Lord Naseby
Main Page: Lord Naseby (Conservative - Life peer)
Baroness Neville-Rolfe
My Lords, perhaps the noble Lord can help me on this but I think the conditional agreement between Tata and Greybull that was announced on Friday also covered the Tata Rotherham mills, and we have offered government-backed commercial funding if it is needed. Perhaps I may follow up on this and write to the noble Lord on the other points. I would make the general point that we now have the Steel Council, where the industry, the unions and other stakeholders have come together to examine all of these issues, and that is very important. Further, Tata has today put up for sale pretty well the whole of its operations. I will look at that further and write to the noble Lord.
Lord Naseby (Con)
Is it not encouraging that the workforce and the management say that they have a turnaround plan and require only medium-term financing? That is not dissimilar to what happened at Rolls-Royce. Against that background, in Canada and Holland there are large mutual organisations capable of turning around and running steel organisations. Should we not think along those lines as well?
Baroness Neville-Rolfe
I thank my noble friend for his question and for writing to me about the role of the mutual, which I have passed on to the Ministers and officials responsible for this challenging area. We should be looking not only at opportunities for support but at the supply chain, and into the uses for steel at the higher end as well as the more-volume end of production.