Chris Bryant

I honestly just do not think that the hon. Gentleman understands how this works—any single element of it, to be honest. Let me first address his point about the timing. I would have much preferred to give greater notice to everybody, and I worked towards being able to do so. Unfortunately, one of the key parts of the interaction is with the European Union, and we only completed our negotiations with the European Union over the last few days. I point out that the EU itself has not as yet announced its quota, either with us or for any other country, and will not do so until Monday. I wanted to bring this forward as soon as I possibly could. The hon. Gentleman refers to U-turns. We have listened to the concerns both from specific businesses—I know that some are very pleased with some of the categories we have changed and the quotas we have increased—and from hon. Members, who have brought their concerns to the Chamber or directly to Ministers. We have tried to address as many issues as possible, but, as I said in my statement, there are difficult trade-offs here. The hon. Gentleman suggests that we should cut the 50% tariff rate. I am not sure that is a point he has made anywhere previously, but if we had a lower tariff rate than other countries, in particular the European Union, we would—this is why I do not think he understands how any of this works—immediately become the dumping ground for all the cheap steel in the world. We would be a magnet for that and we would be exacerbating the problem for steel production that we already have in the UK. The shadow Secretary of State raised the question of defence. I have looked carefully at this. Of course, he wrote a letter this morning that made some rather ill-founded remarks about what is likely to happen to defence. First, Sheffield Forgemasters is already providing significant amounts of UK steel precisely into the UK defence sector. When the defence investment plan is produced, I want it to deliver jobs in the UK rather than just everywhere else in the world, and I would like more of our defence industry to be based on using UK steel, because that would be a double win for us. I note that when the previous Government were in place, they commissioned: Type 26 frigates—65% of that steel came from Sweden; Type 31 frigates—all the steel from Finland; and four Royal Fleet Auxiliary Tide-class tankers—44,000 tonnes of steel from Korea. When the Dreadnought-class nuclear ballistic submarines were commissioned by the last Government, where did the steel come from? From France! We can do far, far better than this. It is absolutely preposterous that only 30% of UK steel needs are being met by UK steel production. We need to get that number up. We have committed to getting it to 50% and that is why I am immensely supportive of the measure that we are introducing today. I also want to make it clear that a lot of categories of steel—as I said, three quarters of the steel by value—is not in scope of the measure at all. That means it can come in and out of the UK without any tariff. Also, the 50% tariff is not on all the steel in a particular category; it is only on that above the quota. In significant areas, we have increased the quota and, for instance, in categories 4, 6, 12A and 7, which is particularly important for the defence sector, the final quotas are higher than the levels of historical trade because some of the previous quotas were not even being fully used. I am afraid that the hon. Member is wrong in nearly every single element of his analysis—and that is not the first time, is it?