Post-SSI Support Package: Redcar

Tom Blenkinsop Excerpts

Tuesday 19th January 2016 Commons Chamber

[Anna Soubry]

I am not aware of anything in particular in respect of the redundancies in Hartlepool, but if the hon. Gentleman and those in the neighbouring community want to put forward a case, I am always willing to listen.

[Tom Blenkinsop (Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland) (Lab)]

First, this situation is unlike the mothballing scenario in 2010, when I was a union officer on site, because there was not a single hard redundancy in the 22-month period. Now, there is a liquidation scenario and we have seen many hard redundancies. Secondly, I have written to the Minister about extending the remit of the taskforce to encompass the whole Tees conurbation and to help other workers who lose their jobs, such as those at Caparo, Tata and Boulby in my constituency. Thirdly, this will happen again and again. We have seen it in Port Talbot, Trostre, Llanwern, Dalzell and Clydebridge. We need a national network of taskforces to see how steelworkers and other workers are being treated in different areas of the country. This cannot be dealt with in a devolved, fragmented way. It is a sectoral issue that encompasses the whole of the UK.

[Anna Soubry]

I do not have time to deal with all those points because I want to respond to the specific points that were made by the hon. Member for Redcar, but there are lessons to be learned. It behoves any community, in the event of serious job losses, to act quickly and pull it all together. Many communities do so and that was critical in Redcar.

I pay tribute to the hon. Members for Redcar and for Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland (Tom Blenkinsop), and other hon. Members, for the way in which they have worked with the taskforce. I have paid tribute to Amanda Skelton and Paul Booth for the way in which they formed the taskforce almost before the dreadful news came on that Friday. As the hon. Gentleman said, at least 2,000 people were immediately put into redundancy, with all the consequences that that has for the supply chain, and many hundreds of them had not been paid for a considerable period. One reason why the taskforce was successful was that there were already good relationships between business, the council, Members of Parliament and all the other people one would expect to be there.

As a Government, we quickly put forward a financial package. In effect, there was £60 million. There was a headline figure of £80 million, but just under £30 million of that was used for redundancies, so the money that could be put into helping people get back into work was in the region of £50 million. I want to put it on the record that there was a £2.4 million safety net fund and that £1.7 million was eventually made available for apprentices. It took a bit of a fight, but we got there. There was £3 million for retraining courses, £2.6 million for a flexible support fund, £750,000 for business start-ups, a jobs and skills fund of £16.5 million, and £16 million of support for firms in the supply chain and the wider Tees valley area. There were also redundancy payments.

The hon. Lady is right to say that there is often a big problem in Whitehall. We said to those people, “We trust you to work out where the money needs to go.” However, the situation was, frankly, maddening and infuriating, and I only found out about it after she sent me a text. I do things differently, Mr Deputy Speaker. I give people my mobile phone number and say, “You contact me. You text me”, and they do! In a way it should not be like that, but it is good—we can exchange numbers later in private, Mr Deputy Speaker. The reason I do that is because of the situation that we found at Redcar. We had a group of people in the taskforce whom we trusted, and I pay tribute to all of them. They are not paid to do that, and they have worked incredibly hard. Amanda Skelton is paid to be the chief executive of the council, but she has worked like an absolute trooper and well beyond the hours for which she is paid—astonishing!

We trusted those people to put together a package and to have the funds, but we then had to go through the most bizarre set of hoops and all the rest of it, because they had to show that the package was value for money. As I put it to my otherwise excellent civil servants, this is a chief executive of a unitary authority who, on a daily basis, deals with large amounts of money and a huge budget. She is more than capable of looking at value for money, because unfortunately she has had to make lots of cuts, to reorganise and so on. In other words, I cannot think of many people who are more qualified to decide where the money should go, and who also have the responsibility to safeguard what is taxpayers’ money, but instead a system had to be followed—and Governments, of whichever colour, are blighted by too many systems and processes. We say that we will trust people, but too often we do not. However, we cut through that system—the instruction I always give is, “Get on with it. Trust these people and give them the money so that they can get on with it.”

There is no better example of the determination of those people involved in the taskforce—and beyond in the community—to do the right thing by all those who were made redundant at Redcar than what happened with the apprentices. There were 51 apprentices at SSI, and those jobs finished on that Friday. Some of those youngsters were on three-year apprenticeships, and it had all gone. This is a lot of money to ordinary folk, but we were talking about £1.7 million. It was astonishing. People such as Paul Booth went out there and found a place for every single one of those 51 apprentices within a week. That speaks volumes about their abilities, and about the reaction from the community and businesses. We then had to get the money—bit of a nightmare—but we got it, and all 51 apprentices can continue their apprenticeships.