Foreign Direct Investment to the UK

Lord Jones Excerpts

Tuesday 10th September 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Jones (Lab)]

My Lords, I too thank the noble Lord, Lord Harrington, and it is always instructive to hear the noble Lord, Lord Bilimoria. I want to see more foreign direct investment and see it invested in Wales’s remaining steel industry. I want to see the global company, Tata, invest ever more urgently and very considerably in what remains of Britain’s steel industry, specifically in Wales, particularly at Shotton, which is a small gem in Tata’s steel crown, and now especially—strategically, substantially and very urgently —in the still-mighty Port Talbot works, which is still just perhaps a fully integrated steel plant. I welcome the green steel fund and the Government’s timely emergency funding. However, I am a long-standing parliamentary witness to the contracting and dying agonies of the steel plants in Wales—Ebbw Vale, Cardiff’s East Moors, Newport’s Llanwern, north-east Wales’s Shotton, Brymbo in Wrexham, and Trostre and Velindre in the south. As a youthful Minister and shadow Secretary, I visited most of them.

I declare an interest as I once was a common labourer on the furnace stage of No. 2 blast furnace when the fully integrated Shotton works was in its heyday with a workforce of 14,000. My tools were a crowbar, a pickaxe, a shovel, a six-foot ladle for sampling the blinding-orange, hot running metal, and a wheelbarrow for my hundredweight of moulding sand. I operated from the roaring mouth of the furnace across the stage, along the runner to the drop to the receptacle that received the metal below. There was no Health and Safety at Work etc. Act—Michael Foot’s historic legislation was a generation away—but I had a helmet and salt tablets.

I took my breaks in an echoing, greasy, cramped cabin and my workmates were men of no fixed abode, probationers, ex-prisoners and no-hopers. We were all equals and the furnace keeper was a hugely experienced, brave, careful man. He wore clogs and had his sweat towel at his brass-buckled belt. I say that the steelworker always works in a challenging environment, seeking to avoid injuries and deafness. I would like to see the Welsh steel industry, especially in beleaguered Port Talbot, have its generous, urgent direct foreign investment from Tata Steel.

I note that that clock says I have spoken for two minutes 24 seconds, but I think it had a breakdown and I must honour the four-minute limit.