British Steel (1967–1999)

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British Steel was a major British steel producer. Originally created as the nationalised British Steel Corporation (BSC), it was privatised and thus became a public limited company, British Steel plc, in 1988. It was once a constituent of the FTSE 100 Index. The company merged with Koninklijke Hoogovens to form Corus Group in 1999. Britain's steel industry was re-nationalised on 28 July 1967 under a Labour government headed by Harold Wilson, creating BSC. At the time of formation, BSC comprised around ninety per cent of the UK's steelmaking capacity; it had around 268,500 employees and roughly 200 subsidiaries. However, by this point, 20 years of political manipulation had left companies, such as British Steel, with serious problems: a complacency with existing equipment, plants operating below full capacity (resulting in persistently low efficiency), poor-quality assets, outdated technology, government price controls, higher coal and oil costs, lack of funds for capital improvement, and...

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