Wales First Minister in India dash to urge steel jobs rethink
Welsh Secretary accused of being ‘uninterested’ in Port Talbot job losses as MPs clash over steel transition plan
Wales’s First Minister will visit India to urge Tata Steel to “look again” at its plans to shut blast furnaces which could cost thousands of jobs.
Vaughan Gething, leader of the Welsh Labour Government, said he plans to visit Mumbai in a last-ditch attempt to get the company to reconsider the future of steel production in Wales.
Tata Steel said last week it will shut its furnaces in South Wales after rejecting a last-minute union plea to change its plans.
The union plan involves keeping one blast furnace running at the Port Talbot plant while it transitions to greener steel production.
As many as 2,800 jobs face the axe across Tata’s UK operations, most at Port Talbot, the UK’s biggest steel plant.
Speaking in the Welsh Assembly, Mr Gething said he will press the case again “that we have continued to make and will continue to make for there to be no hard compulsory redundancies”.
He said he would ask Tata to “look again at the opportunities for steel within Wales and Britain, and what it will mean not just for our renewable future but the general future of our economy”.
Tata plans a £1.25bn investment in an electric arc furnace on the Port Talbot site and will close the two blast furnaces by the end of June and end of September respectively.
Tata insists it will be the biggest investment in the UK steel industry for decades, safeguarding the industry and preserving 5,000 jobs.
Jeremy Miles, the Welsh Cabinet Secretary for Economy and Energy, said it was “extremely disappointing” Tata had not taken up proposals for a transition to lower-carbon steelmaking. Tata says the union plan would have incurred at least £1.6bn of additional costs.
The First Minister’s trip announcement came after David T C Davies, the Westminster Welsh Secretary, was accused of being “uninterested” in Port Talbot’s steelworks and “casually discarding” thousands of jobs.
The Labour MP Sir Chris Bryant criticised the Secretary of State for failing to assess the economic impact of the 2,800 expected job losses.
The Plaid Cymru MP Liz Saville Roberts said: “In the Netherlands political pressure resulted in Tata investing in an electric arc furnace and direct produced iron technology, all the while protecting jobs.”
“The German government is spending £2.2bn – over four times more than the UK – to transform its steel industry towards hydrogen. Why is the UK so uniquely incapable of effective investment in our strategic steel future?”
Mr Davies replied: “There is, however, nothing whatsoever to stop Tata at some point in the future, from building a DRI (direct reduced iron) plant, to go along with the electric arc furnace if they believe that is a commercially sensible thing to do.
“But even if they do that, it is not really going to resolve the problem that we face, of 2,800 jobs being lost in Port Talbot – at best it would save another 200 jobs.”
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