Sources of the AGR Disaster

Abstract

When Arthur Hawkins told the Select Committee on Science and Technology in the British House of Commons that the AGR was inherently a difficult system and less economically attractive than at first supposed, the Chairman, Mr Arthur Palmer, asked why the CEGB had been so over-confident earlier. Hawkins replied that the question should be put to the AEA, who had advised the CEGB, who had been under ‘somewhat fairly heavy pressure’,¹ whether exclusively from the AEA was not clear. The question could rightly be put not only to both the Authority and the Board, but also to ministers responsible for the decisions which turned out badly and, too, to the Select Committee itself, which for long attacked the consortia for failing to export the unsaleable. But Hawkins was justified in implying that the AEA had primary, initiating, responsibility. The politicians who created and continued the organisation had a more fundamental responsibility.