ABSTRACT
The gas industry in Britain developed from the nineteenth century as a mixture of private and later mainly municipal services. The industry was nationalised in 1948 as a collection of regional operations. Over 1,000 separate gas businesses were taken over and formed into 12 Area Boards, overseen by a Gas Council. In 1972 the Gas Act was passed vesting all of the component parts of the state-owned industry in the new British Gas Corporation (BGC) consisting of a headquarters and 12 regions, following the conversion of Britain’s mains gas supply from “town gas” to “natural gas”. The BGC was given a monopoly position in the British Gas market derived from legal powers stretching back over many years. Although there was some competition between gas companies for customers in the first half of the nineteenth century, an official inquiry in 1847 had concluded that “Competition between companies is never long lived.” Nor did the inquiry find competition necessarily beneficial to consumers. By the end of the nineteenth century the gas industry had consolidated into geographic monopolies and “sliding scale” regulation had been imposed, in which the payment of higher dividends than the permitted amount to shareholders meant passing on the advantage in lower prices to consumers.1
