Sarah Jones

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his contribution and for welcoming the Prime Minister’s announcements today on the zero emission vehicle mandate and the changes we have made to support the automotive industry, which is incredibly important. The hon. Gentleman talks about the number of good steel jobs that have gone forever or are at risk, but that happened because the previous Government failed to intervene to support our steel industry. That is why we lost so many jobs over the last decade. Not having an industrial strategy or a plan for steel meant that we allowed offshoring of our jobs in the steel sector, which has damaged us. He rightly said that in many key parts of our country we need good jobs. I should say that steel produced really good jobs, which are better paid than the average in the area and are done by really good, qualified people we want to retain in the UK. The hon. Gentleman talked about energy. Again, the reason why we are here is that we had years of the previous Government not intervening in this space. We are well aware of energy prices in this country and are doing all we can to bring those down. [Interruption.] I was asked by the hon. Gentleman to redouble my efforts in the negotiations we are having with British Steel. I will do everything that I possibly can—as we are doing. I hope he understands that I cannot go into detail about the state of those negotiations because that would be bad for the workers, bad for our supply chains and bad for the outcome. The hon. Gentleman talked about national security and primary steel. We are conducting a review of primary steel as part of our plan for steel and we will have the results of that soon. We will look at those results and see what we need to do. I should stress that there is defence equipment made in the UK from electric arc furnaces; there is not much defence work either in British Steel or at Tata in Port Talbot at the moment. People such as Sheffield Forgemasters produce steel from electric arc furnaces. However, the hon. Gentleman is right to talk about the importance of national security and to say that the world has changed and things have moved on, so we need to ensure that we are protecting our country as we need to. As I said in the Chamber in response to the last urgent question on this issue, there is a reason why Putin bombed the blast furnaces in Ukraine pretty much first: it was because a country wants to have that steelmaking capacity. We are alive to those issues, and that is why nothing is off the table. We are doing everything that we can.