Trade Remedy Measures: UK Interests

Hywel Williams Excerpts

Monday 25th February 2019 Commons Chamber

[Dr Fox]

Like my hon. Friend, I am, I would like to think, a great champion of free trade, but that does not mean a free-for-all. There have to be rules to ensure that there is fair trade in the global trading system. That means that those countries that purposely overproduce, dump and subsidise, and are therefore not part of a fair trading system, should be penalised for doing so.

[Hywel Williams (Arfon) (PC)]

Some 9,000 jobs in Wales depend on the steel industry. Further to the question from my hon. Friend the Member for Dundee East (Stewart Hosie), some steel products figure in the list of 43 measures to be maintained, but others appear in the 66 measures to be terminated. Will the Secretary of State give an absolute guarantee that the measures to be terminated will not lead to steel jobs being terminated in Wales?

[Dr Fox]

I am encouraged by the reaction of UK Steel, who very much welcome the Government’s measures. In a very small number, such as rebar, we have maintained the remedy, where the industry itself has said that it wants to and it meets the threshold: we have not done so where there is either no production in the UK or there has been no representation from any UK producer that we should carry forward such a remedy.