13:19 Angela Eagle (Labour)

My hon. Friend will be aware that concerns about the challenges facing the steel industry have been raised repeatedly in this House—I think there have been 10 debates—and there have been repeated questions, meetings, exchanges with officials from the Departments for Business, Innovation and Skills and of Energy and Climate Change, and others, for more than two years. Is she surprised, as I am, that it has taken until today for the Business Secretary to get on a train to Brussels and try to sort out this mess?

The hon. Member for Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland (Tom Blenkinsop) is right: the carbon tax floor is a bad tax and a tax on manufacturing, but so, too, is it true that in every one of the five or six occasions in the previous Parliament when we debated energy prices, Labour Members voted for higher energy prices. In particular, in December 2012 they were led through the Lobby to vote for the accelerated closure of the British coalfields in advance of anything happening in Europe. The carbon price floor is a unilateral tax, because the EU abandoned the emissions trading system and left us acting unilaterally in this regard.

In this Parliament, we always have to remember the issue of tackling climate change, but we have to balance that with the cost that that puts on our energy-intensive industries. We have to ensure that we get the balance right.

Does my hon. Friend agree that the carbon price floor was a tax introduced by the previous Conservative-led Government, and that it is an entirely revenue raising tax that does absolutely nothing to contribute to combating climate change?

Rather than hiding behind the European Commission, why do the Government not take action first on energy-intensive industry payments and get retrospective approval later? That is what Germany did with its Renewable Energy Act 2012. It provided support to producers of renewable energy from January 2012. It did not submit the Act for prior state scrutiny. It let the Commission investigate and then state aid approval was received in November 2014, two years after it had first provided support. Why can our Government not look after the interests of UK steel in the same way? It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the Government have been so slow to act because they have an ideological aversion to any Government intervention. We have a Secretary of State who will not let the phrase “industrial strategy” cross his lips.

[Source]

13:49 The Secretary of State for Wales (Stephen Crabb)

Does my right hon. Friend agree that Labour Members ought to do him the courtesy of listening to what he has to say? Does he agree that it was they who started bringing in the carbon taxes that have caused problems for manufacturing and that it is this Government who have tried to hold those taxes down?

We have absolutely been pushing for state-aid clearance on this. It is really important. As my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister made clear today, as soon as that state-aid clearance is given, we will start paying the compensation to steel companies. It is worth pointing out that we have already paid out £50 million to a number of steel companies to compensate them for additional energy costs arising from environmental and climate change policies, a lot of which were imposed by a previous Labour Government.

Secondly, we are addressing the impact on intensive energy users such as the steel industry of policies to reduce the negative impacts of climate change.

As I said a moment ago, we have already given more than £50 million of support to the steel industry. We were the first EU country to pay compensation for indirect costs of the EU emissions trading system to energy intensives in 2013, we started to pay compensation for the costs of the carbon price support mechanism as soon as the European Commission gave state clearance in 2014, and we exempted the metallurgical industry from the climate change levy in the same year. As my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister has announced, we will provide further compensation for climate change policies, with payments starting as soon as state aid is approved and continuing throughout the current Parliament.

[Source]

14:56 David Mowat (Warrington South) (Con)

I shall return to climate change. When I intervened on the shadow Secretary of State, she immediately closed the point down by saying that we have to be aware of climate change issues. That is true, but we cannot be aware unilaterally. No other country in the world has signed up for an 80% reduction by 2050—nobody has done it. It may be that we are right—that we are the only country in the world that will fix our 1.5% of global emissions—but the cost is the stock stuff that we are talking about now, and we all need to be aware of that. As I said in an intervention, when this issue is discussed in Parliament the Labour party and the Scottish National party always take the side of going further and faster on green stuff. Even in the Chamber this week, there were two examples of what I would describe as virtue signalling on this issue by Opposition Members, saying how green they are compared with the guys over here on the Government Benches. That is because we understand the impact of such measures, and we know that unless we act to close that energy price differential, we will be here discussing more industries in future.

[Source]

15:04 Tom Pursglove (Corby) (Con)

On energy costs, we need to be mindful of the impact that green taxes and levies have on businesses. There is quite often a clamour to do more on the climate change agenda. I understand that people are passionate about that, but we need to be mindful of the impact that has on the costs attached to doing business.

[Source]

15:13 David T. C. Davies (Monmouth) (Con)

There has been no warming—no increase in the temperature—of this planet for the last 16 years, despite all the CO 2 that has been pushed into the atmosphere. None of the scientists can explain that; they say that the pause is caused by volcanoes, they blame other kinds of gases or they say that there is a natural pause, as Jim Skea did. The reality is that there is no global warming at the moment. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change accepts that.

Why on earth, then, are we levying all these taxes on our industries? I support the Government’s coming up with a compensation scheme and freezing the carbon price floor, but I have a much better idea, which I ask Members in all parties to think about: scrap the carbon taxes. There is no point in having them if the Chinese do not have them and when we are generating only a tiny amount of CO 2 . Scrap the whole lot and we will not need a compensation scheme. Allow our steel industry to compete on an equal basis with everyone else. It is not the global climate that we need to worry about; it is the economic climate.

[Source]

15:48 Margaret Ferrier (Rutherglen and Hamilton West) (SNP)

Steel is used to create more than 80% of the components required to build a typical wind turbine, and plate steel from Tata’s Scunthorpe and Dalzell mills is used in the fabrication of these renewables. UK Government policy on the removal of support for renewables will have an adverse impact along the supply chain, particularly on the steel industry. Plans to cut support for renewables need to be dropped now. The UK has the highest carbon tax in the world. More than half the UK power price is made up of this tax. Steel needs to be given the recognition it deserves in helping to grow the renewables sector, thus reducing carbon emissions in the long term.

[Source]