Lord Jones
Main Page: Lord Jones (Labour - Life peer)
Baroness Neville-Rolfe
I have some sympathy with the points made by my noble friend but we are where we are. Of course, the majority of the measures were taken when the party opposite was in power. The steel industry has found it very difficult, which is why we have made the substantial compensation payments to which my noble friend referred, including £50 million to Tata since 2013, £9 million of it in the past three months, with tens of millions more in the pipeline. More importantly, however, the Chancellor announced in the Autumn Statement that we will exempt energy-intensive industries from renewable policy costs, saving them an estimated £400 million up to 2020. This is a difficult area and we have sought to find a way through.
Baroness Neville-Rolfe
As I said in repeating the Statement, we are ready to look at pretty much all the options. I think that the Secretary of State has made clear that he sees nationalisation as problematic, not least because all the most successful, leading steel operations across Europe are not nationalised. But we are keen to find a way through this so co-investment with an element of government support for a period, and indeed the sort of arrangement that we had in Scotland, where there has been some sort of interim cover, can be advantageous.
Lord Jones (Lab)
My Lords, will the Minister acknowledge the huge contribution made in north-east Wales by Shotton steelworks, which is still highly profitable, very high-tech and a centre of excellence in steel making? Perhaps I may remind her that in 1980 Shotton steelworks was an integrated plant employing 13,000 people. It lost overnight, in Europe’s biggest single redundancy exercise in living memory, some 8,000 steelworkers’ jobs. It is fair to say that the Shotton steelworks has made its sacrifices already. Further, does the Minister understand the impact of mass unemployment? It affects many families, schools and satellite steel townships? Communities remain scarred and now, when they are in a profitable state, do not wish to suffer further redundancies or closures.
My last point is this. If our nation is to have any idea of national greatness for the future, how can we survive without the seedcorn industry that is steel? It is a folly to consider sending atomic-powered submarines armed with nuclear-tipped missiles abroad if we do not have the industry that enables any nation to make war—which is steel. We must retain our steel industry.
Baroness Neville-Rolfe
I applaud the work of the noble Lord both as a Member of Parliament in that area and indeed as shadow Secretary of State, and of course I acknowledge the sacrifices that have been made by steelworkers and their families in Wales and more generally across the UK. These things are very difficult. Indeed, that is one of the reasons we are taking the measures that we have set out today. We have said that we are willing to provide a much broader degree of support for Port Talbot and that in the future, procurement rules will allow a greater degree of buying British than has been possible in the past. The noble Lord is right to say that steel is a core industry for any country.