful was labours' nationalisation programme 1945 - 1951?

Nationalisation was largely successful in electricity with improvements in the quantity and quality of electricity supplied. There was also large success in the gas industry as there were massive improvements that made up for where it had previously lacked far behind electricity. There was also a growth in civil aviation and in cable and wireless communications; electrification extended to more remote parts of the country. However, the expansion of both the electric industry and the gas industry threw them into competition with each other. A great success of Labour's nationalisation programme of 1945-51 was the increase and expansion of industries in Britain. There was important expansions in some of the newer industries especially car production. Manufacturing output increased by 50% during these years, and the volume of exports rose by 67% between 1947 and 1950. There was remarkable expansion of production and exports in the five years up to 1951, however, along side these was a slow rise in the cost of living. Furthermore,  a lot of Labour's economic progress was based primarily on the old, staple industries such as coal, iron, steel and ship building; out of date in both equipment and organisation and not very efficient. Nationalisation of coal was popular with the miners, but to the public it became associated with fuel shortages, it was seen as a failing industry.

A huge flaw of Labour's 1945-51 nationalisation programme was the cost of it. It was extremely expensive, mainly due to the compensation of Private owners costing £2700 Million, money which was subsidised through taxation and some people thought it was money that could've been better spent. Taxpayers had also been burdened with run down and unprofitable industries such as coal mining and the railways which would have been subsidised indefinitely. The nationalised industries didn't always benefit from state control either. The pay of workers and the working conditions in the nationalised industries did not change a great deal and workers often found themselves to have the same managers after nationalisation as they did before. The administrative system adopted by Labour did not directly involve workers in the decision making or running of industries and the government resisted attempts to appoint representatives of the workers to their boards.

In conclusion, although the nationalisation programme was important for Labour and it's ideology, it was a less successful reform than in other areas of their society. It did have some profound effects on production and exports but it failed to make dramatic improvement in most areas. The programme worked out to be more costly than some people argued it was worth, but it did manage to drive Britain away from total capitalism, and instead Britain became a more mixed economy. Overall, the Programme wasn't a complete failure, but it had very limited success.