Steel Industry (Nationalisation) Bill

I can inform the House that nothing in the Lords amendments engages Commons financial privilege.

I beg to move, That this House agrees with Lords amendment 1.

With this it will be convenient to discuss Lords amendments 2 to 18.

It is a pleasure to be back in the House today to see through the final stages of this Bill. The Government support all the Lords amendments before us. I wish to pay tribute to my colleague Minister Leong for so expertly guiding the Bill through its passage in the other place. I also wish to place on the record my thanks for the constructive approach taken by peers to the scrutiny of the Bill during its passage through the upper House, including the constructive and careful consideration from His Majesty’s official Opposition, Liberal Democrat peers and Cross-Bench peers. I thank them for their contribution. We have a responsibility to act now to secure the future of the UK steel industry. This Bill will assist in that by ensuring that steel production is secured, helping to restore domestic production to sustainable levels and supporting the Government’s economic growth plans where the public interest test is met. The Lords amendments before us strengthen the Bill in several ways. Amendment 1 ensures that the sunset power in the Bill may be extended only by increments of two years. This means that the Government would have to seek parliamentary approval at regular intervals to keep the principal transfer powers on the statute book. Lords amendments 2 and 3 place a duty on the Secretary of State to consider the costs that are likely to be associated with the exercise of the principal transfer powers, ensuring that such costs are considered in any decision making over the use of these powers. Lords amendments 4 and 5 upgrade the parliamentary procedure relating to continuity obligations and enforcement, ensuring that Parliament has increased scrutiny of these matters. Lords amendments 6 to 18 all relate to the appointment and role of an independent valuer and ensure that key considerations around environmental and health and safety liabilities are taken into account during any valuation exercise. A final decision on the use of the powers in the Bill has not been taken. Any decision to exercise the powers in the Bill will be subject to satisfaction of the public interest test, based on the relevant facts at the time of the decision. Steel has shaped our nation’s history, and this Bill is an opportunity to ensure its long-term success. The Bill enables decisive action for a strategically vital industry, defending our national security and supporting our critical national infrastructure, our economy and our national interest. I therefore ask right hon. and hon. Members to support the Lords amendments before us today.

I call the shadow Secretary of State.

I am grateful to their lordships for their work on the Bill. We support the amendments before the House. Let me be plain from the outset: our objection has never been to steelmaking, or to the men and women who make steel; it is to a Government who have crashed around and used blunt instruments without ever having a detailed plan. Hope is not a strategy, and a blank cheque is not a plan. Nationalisation is a bad idea, and nothing that has yet been said at that Dispatch Box has told the House where the spending stops. The Government are taking us down a fast and expensive road with no idea where the exit lies. Even members of the Government concede in private that they rushed into something that they now repent at leisure. Let us look at what we have learnt over the passage of the Bill. The Government and their Lib Dem little helpers in the Lords voted against a Conservative amendment in the name of the noble Lord Hunt to limit support to £2.5 billion over three years.