Sir Keir Starmer has confirmed that British Steel will be taken into full public ownership, ending months of speculation about the future of the loss-making Scunthorpe plant and drawing a line under fraught negotiations with its Chinese owner, Jingye.
In a speech designed in part to head off a brewing leadership challenge after Labour’s bruising local election results, the prime minister told supporters that emergency legislation would be laid before Parliament this week to grant ministers the powers needed to take “full ownership” of the business, subject to a public interest test.
“Public ownership is in the public interest,” Sir Keir said, adding that he intended to prove his “doubters” wrong and that, for the British public, “change cannot come quickly enough.”
The decision marks a significant shift in approach. Whitehall had previously stopped short of full nationalisation, preferring instead to court private investors while keeping the blast furnaces alight through an emergency supervision regime. That regime was imposed last April after the government seized operational control of the Scunthorpe site amid mounting concerns that Jingye was preparing to switch the furnaces off, a step that would almost certainly have ended the United Kingdom’s ability to produce so-called virgin steel.
Virgin steel, smelted from iron ore rather than recycled scrap, is the grade used in heavy infrastructure projects, from new rail lines to large-scale construction. Restarting a blast furnace once it has gone cold is both technically forbidding and extraordinarily expensive, and the loss of that domestic capability has been viewed in Westminster as a strategic red line.
Support authors and subscribe to content
This is premium stuff. Subscribe to read the entire article.
