British Steel Corporation PLC

British Steel Corporation PLC, former British corporation that merged with Dutch steel firm Koninklijke Hoogovens in 1999 to create Corus Group, PLC. Corus, one of the largest international steel companies, conducts business worldwide. Headquarters are in London.

For much of its history, British Steel was a government-owned corporation established by the Iron and Steel Act of March 22, 1967, when the firm assumed ownership of 14 major steel companies in the United Kingdom: Colvilles Limited; Consett Iron Company Limited; Dorman, Long & Co., Limited; English Steel Corporation Limited; G.K.N. Steel Company Limited; John Summers & Sons Limited; The Lancashire Steel Corporation Limited; The Park Gate Iron and Steel Company, Limited; Richard Thomas & Baldwins Limited; Round Oak Steel Works Limited; South Durham Steel and Iron Company Limited; The Steel Company of Wales Limited; Stewarts and Lloyds, Limited; and The United Steel Companies Limited. These companies commanded some 200 wholly or partly owned subsidiaries in the United Kingdom and overseas in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Africa, South Asia, and South America.

The first efforts to centralize the British iron and steel industry occurred during the Great Depression, in the creation (1934) of the British Iron and Steel Federation (BISF), an association of major firms that negotiated both with the government and with rival foreign cartels and firms on issues of pricing, tariffs, quotas, and other policies. During World War II the staff of BISF became almost wholly the staff of Iron and Steel Control, a division of the Ministry of Supply established to direct wartime production.

At the war’s end, a Labour government returned to office, pledged to the nationalization of the steel industry. In 1949 a nationalization act was passed, creating the Iron and Steel Corporation of Great Britain, but little real change in the industry had resulted by the time that the Conservatives returned to power in 1951 and, two years later, denationalized the steel industry. An act in 1953 did, however, establish an Iron and Steel Board to supervise, though not dominate, a privately owned industry still associated in the BISF.

With the Labourites again in power, a second nationalization was imposed in 1967 under the Iron and Steel Act. The BISF was abolished, and the public British Steel Corporation was established. Another Iron and Steel Act, in 1969, dissolved the old constituent companies and rearranged the corporation into six divisions for general steels, special steels, strip mills, tubes, constructional engineering, and chemicals. These divisions were later reorganized into a more complex system of Manufacturing Divisions (geographic), Product Units (types of products), and Profit Centres (types of products and services). Under the Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher, British Steel was once again made profitable and was privatized in 1988.