The UK steel sector will remain uncompetitive without better government policy to protect it ahead of changes to safeguard quotas in other regions, panellists said at the recent Make UK conference in London, attended by Kallanish.
Peter Quinn, director of sustainability and environment, Tata Steel UK, told attendees the UK needs to be prepared for the “cliff edge” coming on 1 July when the EU’s new quota and tariff regime comes in. “We want to at least preserve what we’ve got now,” he noted.
Gareth Stace, director general, UK Steel, also warned of damage to the industry, “unless this government, because it’s now or never, does something really important and significant to change the fortunes of our sector”. Without action, it “will be a very, very different sector in the next few years”.
He also noted that concerns over energy and carbon costs, as well as procurement still need tackling, and if the government does not address those, “we are still dead in the water”. However, the new EU tariff-rate quota regime “blows everything else out of the water”.
If the UK government fails to respond and “give us a really good, robust and strong UK steel quota and safeguards from 1 July and address the uncompetitive business landscape, then we will not be the sector that even you know at the moment,” he warned.
Carles Rovira, chief executive at 7 Steel, argued “there is no reason UK steel production cannot be competitive”, noting the country will have the latest technology, using electric arc furnaces, skills and scrap.
“What we’re asking [from] government is to give us the same means other steel producers have to compete,” he asserted. He highlighted scrap barriers for 48 countries, making the material cheaper domestically. Other countries which have subsidies for energy should not be seen as “competitive”, he argued.
Meanwhile, Alasdair McDiarmid, assistant general secretary, Community Union, said: “We need to stop lurching from crisis to crisis. We’re in a hole [and] it seems like we’ve been in a hole for a very long time; we need to fix this once and for all.”
He expressed frustration to still be calling for the same support as when the Steel Council was first formed in 2015 after the SSI steelworks collapsed. “We defined what the industry needed at that time; there were five key priorities, action on energy prices, procurement, trade defence, reform of business rates and support for decarbonisation investment, and we’re now in 2026, 11 years on and these are still the priorities,” he lamented.
“We know what the problems are, we know what the solutions are, it’s very, very frustrating,” he added.
Meanwhile, Quinn described the ETS schemes in the UK and EU as “blunt instruments” that have not been effective in creating conditions to decarbonise “a very capital intensive business”.
“It was punitive, it was a cost for not decarbonising, but it didn’t help you to decarbonise, it just punished you for not doing it and the two things are different,” added Quinn.
Stace expressed concerns over the UK’s CBAM policy. “Unfortunately, within Treasury, CBAM is developing … but it’s going to achieve exactly the opposite of what it should,” he warned.
He highlighted UK Steel calculations show Chinese steel will pay less in CBAM costs than steel produced in the UK. “It should have been the other way round and it’s astonishing that we’ve got less than a year to go before it comes into effect on the 1st of January next year and yet Treasury is working through a policy that’s going to damage us even further,” he concluded.
