Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:

To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, what estimate he has made of the proportion of UK steel and steel products procured by his Department in (a) 2017 and (b) 2018.

For the first time this year the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy published information from Government departments and their arm’s-length bodies on the value and origin of the steel procured over the financial year 2017/18, where this information was available. The Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy did not directly procure any steel, from the UK or overseas, in this period for major projects.

We will continue to work closely with departments and their arm’s-length bodies to improve awareness of the steel procurement guidance and the quality of the information that they are able to provide us on the steel procured for their major projects.

In publishing this data and the annual Steel Pipeline, we are supporting the industry to maximise its potential for growth, enabling steel businesses to plan for future demand, and ultimately increase the amount of UK steel used in both public and private UK projects. The Steel Pipeline shows how the government plans to use over 3 million tonnes of steel – worth around £500 million – over the next decade, on infrastructure projects such as the construction of Hinkley Point C and the maintenance and upgrading of the UK’s motorway network.