Steel Industry

Baroness Redfern Excerpts

2nd reading
Saturday 12th April 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Redfern (Con)]

My Lords, I refer to my interests in the register. Scunthorpe, as we have heard from many speakers today, is a proud steel town that I have known for many years. Its people are fighting with all the strength and resilience that they have to keep those coke ovens burning. Some 2,700 jobs hang in the balance. With every family in the area, there is some connection or they know someone working there. There are also the hundreds of people employed in the supply chain, which will be thrown into chaos if Scunthorpe loses its steel capacity.

The big British Steel sign at Scunthorpe says, “Building stronger futures”, but there will be no future if the coking coal does not arrive in time to keep Anne and Victoria, the blast furnaces, going hot. If they are closed in an unplanned way, they can never be reopened. With this important decision today feels like everything is going down to the wire. Scunthorpe is proud, and rightly so, that it makes the highest-grade virgin steel available. Let us not forget that, as we have heard from many speakers today, if we let the blast furnaces go cold, we will be the only country in the G20 that does not produce primary steel, against a proud 160-year industrial legacy. All this is against the backdrop that the demand for steel is likely to go up, not down.

Our resilience and national security are threatened as steel becomes the subject of tariffs and trade conflicts. As we know, there is already a proposal on the table for a 25% tariff on steel exports to the US, which we must be very mindful of. The UK has much scrap steel, but we need the import of large quantities of iron pellets and coking coal—although we have the Cumbria mine, mentioned before, which is ready to develop and could supply coking coal in the interim. Transition will take a period of time, so it is vital we keep the blast furnaces burning in Scunthorpe while working towards a gradual transition to low-carbon arc furnaces.

Regrettably, the ongoing issue is for the workforce, who are working with high electric prices, and the industry has called for a cap on energy prices for heavy industry in order to match. We are charged twice as much as Germany and France are for their industrial electricity, which does not allow us to compete on a level playing field. This is unfair competition and has to be addressed.

Finally, the Government must do the right thing during the period of transition: bring the Scunthorpe site back into public ownership while protecting workers during this time, with a clear plan for the workforce. How can the UK not produce its own, high-quality steel? It must and it should.