An Economic Advisory Council had been set up in 1930, chaired by the Prime Minister and including leading economists John Maynard Keynes and Josiah Stamp.
[2] NEDC was outlined to the House of Commons in July 1961 by then Chancellor, Selwyn Lloyd, and first met in 1962.
[3] It was modelled on the French Economic and Social Council, and it remained an influential player across the 1970s governments of Edward Heath, Harold Wilson and James Callaghan in terms of setting future strategy for UK business and industry, though not in terms of industrial relations.
It was headed by a series of consensual industrialists Sir Geoffrey Chandler and Bernard Asher and ex civil servants e.g. John Cassels and one academic Walter Eltis.
Margaret Thatcher distrusted the body and scaled down its meetings from monthly to quarterly - of which the Chancellor only attended one per year.