Redcar Steelworks

Lord Forsyth of Drumlean Excerpts

Tuesday 13th October 2015 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe]

My Lords, on the up to £80 million that is made available, how much goes on redundancy will depend on uptake, but we are clear that it will provide a lot of funds for training and reinvestment in skills—the sort of things that are needed and that are in the hands of the local task force that we have set up and did great work in 2010. The Prime Minister has said that, if necessary, we will look at this again, but we think that the £80 million will make a huge difference to the more than 2,000 unfortunate people who, if one takes all of them together, will lose their jobs—it is very disappointing. On a future task force, we are focusing this week on the summit and on the local task force.

[Lord Forsyth of Drumlean (Con)]

Does my noble friend know that for the second Forth Bridge crossing, which was commissioned by the Scottish Government, the majority of the steel is being shipped from China? That suggests that there is a degree of uncompetitiveness or a degree of dumping of steel going on. Does my noble friend not acknowledge that one consequence of putting green taxes on high-energy-using businesses is to make them uncompetitive, leading us to import carbon from our competitors and to put our people out of work?

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe]

My Lords, I am not sure that energy policy is the issue here. We have already paid £50 million in compensation under the Energy Intensive Industries Compensation Scheme. As my noble friend said, the issue is the lack of competitiveness, but I think some public organisations do this better. If one looks at Crossrail, one sees that it used a great deal of British steel in its concretes by way of the work that it did with the supply chain to encourage it to bid for work during that excellent project.