The steel industry across the UK and indeed Europe is facing very challenging economic conditions: there is overproduction across the world and the price of some types of steel have almost halved over the past year alone. While the Government cannot fix the price of steel, halt global overproduction or fix currency rates, it is doing all it can to help the industry and workers.
The Government has already paid steelmakers £76 million in compensation for energy costs, led the charge within Europe to protect the industry from unfairly cheap imports and has changed public procurement rules to help steel suppliers compete with international suppliers for major projects.
The Government will also be exempting eligible Energy Intensive Industries, including steel makers, from the indirect costs of the Renewables Obligation and Small Feed-in-Tariffs. This will enable steelmakers to keep their bills down, keep them competitive, keep them here and also give certainty for future investment decisions.
The steel industry's request for flexibility over Industrial Emissions Directive exemptions has also been secured, saving the industry millions of pounds of unnecessary expenditure by offering steel companies more time to comply with this European legislation.
Following recent talks in Europe, we also have encouraging and important commitments to speed up the European Commission's work on unfair trade practices and ensure the effectiveness of State Aid rules.
While there is no straightforward solution to any of the complex issues involved, the Government has been doing, and will continue to do, everything within its power to support steel communities and the industry in the weeks, months and years ahead.