Speeches by Jones.

“As you know, energy prices are an issue that comes up across lots of different industries, not just steel. As an energy-intensive industry, it is particularly important to them. There are currently two mechanisms through which they get support. First, energy-intensive industries get some of the policy costs taken off t…”

“The defence one.”

“Yes.”

“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…”

“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…”

“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…”

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

“Yes.”

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

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

“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…”

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

“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 …”

“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.”

“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…”

“They have announced today that they are doing the piece of work. The EU has announced a suite of different things, some of which are similar in terms of timeframe to us. There are two questions. There is the immediate question about whether the safeguards that are in place now are adequate. That is what the TRA is now …”

“It has announced today, which is helpful, that it is going to widen its review of the UK’s steel defences. That is directly in response to the request that was put in by UK Steel, which they talked about when they met you last week. We are pleased about that. It is basically expanding the scope of steel safeguard measu…”

“As you say, next Wednesday is 2 April. That is world tariff day, as the US are calling it. Of course, that comes after the tariffs that have already come in on steel and aluminium that you talked about to colleagues last week. These will be the reciprocal tariffs that have been talked about. Because of the strength of …”