Steel Trade Measure

Nick Smith Excerpts

Thursday 25th June 2026 Commons Chamber

[Chris Bryant]

The hon. Member will know that we changed the rules of the supercharger in April this year, taking the support from 60% to 90% of energy costs. The point is well made about energy costs being one of the things that have made it difficult for steel over the last decade. On whether we are better being in or out of the European Union, one of the ironies is that if we were in the European Union, we would not have to be negotiating about its imposition of tariffs and quotas on us. I am not sure that that is a very good line of argument. Finally, I was pleased to see in Kyiv in January that one of the six bridges that had been destroyed by the Russians when trying to invade the city had been rebuilt—and guess where the steel was made? The United Kingdom. That is the kind of thing that we should be investing in.

[Nick Smith (Blaenau Gwent and Rhymney) (Lab)]

My constituency has many steel fabrication businesses, some of which I visited recently. Will the Minister please outline how he listened to such businesses and their concerns before this announcement?

[Chris Bryant]

My officials and I have spoken a great deal to the kind of businesses that my hon. Friend is talking about—not all of them, but a large number of them—and have tried to explain that we are trying to tackle only those categories of steel that can be and are being produced in the UK. Those are the ones that we are trying to protect; as a south Wales valleys MP, like myself, he will fully understand the obvious reason for that.

That has meant that we have increased some of the quotas to allow more tariff-free imports—precisely to answer the question that some of my hon. Friend’s companies may have. If he wants to go through the specifics of the companies in his patch, I would be happy to do so. I will not have pleased everybody—in my life, I very rarely ever have. [Laughter.] I did not mean to unite the Chamber on that point. We have tried to listen where we possibly can, but there are difficult trade-offs.