Steel Industry
Andrew Gwynne Excerpts(9 years, 1 month ago)
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Ms Eagle
Yes, I do.
Rather than hiding behind the European Commission, why do the Government not take action first on energy-intensive industry payments and get retrospective approval later? That is what Germany did with its Renewable Energy Act 2012. It provided support to producers of renewable energy from January 2012. It did not submit the Act for prior state scrutiny. It let the Commission investigate and then state aid approval was received in November 2014, two years after it had first provided support. Why can our Government not look after the interests of UK steel in the same way? It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the Government have been so slow to act because they have an ideological aversion to any Government intervention. We have a Secretary of State who will not let the phrase “industrial strategy” cross his lips.
We on the Labour Benches support international trade, but free trade must also be fair. China is currently responsible for a tsunami of cheap steel, which is being dumped on European markets. The UK should be at the forefront of demanding rapid and effective action to stop it.
Andrew Gwynne (Denton and Reddish) (Lab)
We are not just talking about the here and now, but the longer-term economic vision for the country. As sure as night follows day, the steel price will recover at some stage and we could find ourselves without a steel industry and be wholly beholden to other countries.
Ms Eagle
My hon. Friend makes an extremely important point. The steel industry is very cyclical in nature. During the hard times and the downturns, it is very important to try to act to preserve assets of strategic importance to our country, so that we can take advantage of the upswing and the recovery when it comes.
China is currently responsible for a tsunami of cheap steel products. Last week’s Chinese state visit is over and done with, so I hope the Business Secretary will be making the case in Brussels today that we should act rapidly to stop the dumping of Chinese steel products in Europe. The scale of the new Chinese imports and the speed of their arrival is staggering. Its surplus production is nearly twice the annual production in the entire EU, and it is increasingly finding its way here. Chinese rebar has grown from having zero presence in the UK market in 2013 to comprising 37% of it a year later. There are quality concerns with some imported Chinese steel. We also know that Chinese steel production causes more environmental damage than UK production, so it is a false economy to allow it to continue.
For both those reasons, action to tackle dumping is vital and long overdue. Perhaps the Minister can tell us, when she winds up, what she managed to achieve during her recent visit to China. I can tell her that both the leader of the Labour party and I raised this issue with Premier Xi and his delegation during the recent state visit to London. Did she raise it during her visit to China? If so, what are the Government actually going to do about the huge amount of imports and the dumping? When it comes to acting on China specifically, perhaps the Government should be less interested in selling off our nuclear industry and more interested in standing up for the strategic interests of the UK.
Standing up for British steel means standing up for the high-quality skills that have built some of the UK’s, and indeed the world’s, most iconic landmarks. British steel built Canary Wharf, the new Wembley stadium and Sydney Harbour bridge, and it will be building the Freedom Tower in New York. We should all be proud of what the UK steel industry has achieved, but the Government cannot treat it as some relic of the past; it has to be a vital part of our country’s future. That is why the Government must do more—much more—to see the industry through these tough times and prepare it to seize future opportunities. The Government should publish an industrial strategy for steel and be open about how they envisage maintaining the strategic steelmaking assets in this country during hard times. It is only firm action now that will guarantee any future at all for UK production.
I commend the campaign by the Daily Mirror, which is setting out daily the compelling case to save our steel. Just in case Ministers were in any doubt about the urgency, Gareth Stace of UK Steel has today described the industry as being like a patient on the operating table “likely to die” without help.
Community, the main steel union, has called for an urgent meeting with the Business Secretary because of the ongoing threat to jobs, as it has emerged that no representative of the workforce, be it Community, the GMB or Unite, has yet been invited on to any of the working groups set up after the steel summit. [Interruption.] The Minister says there is no need to invite representatives of the workforce on to these working parties. Ministers should meet the workers from steelmaking communities, including Teesside, Lincolnshire, Yorkshire and south Wales, who are lobbying Parliament to hear at first hand, as I have, the real cost of Government inaction.
The Prime Minister claims the Government are acting on procurement. Just yesterday, the Minister told the Business, Innovation and Skills Committee:
“I would say buy British because it’s quality.”
However, the inadequacy of the Government’s response was laid bare on the very same day, when it was revealed that the Government had just spent more than £3 billion on three new Royal Navy ships and 589 Scout specialist vehicles for the Army, which will use imported Swedish steel.
Stephen Crabb
I do not accept that the European or the British steel industry will be “well gone”, to use the hon. Gentleman’s phrase, but I think he is right when he talks about the length of time it takes to get state-aid clearance on these issues. This is one aspect of the overall issue that we are pushing for. My right hon. Friend the Minister for Small Business, Industry and Enterprise has had some discussions about this herself. This is a matter on which we are determined to take action—and not with respect only to the issue of state-aid approval that we are seeking at the moment, because we are concerned about the overall process for speeding up state-aid applications generally.
