UK Steel Industry

Greg Mulholland Excerpts

Tuesday 12th April 2016 Commons Chamber

[Greg Mulholland (Leeds North West) (LD)]

I am pleased to participate in this important debate, and I am delighted that the Speaker granted it. As the son of a Teessider, I am a regular visitor to Teesside and to Redcar. I was there only a few weeks ago, and to see the site of that plant, now empty and derelict, with no flame after 175 years of steelmaking, is shocking. My thoughts are with the constituents of the hon. Member for Redcar (Anna Turley) and the people in the surrounding Teesside constituencies. As has been said, when 3,000 jobs are lost, many more thousands of jobs and lives are affected. The Government are at least finally taking very slow action; what a shame that they did not take that action then, to try to prevent that closure.

As my parliamentary neighbour the hon. Member for Hartlepool (Mr Wright) has pointed out, what a contrast there is between what this Government are doing and the industrial strategy of the previous Business Secretary, the internationally respected Vince Cable, who sought to ensure that we maintained our existing industry while transitioning to new technologies. That is entirely lacking now. The current Business Secretary was so proud to say that there was now a Conservative Business Secretary, but he simply does not have an industrial strategy for the United Kingdom.

What an extraordinary situation this is. The Conservative party, while preaching free trade, is rolling out the red carpet for, and seeking to do sweetheart deals with, a communist nation whose subsidised basket case of a steel industry is producing steel that no one in the world needs or wants. It is wrecking a perfectly viable situation. Let me read the House an interesting quotation:

“Redcar has already paid the price for this ultra-free trade ideology, and Port Talbot is about to follow. There will eventually be little left if the current drift in trade policy is allowed to continue.”

Who said that? Was it the Leader of the Opposition, the leader of the Liberal Democrats, the leader of the Scottish National party? No; it was the international business editor of The Daily Telegraph, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard. That is a damning indictment of the Government’s lack of an industrial policy, and of the fact that they have turned their back on steel.

All that the Chancellor is doing is saying to the Chinese, “Can you make a little bit less steel, please?” That is all that he is prepared to do, because of his desperation to court China over projects such as the Hinkley power plant. Although China is closing five steel mills, it will still be producing 1.13 billion tonnes by 2020, according to figures from the Library. That is still far more than the world needs, and it will cause devastation.

Only six months ago, when we were seeing inaction from the Government, the Liberal Democrats called for Ministers to set up a Minister-led steering group to look at the whole steel industry so that a strategy could be delivered to save that great British industry. The Government ignored the call, and failed to act. What we are seeing today is not leadership but panic; the Government are doing too little, too late.

Ministers must now at least do what they can to reverse the present position. They must keep the Port Talbot plant operational while a buyer is sought, and they must be a little less arrogant. They must listen and learn some of the lessons of the past, including the lesson of what Vince Cable did when he went to talk to General Motors. They must ensure that we have a steel industry in the future to support the UK economy.