The Phillips Report on building: 1950

The article reviews and interprets the "Phillips Report" of 1950 the first "post war" report on construction. This reviews attempts to realize aspirations and plans for reconstruction derived from the Simon Report(1944) and the climate of "planning for post war Britain" (Simon 1945). Phillips is a 'Discourse of Hope' based on the experiences of a group of 'Keynesian planners' from the public and private sectors who collaborated within the wartime value consensus. Phillips shows that by 1950 the context and practices of construction had begun to diverge from their assumptions. The discourse evolved until Crichton (1966) but relied on: an assumption of the manageability of construction established in Phillips and reflected in attention to the supply rather than demand side; and a concept of contracts let in a setting of collaboration facilitated by extensive but unrealisable degrees of information. Phillips is compared to Emmerson (1962), one of a set of reports and research which attempted to develop the concept of planning and assumption of manageability in the face of changes in construction. These split the theme of contracts, (Banwell 1964), and communications, (Higgin and Jessop 1963, Crichton 1966), which dominate official reports since 1944; communications signifying problems of co-ordination.