British Steel

Peter Bottomley Excerpts

Wednesday 22nd May 2019 Commons Chamber

[Mr Speaker]

Order. Colleagues, I will shortly come to Members with constituency interests, and indeed to the hon. Member for Watford (Richard Harrington), the former Minister, but I would like to begin with a new, young Member who once worked for British Steel. I call Sir Peter Bottomley.

[Sir Peter Bottomley (Worthing West) (Con)]

That was quite some time ago, Mr Speaker, when it was the British Steel Corporation rather than the old Appleby-Frodingham steel plant that we are discussing today.

I put it to my right hon. Friend that we ought to go on following his non-partisan line, but we ought also to remember what happened to steel production and steel employment during the last Government. Will he also tell us what can be done on energy costs, which form a large part of steel production costs?

Can my right hon. Friend confirm that this is an industry in which the worldwide steel cycle has a massive impact? The House will be grateful to him for doing all that he can to mitigate its effects on this country.

[Greg Clark]

I agree with my hon. Friend. I was unaware that he had had that early experience in the steel sector. I do not want to make a partisan point, so perhaps I can take this in a historical sense to illustrate that the steel sector has been through periods of turbulence and difficulty in this country and around the world, and it is clearly going through one now. It was the case that steel production fell by 50% between 1997 and 2010, as did employment in the sector, but I do not blame that on the Government of the day. It was a feature of the market at the time, but I think that we should learn the lessons from some of the decisions that were taken then. [Interruption.] The hon. Member for Middlesbrough reminds us from a sedentary position that the blast furnaces at Redcar were mothballed, which made it difficult to return them to service. They did come back with SSI, but it was very difficult to do that. The point is that we should have the maximum possible continuity, and attend to the lessons from that time. Criticisms were made at the time of the approach being taken both there and in SSI, and in the present situation we should learn the lessons and ensure that we have maximum continuity.