Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner says she’s “confident” the British Steel blast furnaces in Scunthorpe will continue running, as the raw materials needed to do so “have been paid for”.

Ministers rushed through an emergency bill on Saturday to take over the facility after talks with Chinese owners Jingye broke down, and concerns they would allow the blast furnaces in to go out, effectively ending steel production in the UK.

Read more: https://news.sky.com/story/british-steel-raw-materials-for-scunthorpe-plant-paid-for-amid-race-against-time-to-avert-shutdown-13348481

#britishsteel #politics #uknews #business #scunthorpe

SUBSCRIBE to our YouTube channel for more videos: http://www.youtube.com/skynews
Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/skynews
Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/skynews
Follow us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/skynews
Follow us on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@skynews

For more content go to http://news.sky.com and download our apps: Apple https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/sky-news/id316391924?mt=8 Android https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.bskyb.skynews.android&hl=en_GB

Sky News Daily podcast is available for free here: https://podfollow.com/skynewsdaily/

Sky News videos are now available in Spanish here/Los video de Sky News están disponibles en español aquí: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCzG5BnqHO8oNlrPDW9CYJog

To enquire about licensing Sky News content, you can find more information here: https://news.sky.com/info/library-sales

waiting to be shipped to Skunthorp Some of the raw materials the government has spent the weekend scrambling to secure to protect the short-term future of British Steel’s blast furnace plant Literally keeping the home fires burning matters because if these furnaces go out the plant is dead With fresh supplies of iron ore on route from Australia and coing coal from the United States the deputy prime minister is confident it has a future We’ve got the raw materials They’ve been paid for and we’re confident that the furnaces will continue to fire We’re we’ve taken the action we’ve taken over the weekend It was important that we did that We secured the site Having seized control of the company from its Chinese owners at the weekend the prime minister met new chief executive Alan Bell on the right here He will work alongside a team from consultants EY on short-term survival and a long-term plan likely to start with nationalization there’s still a lot of discussion that needs to take place about what comes next You know what what are the plans under this this new uh rule of of the Labor Party the Labor government Um so we’re still waiting to get that detail as to what what’s going to follow after after the weekend but yeah I think it’s safe to say that we feel a lot more secure now than we did before Locally there’s relief that the plant and its 2,700 jobs have a reprieve It’s having a real big impact our business has gone down um by about 60% for the guys not coming out So my partner’s worked there for I think about two years now So we still don’t know what the outcome is We’re still in that random space of do they have jobs do they not have jobs ministers and management say their intervention is justified because only coal fired scumthorp can produce the virgin steel used from railways to defense But government support for Tata Steel’s Port Tolbert works will support a transition to electric arc furnaces fed with recycled steel a potentially more sustainable alternative We’ve got the feed stock here We don’t have supplies of coke and iron ore but we do have our own scrap Uh so we could be operating in a closed loop powering it with renewables or nuclear and then we would have a a green clean steel industry which is categorically the way of the future With Scunthorp losing £700,000 every day and Donald Trump’s trade war deflating steel prices forging a long-term future for the British steel industry remains an enormous challenge Paul Kelso Sky News

29 Comments

  1. Build a power station next to the works, surely there must be a way to transfer that heat to make steam for the turbines to generate electricity? Economical and environmental sense, if we need this plant to produce virgin steel. Could replace the 2 dormant furness with carbon arc fed by said power station.

  2. more lies!! the new coal mine that was planned in cumbria was going to be solely used for british steel making, theyre just trying to waste more of our money by having the raw materials shipped in from Japan.

  3. Government using the word 'confident' means they are crossing their fingers and hope for the best. A business losing £700k/day would not be touched with a barge pole.

  4. If there’s one raw material we do have here in Britain it’s coal millions of tons of it. If there is any raw material that we don’t need to pay for it’s coal yet the gov went out and made a deal worth 700 million wit Japan for it 😂 we I’m sure will create a much much bigger environmental impact and costs like ten times the amount it would have had we just mined it here ourselfs!

    But hey at least it wasent mined here right so we can pretend and say we are doing our bit for the planet 😂. Let’s just import everything for ten times the price from other country’s and let them increase the co2 emissions instead at least they will be richer for it can’t say the same for us who have the most expensive energy in the world because of these policy’s.

    NET ZERO MADNESS MUST END

Leave A Reply