Net migration down to normal levels

What happened in wartime was that people were directed where to work and what to do and for how long. That is not manpower planning

Manpower planning is more akin to the planning for the future that took place suring the war, planning for the post-war society. It is thinking ahead, to whaat the future is expected to be like and what workers and skills we will need at every level from school leavers to university graduates, from engineering to medecine and funding post school education to meet these demands. It is constantly revising these forecasts and adjusting training and further training opportunities to meet the changing situation.

Manpower planning has always been a tool of government.

Such planning during the World Wars and the early Cold War was partially effective: it achieved many of its core goals—mobilizing huge numbers of people, maintaining essential war industries, and sustaining long conflicts—but it also suffered from serious inefficiencies, misallocations, and political pressures that limited its overall effectiveness.

From 1945 into the 1960s the UK struggled with labour shortages in key sectors (coal, transport, industry) throughout the late 1940s.

National Service helped maintain armed forces during Imperial commitments, but critics argued it drained labour from a recovering economy.

So the overall answer is UK manpower planning was effective when cntralized authority existed (WWII), the goal was clear and existential and government was willing to direct labour force allocations at a national scale

It was much less effective when coordination was weak (e.g., in WWI and the early post-war years), voluntary systems were relied upon too long and political resistance slowed necessary reforms.

I used to wonder, but now I just think that all any Government of any ideology cares about is getting themselves elected again.
They don't really care about the country at all.
Forecast planning needs to be considered in decades, with goodwill on all sides. That doesn't happen here.

M0nica

Universities may need to close because of the reduction of foreign students. In some cases putting world beating departments involved in critical scientific research in danger of close down.

What I have never understood is why no British government has undertaken proper man/womanpower planning forecasting broadly what skills will be needed and providing the relevant training so that we can provide for everything in this country form our own resources.

All we have had is the mindless expansion of the university sector so that so many young people start life with an enormous burden of debt, with the qualfication they have bought so expensively, devalued because there are just so many of them. when what was needed was more lower grade qualifications, cheaper to provide, but with potential to go further.

What we have done is plunder the less developed areas of the world, where their route to improvement is based on training young engineers and doctors and keeping them in their country, instead we entice them over here with high salaries, compared with their home countries. In fact enticing other countries clever young people what we deplore when it happens to our young people.

I can only, sadly, agree with this post M0nica. But I will repeat one of your thoughts

What I have never understood is why no British government has undertaken proper man/womanpower planning forecasting broadly what skills will be needed and providing the relevant training so that we can provide for everything in this country form our own resources.

Why indeed.

Chocolatelovinggran

Young people have always been the ones to venture abroad. My DD and SIL have built a new life for themselves in Scandinavia. Their children were born there.
This was not a rejection of Britain, but an interest in leading a different kind of life.

These are people - people we needed - whose "adventure" was to come here. It seems that it has become so much worse than an "adventure" that they have decided to go home Chocolatelovingran.

Universities may need to close because of the reduction of foreign students. In some cases putting world beating departments involved in critical scientific research in danger of close down.

What I have never understood is why no British government has undertaken proper man/womanpower planning forecasting broadly what skills will be needed and providing the relevant training so that we can provide for everything in this country form our own resources.

All we have had is the mindless expansion of the university sector so that so many young people start life with an enormous burden of debt, with the qualfication they have bought so expensively, devalued because there are just so many of them. when what was needed was more lower grade qualifications, cheaper to provide, but with potential to go further.

What we have done is plunder the less developed areas of the world, where their route to improvement is based on training young engineers and doctors and keeping them in their country, instead we entice them over here with high salaries, compared with their home countries. In fact enticing other countries clever young people what we deplore when it happens to our young people.

Young people have always been the ones to venture abroad. My DD and SIL have built a new life for themselves in Scandinavia. Their children were born there.
This was not a rejection of Britain, but an interest in leading a different kind of life.

If I was a younger person now I would be heading for Dubai.

Being part of an earlier ‘brain drain’ I can sympathise with these young ones. You just want to work hard and make headway and explore pastures new. In the UK at the time we left it just wasn’t easy to do that - blocks at every turn and a good old old boys network giving jobs to people who didn’t necessarily deserve them. It was a breath of fresh air to ‘escape’ and we were lucky - we never looked back and were able to buy a lovely house which would have been way,way out of our reach before. .

I would far prefer to keep the young businessmen and women and entrepreneurs in the UK. It's a sad state of affairs when they feel this country isn't worth staying in.

Whatever Labour do they can't win.

Tories are claiming it's a braindrain- everyone leaving a sinking ship. Stoked by the media too. I'm getting pretty tired of it now...

It’s also a loss that most of the outward migration is of under-35yo Brits. We need them here! One of my own family is being headhunted to work abroad, at more than twice the salary they could earn here. They’re very conflicted about the opportunity.