Jonathan Reynolds says he is “delighted” vital raw materials have arrived to keep the blast furnaces operating at British Steel’s plant in Scunthorpe. Speaking at nearby Immingham Port, the business secretary also hinted at concerns over future Chinese involvement in the steelworks following a clear ‘difference of opinion’ with its previous owners. Report by Covellm. Like us on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/itn and follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/itn
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00:00I am delighted that after a incredible cross-government effort we have secured
00:04the raw materials we need to keep the blast furnaces going and I want to say a huge thank you
00:10to all the staff of British Steel, all the people who have been involved in really really pulling
00:15out the stops to make sure we've got that continuity of supply. But I have said from
00:20the beginning that the kind of support we're now putting in place for British Steel is better value
00:25for the country, better value for the taxpayer than offering hundreds of millions of pounds
00:30for significant job losses in a way we weren't quite confident that transformation programme
00:34would deliver what we need for the future or potentially being here today talking to you
00:39about thousands of people having lost their jobs with a cost to the exchequer to support
00:43those people at well over a billion pounds. Well what we need for the long-term future of
00:48British Steel is that private sector partner to work with us as a government on a transformation
00:53programme that might be new technology new facilities that might have a different employment footprint
00:58the staff here absolutely know that they know they need a long-term future these blast furnaces
01:03have given this country nearly a century of service in one case so they know they need the future and
01:10that might be a different model different technology what they didn't want was the unplanned uncontrolled
01:16shutdown of the blast furnaces with thousands of job losses and no plan in place for the future
01:21you've always been clear to maintain in this case our difference of opinion on the future was with
01:27a specific company I know there's a lot of interest in the wider UK China relationship understandably so
01:32but this was about this company I think we've got to recognize that steel is a sensitive sector
01:38it's a sensitive sector around the world and a lot of the issues in the the global economy with
01:42steel come from overproduction and dumping of steel products and that does come from China so I think
01:47you would look at a Chinese firm in a different way but I'm really keen to stress the action we've
01:51taken here was to step in because it was one specific company that I felt wasn't acting in the UK's
01:57national interest and we had to take the action we did