Steel Industry (Nationalisation) Bill

Consideration of Lords amendments

Clause 3

Sunset for exercise of principal transfer powers

I can inform the House that nothing in the Lords amendments engages Commons financial privilege.

I beg to move, That this House agrees with Lords amendment 1.

With this it will be convenient to discuss Lords amendments 2 to 18.

It is a pleasure to be back in the House today to see through the final stages of this Bill. The Government support all the Lords amendments before us.

I wish to pay tribute to my colleague Minister Leong for so expertly guiding the Bill through its passage in the other place. I also wish to place on the record my thanks for the constructive approach taken by peers to the scrutiny of the Bill during its passage through the upper House, including the constructive and careful consideration from His Majesty’s official Opposition, Liberal Democrat peers and Cross-Bench peers. I thank them for their contribution.

We have a responsibility to act now to secure the future of the UK steel industry. This Bill will assist in that by ensuring that steel production is secured, helping to restore domestic production to sustainable levels and supporting the Government’s economic growth plans where the public interest test is met.

The Lords amendments before us strengthen the Bill in several ways. Amendment 1 ensures that the sunset power in the Bill may be extended only by increments of two years. This means that the Government would have to seek parliamentary approval at regular intervals to keep the principal transfer powers on the statute book.

Lords amendments 2 and 3 place a duty on the Secretary of State to consider the costs that are likely to be associated with the exercise of the principal transfer powers, ensuring that such costs are considered in any decision making over the use of these powers.

I call the shadow Secretary of State.

I am grateful to their lordships for their work on the Bill. We support the amendments before the House.

Let me be plain from the outset: our objection has never been to steelmaking, or to the men and women who make steel; it is to a Government who have crashed around and used blunt instruments without ever having a detailed plan. Hope is not a strategy, and a blank cheque is not a plan. Nationalisation is a bad idea, and nothing that has yet been said at that Dispatch Box has told the House where the spending stops. The Government are taking us down a fast and expensive road with no idea where the exit lies. Even members of the Government concede in private that they rushed into something that they now repent at leisure.

Let us look at what we have learnt over the passage of the Bill. The Government and their Lib Dem little helpers in the Lords voted against a Conservative amendment in the name of the noble Lord Hunt to limit support to £2.5 billion over three years. That is almost £2.3 million every single day. The cap was not plucked from thin air—that £2.5 billion was the Government’s own figure. In their refusal to accept a cap, the Government concede that the figure is likely to be more. That could have been 35,000 new police officers, eight brand-new hospitals or more than double what the Chancellor raised over the course of this Parliament by destroying the livelihoods of British farmers.

We support Lords amendment 1, which limits by two years the power for Ministers to bring further steel businesses into public ownership without coming back to this House. Powers this sweeping should never have been handed to Ministers without limit. We support Lords amendments 2 and 3, tabled by the Liberal Democrats, which would require the Secretary of State to weigh the likely costs before making share transfer or property transfer regulations. That is a modest ask, and it is hugely damning that it had to be forced on the Government.

We welcome the Government’s Lords amendments 6 to 18, which would require, rather than merely permit, the compensation scheme to provide for an independent valuer and would set out plainly the role that the valuer must perform. When the Government listen and act sensibly, we support them—and we have. It is a pity that the Government did not extend this House the same courtesy on the one amendment that mattered the most: the cap on an otherwise unlimited bill for the taxpayer.

We support Lords amendments 4 and 5, which were laid on a cross-party basis. They shift the regulations governing continuity obligations and their enforcement from the negative procedure to the affirmative. If Ministers wish to bind steel undertakings and their suppliers, let them do so in daylight, with the consent of this House—not by regulations that slip through unseen without the scrutiny of Parliament.

We welcome the Government’s Lords amendments 6 to 18, which would require, rather than merely permit, the compensation scheme to provide for an independent valuer and would set out plainly the role that the valuer must perform. When the Government listen and act sensibly, we support them—and we have. It is a pity that the Government did not extend this House the same courtesy on the one amendment that mattered the most: the cap on an otherwise unlimited bill for the taxpayer.

For all the hours we have now spent debating the future of steelmaking in the UK, the Government still refuse to confront the real issue—they know what it is, but they refuse to confront it. It is the Secretary of State for Energy and his addiction to ruinously high energy prices. It is not me who says that but Unite the union’s general secretary, who described this as a “noose around the neck” of job creation.

There is no path to profitable steelmaking of any kind in the UK while energy prices here are four times higher than in many of our competitor nations. There is no tariff damaging enough to manufacturers and steel users to compensate for that, even though the Government’s botched attempts are clearly already causing manufacturing jobs to shift offshore.

The Government will talk about their British industrial competitiveness scheme, which is welcome, but it is just a sticking plaster on a gaping wound—and the Minister knows it. It is nonsense to claim that their strategy is one of security of supply when the same Government refused to open a coking coal mine, meaning that every furnace is reliant on imports, without which they would close in a matter of hours.