Rachael Maskell
Main Page: Rachael Maskell (Labour (Co-op) - York Central)
Sajid Javid
We have an industrial strategy. People can choose to focus on the semantics—they can call it an industrial strategy or an industrial policy—or they can actually look at the results. As I said earlier, one of the reasons that manufacturing output, sales, employment and exports are all up in the last five years is that this Government have a successful industrial policy.
Rachael Maskell (York Central) (Lab/Co-op)
Hundreds of Tata long products jobs in design consultancy in York will be saved on completion of the Greybull Capital project. However, we are concerned about the wider productivity plan, in particular with regard to wider support for the supply chain and maintaining confidence in it. What is the Secretary of State doing to support that?
Sajid Javid
My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Wales has had some recent discussions on this issue. I think the hon. Lady is aware of that. She is right to raise the issue of productivity more generally. I do not think it is an issue of productivity in our steel industry. If we look at the output of our workers in the British steel industry, we will see that they are second to none in terms of their productivity. We should take this opportunity to commend the hard work of those men and women. Productivity more generally in the UK economy has been a long-running issue. The supply chain is one of the ways to deal with that, especially with regard to import substitution. I think that is where steel has a big role to play, because there are still too many steel imports and I think that a lot of that steel can be purchased here at home.