Dame Harriett Baldwin

I think it has been clear throughout these two days of debate that none of us in the House underestimates the importance of the steel industry to our national economy, to our industrial resilience, and to the communities whose livelihoods depend on it. We can all agree that steel matters, and that steel jobs matter. However, we also believe that the responsible stewardship of taxpayers’ money matters, and despite the eloquent way in which the Secretary of State expressed his views on the Bill, we see it much more as a chaotic and unplanned intervention. It is not the product of a clear steel industrial strategy, but the product of a failure to negotiate a better outcome. The negotiated outcome was a possibility; the Secretary of State even went to China to try to achieve it. It is the failure to address the root causes of the industry’s difficulties that has brought us to where we are today. The Bill could also be described as the steel industry blank cheque Bill, because it fails to protect the public purse from potentially vast and open-ended liabilities. Nationalisation does not solve the underlying issue that is making domestic steel production unprofitable. The higher employment costs, higher energy costs, planning issues, carbon pricing, regulation and levies associated with the Government’s net zero policies continue to weigh heavily on the sector, and the Bill does nothing to resolve those pressures. Instead, it transfers them wholesale on to the taxpayer. We should reflect on how we came to this point. Not long ago, the Government told the House that they did not want to nationalise British Steel—indeed, that was presented as a last resort to be avoided—and yet here we are, because the Government have failed to negotiate an alternative. We see once again that when this Government negotiate, it is the taxpayer who picks up the bill. Since the intervention began last year, on that historic Saturday, the cost has already run to more than £1.3 million every single day. That is a bill for the taxpayer that will only become larger with this legislation. The Bill exposes the public finances to further liabilities—contingent liabilities, not only substantial but, alarmingly, potentially unlimited in terms of both their scale and their duration. This is a Government getting a blank cheque forever.