Steel Industry (Special Measures) Bill

Debate between Daisy Cooper and David Davis

2nd reading
Saturday 12th April 2025 Commons Chamber

[David Davis (Goole and Pocklington) (Con)]

You will not need reminding, Mr Deputy Speaker, but I will remind the House of quite how unusual a day this is, for a variety of reasons. The last time we met on a Saturday was at a time of war, and the last time we put a Bill through in one day was at the beginning of the pandemic. That is how serious the disastrous circumstances in which we find ourselves are. I assume that this House will accept the Bill, so I will address my comments directly to the Secretary of State.

At one level, this is a “nationalisation in all but name” Bill, because of the powers it gives the Government. Indeed, it actually gives them more powers than a nationalisation Bill would. It will allow the Government to do things that they could not do under a nationalisation Bill. Frankly, I would have voted for one. I am not a fan of nationalisation, as the Secretary of State will know, but I would have voted for nationalisation. I will vote for this Bill, for a simple reason: it buys us time. People have to understand that this is a reprieve, not a rescue.

I do not agree with the hon. Member for Boston and Skegness (Richard Tice) on his strategic nationalisation argument. Nationalisation under these circumstances buys the Secretary of State time and leverage, and he needs to be able to use his judgment on how to use that time and leverage. We have had just a hint of a view of how complex a game Jingye is playing. In fact, if I were to recommend any amendment to the Bill, it would be an amendment to limit to one penny the amount of money that the Government could pay to Jingye, because then no court could challenge that amount, and Jingye would know full well that it was not in line to make money out of the British taxpayer. We have to look at this in strategic and tactical terms.

[Daisy Cooper]

Will the right hon. Member give way on that point?

[David Davis]

If the hon. Lady will forgive me, I will not, because lots of people want to speak. I will refer to something she said in a minute, so if she really needs to intervene, I will let her come in then. We are trying to manage a disaster—a disaster for Scunthorpe, which is local to me, as members of my community work at Scunthorpe. The knock-on economic effects will be felt much more widely than in one town; this will affect thousands and thousands of people all round.

This is also a disaster for our last primary steelmaker, and steelmaking has suddenly become more important. It was always an important part of national strategy, but Mr Trump has made it a vital, unavoidable piece of national strategy. We have to create a circumstance that allows the Secretary of State and the Government to manoeuvre us through that. As Members have said, that means having an energy policy that makes the plant viable—not just viable when it is owned by the state, but commercially viable. It means having an energy policy under which we do not have the highest energy costs of our competitors, which we do now. It also means that we have to think very hard about carbon supply. At the moment, the technology does not exist that allows us to make primary steel without carbon supply, so we have to think about that. Primary steel is a strategic supply, so we cannot rely on another country for it.

I want to see this Bill used in a way that gives the Secretary of State the time to deliver those things, but it must also give this House the right to see what he is doing and how the strategies are turning out. Nobody has got this right. If those on the Government Benches want me to, I can go back to 1997 and park blame, but I do not want to do that today. I want to make this viable. We have to get our energy, environmental and industrial policies all in line to make this work.

To put this in context, last year British Steel lost about £408 million—that was the September number. This year it is about £250 million. Neither of those are small amounts of money. The Treasury would shut down an operation if we just left something like that running inside the Government for very long. We need a new strategy that cuts our carbon emissions without exporting our industry to the rest of the world. I am afraid that most of our successes in carbon reduction over the last decade or two—or three—have been by dint of exporting industries to other countries, often with much worse records than us. In this case it would be China. China has 50% of the world market already. It has massive excess in steel capacity, and its steel capacity is the most carbon inefficient there is, so we would actually be worsening the circumstances.