Customs (Tariff and Miscellaneous Amendments) (No. 4) Regulations 2026

Joshua Reynolds Excerpts

Wednesday 17th June 2026 General Committees

[Mr Joshua Reynolds (Maidenhead) (LD)]

Steel matters for our national security, for our defence and for our critical infrastructure, and it sustains jobs in every single part of the United Kingdom. British Steel supports thousands of jobs and more than £1 billion-worth of economic activity through its own operation and supply chain, as well as underpinning hundreds of thousands of jobs and several more billion pounds-worth of activity across the industries that depend on it.

This is an industry that is worth defending. It has been battered by President Trump’s trade war and by years of unfair practices from China. But supporting the goal is not the same as supporting the method, and the method before us today—a flat 50% tariff, sweeping away the preferential rates across 20 categories of steel—gets the balance badly wrong. It risks protecting one part of British industry by punishing another.

Two of those categories make the point very sharply: category 14, which covers stainless bars and light sections, and category 27, which covers cold-finished bars. Those are not commodity steel products bought by the tonne; they are long precision products on which aerospace, defence and motorsport rely, machined to fine tolerances and certified to exacting grades. Those are also categories in which Britain has little or no production at the volume that we need. A 50% tariff here will not redirect demand to British mills, because there are no British mills to redirect that demand to; it simply lands a 50% tax on those British businesses that need those products.

Hewland Engineering in my constituency is a fine example. It employs more than 120 people and turns over £15 million. It sells precision drivetrains for aerospace, defence and motorsport across the UK, Europe and Japan. The Government’s answer to Hewland and many other businesses is to buy British, but Hewland has looked at the list of approved domestic suppliers, and not a single one meets the grades or certifications that its customers require. This is not a company that is choosing to buy foreign steel over British steel. There is no domestic option, and yet from 1 July, Hewland faces a 50% tariff on the specialist steel that it needs.

That is the central flaw in the Government’s proposals: non-domestic availability. The specialist steel that is required for aerospace, defence and other sectors is not made here at the volumes that we need. It therefore should not have this 50% tariff applied to it.

Who bears the cost of the 50% tariff that the Government are proposing? All the downstream industries that put steel into engines and aircraft parts. They employ around 300,000 people across the country, but this blanket tariff, which is meant to protect, risks weakening that workforce and making it smaller.

The Government know that there is a problem here—that is why Ministers have been meeting industries about this issue for a long time—but it feels as if they are just ignoring these sectors entirely. In an urgent question today, I asked the Industry Minister about this. He said that if I wrote to him, he would help with the quotas and set out the proposals. If we are suggesting that this will happen on 1 July, writing to a Minister on 17 June to ask for some thoughts when we know it will take several weeks to get a response—probably beyond 1 July—will not be of any benefit.

This is not a steel strategy; it is a steel tax on domestic business. We will not support the regulations today, but if the Government intend to press ahead with them, I have some questions for the Minister. Will he consider delaying or tapering start dates to agree some mitigations with industry, removing categories with no realistic domestic capability, particularly in categories 14 and 27, and committing to exemptions for specialist steel that cannot be made at scale in the United Kingdom? Those businesses are crying out and sounding the horn to say that they are at risk of going under. I am worried that, if the Government do not listen to them, swathes of organisations and businesses in my constituency and others will just fold overnight.