Question to the Department for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade:

To ask the Secretary of State for Business and Trade, what assessment his Department has made of the potential merits of reviewing public procurement policy to (a) incentivise and (b) require greater use of UK-made steel in publicly funding projects in the context of the decision of the Net Zero Teesside Power contract.

The Government knows it is important to communities across the country that we use UK-made steel. We are ambitious about increasing the use of UK made steel in UK energy and infrastructure projects where possible.

Net Zero Teesside is not a public procurement (so public procurement guidelines do not apply) but we have spoken to the project developer to understand more about the use of UK and non-UK steel, as well as the wider use of UK local content, in the project. They confirmed their voluntary commitment to achieve more than 50% UK content across the value chain, with around £1billion UK-based sub-contracts already awarded.

We want to champion UK steelmaking and our steel communities now and for generations to come and my colleagues at the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero are looking at how greater UK content will be used in future projects.