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The Economics and Social Aspects of the Beeching Plan

Document Summary

The House of Lords Record of a speech given by Lord Stoneham, in which he outlines his opposition to large parts of the then-just-published Beeching Report.

This document was published on 2nd May 1963 by Parliamentary Archives.

It was written by Lord Stoneham.

The original document format was Paper, and comprised 7 pages.

This document was kindly sourced from Paul Luscombe and is in our Speeches collection. It was added to the Archive on 6th December 2005.

Copyright Information

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"My Lords, I have been a critic of the Beeching Plan ever since it was published on March 27. But I find, as I found when it was first published eight years ago, very much to commend it. Its title then was The Modernisation and Re-Equipment of British Railways, the Report I have here. I still think that there is much to commend in the Beeching Plan, although I recall that no one said of the 1955 edition that it was "monumental" or "boldly imaginative", or used any of the other superlatives which have been applied to the current edition. Everything in the Beeching Plan is in this book, and it has been in increasingly large-scale operation for eight years. In fact, we are now half-way through the fifteen year plan which was adumbrated when this Report was published. Everything is in it except for some of the figures; and many of the figures in the Beeching Report are known to be wrong, although unfortunately none of them can be really checked."