Holly Mumby-Croft
Main Page: Holly Mumby-Croft (Conservative - Scunthorpe)Department Debates - View all Holly Mumby-Croft's debates with the Cabinet Office
Protecting Steel in the UK
Holly Mumby-Croft Excerpts(10 months ago)
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Holly Mumby-Croft (Scunthorpe) (Con)
The news from Tata Steel is extremely concerning, and it leaves Scunthorpe as the last place in the whole of the UK that is able to make virgin steel. It is incredible to me that I am here again making the argument to retain the UK’s virgin steelmaking capability. There have been challenges from across the House on those views, so I will go into detail about some of those challenges.
Some people seem to think that we can make whatever we need in an electric arc furnace. It is true that the range of products is increasing all the time and will continue to expand, but those products are dependent on scrap and all scrap is not equal. We may have the correct tonnage of scrap in this country, but no one has yet convinced me that it is the correct quality of scrap. That is a really important point that we need to recognise.
People have said that we do not export iron ore from this country. That is incorrect; we do export iron ore as a country. People say that we do not have coking coal capability in this country. That is incorrect, because there is a perfectly good metallurgical coal mine in Cumbria waiting to be used. Some will make the argument about reducing the carbon footprint of steel products, using a purely electric arc model, to which I would again point out that many products melted in an electric arc furnace require an input of virgin steel in the mix. People on the works have told me—I listen to them because they know their stuff—that some of those products that they want to make in an EAF will need 30% virgin steel in the mix.
Andrew Percy
Is it not then clear that, given what my hon. Friend has said, it is vital that the Government negotiations with British Steel retain that virgin steel capability?
Holly Mumby-Croft
My hon. Friend, who knows a great deal about steel, is absolutely right. We need to remember that if we are not making that virgin steel here in the UK, it will come from someone else’s blast furnaces, probably from the other side of the world. We will have no control over the emissions or how that steel is produced. We will have no control over the welfare of the people who make it. The steel will then be put on a ship—a ship with a diesel engine, not a sail—and driven over here to be thrown into our electric arc furnaces to make that mix.
Sir John Hayes
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. The more that we make in this country—the more food we grow; the more products we produce—the more essential our manufacturing base becomes, and not just for our economic resilience and wellbeing, but for our move to this wonderful carbon-neutral future, which is so beloved of so many.
Holly Mumby-Croft
My right hon. Friend is correct. Put simply, unless we are going to stop using virgin steel in this country, we should have the ability to make it ourselves, so that we can take responsibility for those emissions and for the production methods, and for the working conditions of those who make the products.
Last week, my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Defence remarked that we are entering a pre-war world. A strong—or at least “in existence”—steelmaking industry is a core part of our nation’s defence capability. We may choose to buy the steel that we need for our defence from other countries—whether or not I agree with that—but resilience is not only about what we choose to do in future; it is also about what we may need to do, or what we may need to have the capability to do should the need arise.
On 18 September, I asked my hon. Friend the Minister for Industry and Economic Security whether she agreed that
“for national security reasons alone, we must ensure that we retain the capability to make virgin steel in this country”.
As I said in the urgent question that I later secured, that was confirmed to me by the Secretary of State the very same day, and I took contemporaneous notes of that conversation. On 18 September, my hon. Friend the Minister commented that I was correct on the importance of virgin steel, stating:
“obviously, we need a place for virgin steel, and that is in her constituency.”—[Official Report, 18 September 2023; Vol. 737, c. 1125.]
I have no problem with building electric arc furnaces—it is a good idea—but I passionately believe that the UK should retain, at least in the medium term, some blast furnace capability alongside that. After the sad news in Port Talbot, that has to be in Scunthorpe.
On 6 October, British Steel set out its plans, which it says are subject to appropriate support from the Government. They are the content of the negotiations that my hon. Friend is working so hard on. They talk about installing two electric arc furnaces, one in Scunthorpe and one in Teesside, and they propose maintaining current operations until a transition to electric arc steelmaking.
I want to be crystal clear: I expect the company to keep to its word on this. If we are to give British Steel hundreds of millions of pounds of public money, we need to ensure that it retains those blast furnaces until the transition. In short, that must be written into the deal. I do not want the sad events happening in Port Talbot to happen to my people in Scunthorpe. I do not want to see blast furnaces switched off early and steel being brought in from abroad and rolled in our mills. I want those blast furnaces to be on for as long as possible, maintaining jobs and keeping options open, so that we can explore alternative technologies, just as other countries are doing.
David T. C. Davies
The Welsh Government have made it clear that they are not able at the moment to put in the sort of money that would be needed to come up with any kind of different plan. There is no other plan on the table, which is why we find ourselves in the situation we are in.
I will turn very quickly to a couple of points that were made. First, on primary or virgin steel, obviously all the iron ore and coal used in the plant is being imported. We are, therefore, at this moment, dependent on other countries for our virgin steel capacity. The advantage of an arc furnace, although this is not the situation that I want to be in, is that we would not be dependent on foreign countries for the supply of steel because, as the Minister for Industry and Economic Security, my hon. Friend the Member for Wealden (Ms Ghani) pointed out, we currently export 8 million tonnes.