Steel: Preserving Sustainable Jobs and Growth in Europe

Gill Furniss Excerpts

Tuesday 7th February 2017 General Committees

[The Chair]

We now have until 3.37 pm, which is one hour after the start of the statement, for questions to the Minister. I remind Members that questions should be brief. It is open to a Member, subject to my discretion, to ask related supplementary questions.

[Gill Furniss (Sheffield, Brightside and Hillsborough) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Wilson. First, I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Aberavon for his helpful and insightful introduction. I also take this opportunity to congratulate him and his colleagues in the APPG on steel and metal related industries for their recent “Steel 2020” report, which has no small relevance to our discussions. I am sure the Minister has read it thoroughly.

In Yorkshire, the Royce Translational Centre at the Advanced Manufacturing Park in Rotherham will be delivered with £4 million of European regional development fund money. That is expected to support growth and innovation in companies employing more than 13,800 people and is estimated to generate £668 million in the Sheffield city region. Is it the Minister’s opinion that EU funding is still underused and suffering from low take-up and a lack of strategic use? Have the Government reduced their enthusiasm for directing industry towards EU funding?

We would welcome a commitment to match EU funds granted before Brexit. On current timescales, EU funds are set up to 2022, while the Government’s pledge is only up until 2020. Will the Minister confirm that the total funding available post-Brexit will be significantly reduced due to the lack of access to EU funding programmes, including Horizon 2020?

[Mr Hurd]

I thank the hon. Lady for her question. The Chancellor of the Exchequer has made public statements about honouring EU funding commitments. Beyond that, in terms of support for things such as technical innovation and research, which she rightly talked about—it is fundamental to a more dynamic future for the sector—she will be well aware that the Government have made it extremely clear that we see innovation as the cornerstone of the industrial strategy. In fact, this Government have made the largest commitment since 1979 to science, research and innovation.

Through the industrial strategy, we are creating an environment in which sectors—as we have said, we fully expect the steel sector to be towards the front of the queue—come to us and say, “This is our vision of the future in terms of both sustainability and growth. This is how we think we can contribute to what you need in terms of productivity, jobs and better wages, but this is what we need from you in terms of unlocking that potential.” That is the kind of conversation we expect to have with a number of sectors, including the steel sector.

I do not know enough about the specific facility that the hon. Lady mentioned, which I am guessing is in her constituency.

[Gill Furniss]

No, it is alongside it.

[Mr Hurd]

Okay. I am certainly interested to know more about that. It seems part of an ecosystem that we need to nourish in the future, because access to innovation and new ways of making and doing things will be critical to the sustainable future that we all want for this foundation sector.

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[Gill Furniss]

The UK steel industry is a foundation industry that underpins many others and has a supply chain that runs across the country. It is an innovative sector, with new products constantly being created. It is also a sector that requires careful planning and a co-ordinated strategy, particularly around trade but also around training, around access to funding for research and development and for innovation, and around decarbonisation and energy costs.

We are here due to the insufficiency of the answers given to the European Scrutiny Committee on the Government’s position across issues affecting the steel sector before the Brexit vote, so I would have expected the Minister to be at pains to make the Government’s strategy as clear as possible. I can see that he is not doing so, for several reasons, I understand the complexities of the negotiations ahead, but the Minister has left a lot of questions unanswered.

Recently in the Chamber, I noted in a question that the industrial strategy Green Paper referred to steel on only one occasion. The only clarification that I received from the Government then was that they had had very productive discussions with the industry; the Minister has certainly reiterated that today.

I am very concerned about the lack of any clarity on the compensation energy package. It is getting closer and closer every day, and we certainly do not want to be at the cliff-edge, as my hon. Friend the Member for Aberavon described it. I am sure we will all be pursuing the matter further. We really need some concrete answers about the Government’s plans for trade defence measures, about international co-operation on Chinese dumping and overcapacity, about what will be available once EU funding sources have gone, and about the ETS.

There is still a crisis in the steel industry. Steelworkers throughout the UK and working people in the industries that depend on steel all along the supply chain deserve some clarity on what is being done to support the sector at this crucial time.