Luke Myer

I am delighted to welcome the Bill, and will speak to a couple of the new clauses and amendments. I declare my role as chair of the all-party parliamentary group on steel and metals-related industries, through which it is a pleasure to work cross-party in the interests of the industry. Just outside Middlesbrough, wedged between the gas pipes and the railway, is an old path. Someone walking there 200 years ago would have found sailors trudging through salt marsh hamlets, and 100 years ago they would have found steelworkers—hundreds of them—walking home on the tired commute. The cinders underfoot gave the path its name: “the black path.” If someone walks that path today, they will see the remnants of a bygone age for Teesside iron and steel. They will see a former railway station, now disused, which was used for industry. They will see a lost ironworkers’ village and the red wild flowers that thrive on former slag pile soil. And, of course, they will arrive at one of the largest brownfield sites in Europe: the former Redcar steelworks, which once stood as a great shadow on our skyline, the heart of the region, pumping out steel across the world. The phrase on Teesside goes, “We built the world.” Everything from the Sydney harbour bridge to the Churchill War Rooms were made with Teesside steel. It can never be forgotten that, in 2015, the then Conservative Government’s laissez-faire approach to Chinese steel dumping denied us the intervention that we needed on Teesside. The closure of Redcar steelworks tore a hole through our region and cost thousands of jobs. I pay tribute to my constituency neighbour, my right hon. Friend the Member for Redcar (Anna Turley), who at that point was a newly elected MP and fought tirelessly for the workers of Teesside, but we can never allow a situation like that to happen again. We cannot change the past, but steel is not our past, as the workers at British Steel Special Profiles at Skinningrove in my constituency will tell us, or the workers at Teesside beam mill at Lackenby, along with the many supply chain SMEs on Teesside. Having run a Teesside steel company for many years, the Minister for Industry knows that landscape well. I commend the decisions that the Government have taken, particularly on British Steel, that have protected and safeguarded jobs in my constituency and my region.