Speeches by Jones.

“It will be published in the spring. I know the answer to everything is “in the spring”. The steel strategy will be published in the spring.”

“When we publish the plan for steel, which we are working on with the industry, we will have some answers. I am doing a series of roundtables. We did one yesterday on this topic with the steel producers and the scrap producers. These are things that we are teasing out. The Materials Processing Institute is teasing this …”

“We do need it, yes. The question is whether we produce it here or not.”

“There is a question about capacity. The more sophisticated we get in what we can do with scrap, the less need we have for virgin steel. If you are able to separate your scrap to such an extent that it produces high-quality steel, you need less and less of the primary steel. I am told that in America they need a much hi…”

“We are trying to get to the bottom of that demand because people have different views and say different things. The Materials Processing Institute will give us its best guess, based on all the evidence, of what we need.”

“I am sorry if this is repetitive, but there is a difference here. We are talking about the creation of steel production in the UK. There are lots of ways to produce steel in the UK. There are electric arc furnaces. We are looking at hydrogen production as well. Virgin steel is the steel that you get from blast furnaces…”

“Yes. That is why we need a plan, which we have not had before, that looks at what the demand is, what the possibilities are, what we do not make now. There is a lot of debate over floating offshore wind, for example. We do not have the plate mills to build the size of turbine that we might want. We need to look at all …”

“There are a couple of things that explain why we are doing a steel strategy. The steel sector has not been in a brilliant place over recent years. We have seen the production of steel fall. You saw the figures from UK Steel when they gave evidence. Only about a third of the steel we use now in this country is made in t…”

“The defence one.”

“These things are always works in progress. The industrial strategy has eight growth-driving sectors. One of them is defence. Some of the other sectors sit naturally in the Department for Business and Trade; some of them sit under different Departments. Life sciences sits under DSIT, for example. The model is that diffe…”

“We are going to need a bit of advice on all of the strategies that are being delivered in spring and how we are going to communicate them because there is an increasing number of things coming out then that will all be very significant. I welcome what you are doing. I appreciated hearing the evidence that you have take…”

“We are still very much talking to British Steel every day, yes.”

“Our preference would be for the blast furnaces to keep going until they have at least secured the steel to come into the country to keep the mills going. In Port Talbot the blast furnace is closed, but there is steel coming in that can keep everything else operating. Our preference would be for that steel to be secure …”

“We do not have a deadline on it, no.”

“Yes.”

“We made an offer to British Steel on Monday. It has rejected that offer. We are still in talks at the moment.”

“This is another really long answer. I will very happily come back and have a whole session on scrap. I was with the scrap industry yesterday. I was in Celsa looking at its electric arc furnace, which is extraordinary. They are extraordinary things. The scrap industry says, “We sell our scrap. The demand is not here for…”

“This speaks to what we were talking about earlier. You are absolutely right. The amount of Chinese steel is very high. There are already anti-dumping measures. There are 17 of them; 11 apply to China. They apply when you bring in more than a certain amount. CBAM is being introduced in 2027. That is going to be an impor…”

“What industry wants is a line of sight on what is coming down the road. The Department produces a line of sight, as it were, in terms of public procurement for steel. It is not perfect, but it is useful. Through the industrial strategy, we want to be able to do that. There are things that we do not make in the UK at th…”

“Yes.”