Steel Sector

Lord Brookman Excerpts

Monday 18th January 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe]

I hear what my noble friend says and completely agree that rates is a vital area. We have three ministerial working groups, set up in October. They are very aware of the importance of rates. My noble friend Lord O’Neill is leading the work stream on productivity and competitiveness. I will ensure that I pass on the comments made on rates.

[Lord Brookman (Lab)]

My Lords, I wanted to hear what the Minister had to say because I was general secretary of one of the unions involved in the steel industry. As the Minister said, it is devastating news, but it is not unusual news for the steel industry. I am reminded of something I said a few weeks or months ago, about when there were 270,000 employees in one company in the steel industry in the United Kingdom, called the British Steel Corporation. Now we are where we are. The figures are abysmal and most worrying. I worried even further when someone said to me, “Keith”—that is my first name—“You must remember that we live in a post-industrial society”. If we are heading down that track—we are rapidly going down that track as far as the steel industry is concerned—frankly, what the Minister and the Government are saying is not good enough.

I am concerned that I do not hear too much from the Minister about what the trade unions are actually saying at the moment. Are they accepting the closures? Are they accepting the fact that there will be fewer than 30,000 people in total manufacturing steel in the United Kingdom? Are they not that concerned—the Minister made the point that she was—that the imports from China and elsewhere are causing havoc in this country? I do not think the news from the Government is good enough, and I hope we get some more positive action from them.

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe]

My Lords, I would like to pay tribute to the unions in these very serious steel difficulties. They really have been amazing and shown that they can be extremely constructive. They therefore have been working in the task forces with Tata and other steel producers to try to minimise the problems and difficulties of the steel industry.

It has unfortunately been a long tale of decline, with job numbers halving between 1998 and 2010 and a reduction of around one-third in production in that area. There has been an improvement up to 2014, with numbers up from 33,000 to 35,000, but, of course, we now have the latest set of difficulties.

All sides need to come together. Obviously, we need to pursue the problems in Brussels. We have colleagues in other member states who also have steel industries that are suffering from the effect of China. We have to engage on the China side. In the various working groups, we have to look ahead because steel is an important industrial sector. One of the things we have been looking at, for example, is how the improved procurement rules that we helped to negotiate in Brussels can be used to help British steel go into major projects such as HS2.