Defence Contracts: British Steel

Lord Touhig Excerpts

Monday 21st November 2016 Lords Chamber

[Earl Howe]

My Lords, the ambition of Sir John Parker in his national shipbuilding strategy is for UK shipyards to be in an excellent position to compete internationally for procurement opportunities such as the fleet solid support ships. The emerging principles of the strategy should be applicable to those ships without the need to restrict procurement to the UK.

[Lord Touhig (Lab)]

My Lords, earlier this year the Government issued new policy guidelines to ensure that UK steel suppliers compete on a level playing field with international suppliers. They said that this would feed into our national shipbuilding strategy and that the Government regarded British steel manufacturing as vital to this programme. On 4 November, when the Defence Secretary announced plans to cut steel for the first batch of the new Type 26 ships, he was unable to confirm that British steel will be used. Can the Minister be clearer: will British steel be used? Can he list the British steel suppliers that won contracts to supply steel for the building of Royal Navy ships as a result of the policy announced earlier this year?

[Earl Howe]

My Lords, no steel has yet been produced for the Type 26 programme. UK steel suppliers will have an opportunity to bid for the work as part of an open competition. I believe that the Type 26 programme will secure hundreds of high-skilled shipbuilding jobs on the Clyde. In a wider context, it is worth noting that UK suppliers made a significant contribution to the supply of steel for our major defence programmes. The classic example of that is the Queen Elizabeth aircraft carriers, for which some 95,000 tonnes of steel used was British—88% of the content.