ABSTRACT
The British brewing industry was the subject of fifteen official reports between 1966 and 1986. As one opponent of public intervention put it, no other industry had been ‘so crawled over by officialdom’ (The Guardian 1989). This was not difficult to explain. A recent history of the industry notes that it manufactures a popular but potentially hazardous drink, and has been a major source of public revenue since the sixteenth century (Gourvish and Wilson 1994:598). After 1945 rising levels of corporate concentration, along with concern over health and road safety, have further guaranteed continual government interest. The immediate background to recent events was a reference in 1986 by the Office of Fair Trading (OFT) to the Monopolies and Mergers Commission (MMC) which eventually produced a report on the Supply of Beer in March 1989 (MMC 1989). This was the biggest and most thorough investigation to date of the industry’s structures and practices. It was not the first time that its pricing policies or its tied-house system had been criticised. But what was novel was a set of firm recommendations for action to break up what had been designated a ‘complex monopoly’ based on high levels of vertical integration. A weakened version of these proposals was finally given statutory force through the Beer Orders of December 1989, which were implemented over the next three years.
