| Activity | Founded 1931. Supported by Leonard Elmhirst (chairman 1939-1953) and Dorothy Elmhirst. Initial group were Max Nicholson, Kenneth Lindsay, Sir Basil Blackett, Gerald Barry, Noel Hall, Julian Huxley, Lawrence Neal, J.C. Pritchard, and Israel Sieff (chairman from 1933-1939). One of the first 'think tanks' and later a national institution, PEP was created in 1931as an independent , non-party research organisation committed to showing that imaginative and intelligent planning could improve Britain's social, economic and political situation. For more than fifty years the research done by PEP (and their published studies) had a profound influence on both government policy and private institutions and covered a multitude of subjects including housing, the welfare state, land-use, the arts, racial discrimination, trade unions and Parliamentary reform. In 1978 PEP merged with the Centre for Studies in Social Policy to form the Policy Studies Institute. |