My right hon. Friend the Prime Minister discussed this issue with President Xi of China during the important state visit last week. President Xi recognised the UK’s concerns and will be taking action to address Chinese overcapacity. The working group on international comparisons in the steel industry, chaired by the Minister for Small Business, Industry and Enterprise, met last week and is looking at how we can speed up cases within the EU by working with other member states facing similar issues and working with the industry to speed up its provision of evidence on dumping, which would mean that we could then take action.
Stephen Crabb
Secondly, we are addressing the impact on intensive energy users such as the steel industry of policies to reduce the negative impacts of climate change.
As I said a moment ago, we have already given more than £50 million of support to the steel industry. We were the first EU country to pay compensation for indirect costs of the EU emissions trading system to energy intensives in 2013, we started to pay compensation for the costs of the carbon price support mechanism as soon as the European Commission gave state clearance in 2014, and we exempted the metallurgical industry from the climate change levy in the same year. As my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister has announced, we will provide further compensation for climate change policies, with payments starting as soon as state aid is approved and continuing throughout the current Parliament.
Andrew Gwynne
We must remember that behind all this are communities, and individuals living in those communities, who are facing a very uncertain future. Will the Secretary of State take this opportunity to dissociate himself and the Government from the views of his noble Friend Lord Heseltine, who has said that now is as good a time as any to lose a job? Is it not time that he found himself a different job too?
Stephen Crabb
I have no idea what comments the hon. Gentleman is referring to, but I do know that the noble Lord whom he mentioned has a track record of regeneration, winning support for UK industries, selling UK plc around the world and driving up growth in some of the most deprived parts of the UK to which not a single Labour Member could aspire.
All energy-intensive industries will benefit from the compensation at the earliest opportunity, and we are working with the Commission to gain approval quickly for proposals to provide additional relief for the impact of indirect low-carbon energy policy costs. The Business Secretary spoke to the Commissioner last week, and, as I said, he is in Brussels again today to make the need for urgency clear to our colleagues there. Once they are in place, these measures will save energy-intensive industries such as the steel industry hundreds of millions of pounds over the next five years.
Thirdly, we are determined to drive up the number of public contracts won by UK steel manufacturers and their partners through fair and open competition. In the last Parliament, we successfully renegotiated EU procurement rules to allow wider social and economic considerations to be taken into account, and we were the first country to put those new rules into action in February 2015.
We have identified more than 500 infrastructure projects and programmes, valued at over £400 billion and listed in National Infrastructure Pipeline, to help the industry to plan for and win contracts. Those contracts include Crossrail, which we are building with more than 50,000 tonnes of British steel, and HMS Queen Elizabeth, for which Tata provided 40,000 tonnes. We are currently embarking on the biggest programme of investment in our railways since Victorian times. Network Rail’s £38 billion, five-year investment and replacement programme includes demand for British steel worth billions of pounds, and Network Rail sources 95% of its steel from the UK.
Oral Answers to Questions
Andrew Gwynne Excerpts(9 years, 11 months ago)
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The Prime Minister
I absolutely join the hon. Lady in making that point. This is an important anniversary, and it is important that this country and our Parliament commemorate it properly. We must teach children in schools how our constitution has evolved and what rights we have, because pride in those things is important in understanding what a precious jewel we have in a functioning democracy under the rule of law.
Andrew Gwynne (Denton and Reddish) (Lab)
Q4. The target of a maximum two-month wait from an urgent referral for suspected cancer to first treatment for all cancers is being breached. Is there a bigger sign of his Government’s failure than the Prime Minister’s inability to uphold key rights for cancer patients that are enshrined in the NHS constitution?
The Prime Minister
It is vital that cancer patients get urgent treatment. Under this Government, half a million more people are getting referred for cancer treatment. That is why cancer survival rates are going up. Let me give the hon. Gentleman the figures for his own hospital area: 96.8% of patients with suspected cancer are being seen by a specialist within two weeks, which is an improvement on 2010; 100% of patients diagnosed with cancer are beginning treatment within 31 days, which is an improvement on 2010; and 94.8% of patients are beginning cancer treatment within 62 days of a GP referral, which again is an improvement on 2010. The reason we have been able to make those improvements is that we put resources into the NHS when the Labour party told us that that was irresponsible. We have also got rid of the bureaucracy in the NHS in England, which is why it is performing better than the NHS in Wales.