British Steel

Baroness Neville-Rolfe Excerpts

Thursday 24th April 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Gustafsson (Lab)]

With regards to the specifics of Scunthorpe, I am not yet in a position to be able to confirm how much that would be used domestically. Currently only 40% of the UK’s demand is provided domestically, so there is a significant domestic market that we could be looking to serve here.

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)]

My Lords, steel is a strategic national asset, which is, of course, why our Front Benches worked together on that long Saturday 12 April in a very enlightening debate, which was also informed by the background of US tariffs. Are the Government worried about the future of other strategic national assets, perhaps as a result of sky-high electricity price or inappropriate Chinese involvement? Cement might be one area, but I am sure the noble Baroness will be able to tell us what the Government are looking at in this area, whether there are causes of concern and how they are dealing with them.

[Baroness Gustafsson (Lab)]

The noble Baroness is right. Today’s world feels like it is changing from a Monday to a Tuesday. We must not forget that in all of this, we should have that north star—what are those assets that we have within the UK and those industries that we see encouraging all our future growth, and how can we support them? The purpose of the Government’s industrial strategy is to illuminate exactly that: how do we identify those key sectors and what are the facets that we need to intervene in to be able to support the growth? A key aspect of that is energy costs, which is why things such as the supercharger scheme is so important. They need to be targeted at those sectors that we see as really essential to the UK.