The Steel Industry

The British Steel Corporation (BSC) was formed by the 1967 Iron and Steel Act which took into national ownership the fourteen largest steelmaking companies in Britain. (The criterion for inclusion in the nationalization programme was the capacity to produce 400 000 tonnes of steel.) Nationalization of the steel industry followed a period of under-investment by the private steel companies (Dobson, 1981). Profits in the industry were low, reflecting the constraints of a production process spread over a large number of small plants operating already obsolete technology. There was a widely held belief that the steel industry needed large-scale rationalization in order to shift production to a small number of large plants operating with the latest equipment and technology. Thus, ‘Nationalisation was intended as a method of rationalising production and of bringing about a lot of investment in the latest technology’ (ibid. p.48).