Steel Safeguards

Sarah Champion Excerpts

Wednesday 29th June 2022 Commons Chamber

[Anne-Marie Trevelyan]

Sadly, I must decline the invitation as my diary precludes it today, for pretty much the same reason as this morning. I will be working with international partners to ensure these clear and temporary safeguards are understood by our WTO partners and can be used as a springboard to support our steel industry to think about how it can transform to be important and successful globally.

[Sarah Champion (Rotherham) (Lab)]

Protecting British steel from unfair competition is, of course, welcome, but we need more to safeguard the industry itself. Will the Secretary of State explain what the Government are doing to protect the sector as a whole? I am particularly interested in Liberty Steel in my constituency, regardless of the broader issues in the sector.

[Anne-Marie Trevelyan]

The hon. Lady, with whom I have worked on many issues, is a doughty champion of all in her constituency, including Liberty Steel. We will continue to work with all steel producers through the DIT and across Government to make sure we drive forward solutions not only on high energy prices, on which there are a number of sources of support for the steel industry, but on making sure we have the best steel we need, produced in the UK, as we move towards net zero. It is a strategically crucial industry for us. Our producers need to be able not only to produce what our downstream users need, but to export some of the finest steel production in the world to the rest of the world, where it is needed. Having been able to remove the section 232 tariffs, we are now going to see some of our high-end steel production back in the US market. That is important to the US, because some of the stuff it imports we make here, and it needs it. So we are going to continue to work to ensure that those flows—imports and exports—are as they should be and are part of the free and fair trade that the steel industry needs to have.