Earl of Effingham
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British Steel
Earl of Effingham Excerpts(1 week, 3 days ago)
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Baroness Gustafsson (Lab)
There is an immediate and a long-term challenge here. The immediate-term one is working to make sure that British Steel has the raw materials that it needs to be able to keep those blast furnaces running. The UK does not have any operational coke ovens, so we are unable to change domestically mined coal into the coke that is required for blast furnaces. This means we are required to import it. There have been questions about whether we can be thinking about a Cumbria development to be able to source some of that, and it has been explored, but the current assessment is that coal from the Whitehaven mine, for example, has too high a sulphur content for British Steel’s needs.
The Earl of Effingham (Con)
The Minister has talked about transparency and updates, so may I please ask her—and I do not expect her to have this to hand now—for more detailed information? There are many noble Lords who would greatly appreciate seeing a very simple spreadsheet showing us the inputs and why it is apparently costing £700,000 per day to run this operation. Can she commit to providing us with the numbers so we can see where the costs are coming from, why and whether we can have a viable ongoing concern that might even break even?
Baroness Gustafsson (Lab)
Creating an ongoing, viable concern is absolutely the aspiration for the sector, not necessarily with regard to British Steel specifically, but the much broader sector. As I said earlier, we have the immediate-term question of how we make sure that the day-to-day operation of British Steel is ongoing and running. That second longer-term piece is how we make it a financially sustainable industry and one that is able to wash its own face economically. To that part, that is where that steel strategy is really core. With regard to the specifics of what we are spending in the here and now, that is absolutely information that will be made available within part of the department’s accounts when they are published.