Nationalised British Steel has now swallowed an incredible £671 million of taxpayers’ cash since April 2025, according to Lord Leong, Small Business and Enterprise Minister, who revealed the figure last week. That is a bill of about £1.3 million a day. The Public Accounts Committee has already warned there’s no credible plan for the company’s financial sustainability, and, as John Redwood pointed out, the compensation the previous owners will be owed is still not known. Labour ministers admitted the turnaround of British Steel could take five years “or perhaps longer”, and admitted no private investor would currently touch it…
Handily for the Government new regulations exempt British Steel from Freedom of Information rules and ensure ministers and officials can’t be treated as shadow directors so aren’t responsible for financial mistakes. Meanwhile, tariffs Labour introduced to protect the industry are clobbering everyone else. Since July, steel imported to the UK above a set quarterly allowance faces a 50% tariff, and on 1 October several of those allowances were used up within 24 hours. International Steel Trade Association president Godfrey Watt told the BBC the entire quarter’s tariff-free quota for Turkish structural tubes was used on on day one. So British firms now face bills in the millions to source products they cannot buy at home, which get passed on down the supply chain to builders…
Under the nationalised steel system, the taxpayer effectively pays twice: £671 million and counting to keep British Steel’s furnaces lit, and a 50% premium on imported steel to repair schools, hospitals and railway lines. With Speciality Steel next in line for nationalisation, and the Steel Industry (Nationalisation) Act handing ministers powers to take over even more of the industry, the costs are only going up. It was never going to work…
Robert Jenrick on the Today programme:
“Can you now give a guarantee to your listeners this morning that no BBC presenter in the future will be exposed as a paedophile, as a number have been in the recent past? No, of course you can’t…”