Lord Brookman
Main Page: Lord Brookman (Labour - Life peer)
Baroness Neville-Rolfe
I am grateful to the noble Lord for his many questions, and for his reference to the Enterprise Bill, on which we had a good debate yesterday. As I explained at the end of proceedings then, it has been difficult. The underlying problem is that the SSI operation has never made a profit. The scale of decline in steel around the world is enormous. The world is oversupplied, with overproduction at 30%. This figure appalled me. There are 200 million tonnes of excess tonnage in China, and EU production is 169 million tonnes. We have an enormous challenge.
The right thing is to look forward. That is why we have established a steel summit on Friday in Rotherham, which obviously goes wider than Redcar. The Secretary of State will be chairing it and Anna Soubry will be there, along with all the key outside players, including, obviously, steelmakers such as Tata and Celsa, the trade unions and experts, including Oxford Economics, who are able to look objectively at the global position and look forward to see what can be done.
Chapter 11 has its advantages in some other climes. I think we have debated this before. We find that the insolvency tends to end up being less efficient, particularly in the sort of circumstance we have here, where you have a big global problem. You have to look forward to different opportunities for an area.
Lord Brookman (Lab)
As an ex-general secretary of the union referred to by the Minister and an infrequent speaker in the Chamber, I am pleased that the Minister congratulated the union that I once led, under a different heading. I remember a debate in this Chamber many years ago about the future of manufacturing in the UK, which had particular relevance to the steel industry. It went down quite well—there were 19 speakers —but I was told by one of the inner crowd that we live in a post-industrial society, which implied that banking, the service sector and finance were the way forward.
The steel communities in this country, although there were 267,000 people in the nationalised industries in 1967, are very, very small. My home town in south Wales is decimated: the mines have gone, the steelworks have gone and times are tough.
If the Minister is running this conference next week, she should—please—apply her mind to keeping what is left.
Baroness Neville-Rolfe
I thank the noble Lord for his comments and for his experience. I certainly agree that we should seek to preserve what is good. There are opportunities in the steel industry: there is HS2, if that happens; there is specialist steel; and we have a sector-led strategy on metals. We need to look forward in those areas and to small business creation in Teesside and in other ex-steel communities.