Member

We face real danger. Only over the weekend we heard that the plans for a new electric arc furnace down at Port Talbot have been delayed by at least nine months, and possibly much longer, because of a failure to secure a grid connection. I fear that that is just the beginning: there could be concerns about the reliability of a connection or about the price of electricity. We hear from Tata UK that it is completely committed to opening an electric arc furnace, but I fear that the issues considered by Tata India’s board will be very different. If an electric arc furnace does not open at Port Talbot, it will still sell us steel, but steel that is made in India. That might suit Tata, but it does not suit the workers in Wales and beyond. We have just heard from the hon. Member for Rotherham (Sarah Champion) that the electric arc furnaces at Rotherham are not operational. We therefore face the real risk of having almost no steel manufacturing capability, whether from the electric arc furnace or from the blast furnace. It would be deeply humiliating for us, as a G7 nation, to end up with almost no steel-making capability.