The cost of allowing steelmaking in Scunthorpe to collapse would have been “unfathomable”, the GMB union has told MPs, as the Public Accounts Committee weighs whether the government’s intervention to keep British Steel running represents value for money for the taxpayer.
Giving evidence to the committee, GMB national secretary Charlotte Brumpton-Childs set out the union’s case that ministers had little realistic choice but to step in when British Steel’s Chinese owner, Jingye, moved to shut the Scunthorpe blast furnaces. The committee is examining how well prepared the government was for that intervention and what taking the company into public ownership might ultimately cost.
“The cost of not saving steel in Scunthorpe would have been unfathomable, not only to the public purse, with redundancy and insolvency costs, but to the families and communities that rely on those jobs to exist,” Brumpton-Childs said.
She added: “Without the government’s intervention, tens of thousands of workers would be out of a job and the UK’s national security would have been at risk.”
Her remarks go to the heart of the committee’s inquiry. While much of the political debate has focused on the headline figure of public money committed to keeping the furnaces lit, the GMB’s argument is that the counterfactual, the bill for redundancy, insolvency and the loss of the UK’s last primary steelmaking capacity, would have dwarfed it. That is the calculation MPs must now interrogate.
The numbers underline why the question matters. The National Audit Office reported earlier this year that hundreds of millions of pounds had already been spent funding operations, wages and raw materials at the site, with the running total climbing as ministers kept production going. For a workforce of around 2,700 in Scunthorpe, and a wider supply chain stretching across the country, the stakes extend well beyond a single plant.
Ministers recalled Parliament to pass emergency legislation granting temporary control of British Steel after talks with Jingye broke down, scrapping the redundancy plans that had threatened to cut up to 2,700 jobs as the blast furnaces faced closure. The Steel Industry (Nationalisation) Bill would take the company into full public ownership, subject to a public interest test, building on the public ownership plan for Scunthorpe that the prime minister confirmed earlier in the saga.
For the GMB, the national security dimension is central. British Steel operates the country’s only remaining blast furnaces capable of producing virgin steel, the grade used in construction, rail and defence. Lose that capability, the union argues, and the UK becomes dependent on imports for materials it may one day need in a crisis, a vulnerability the Public Accounts Committee’s evidence session was convened to probe alongside the financial questions.
The committee’s findings, expected in the coming weeks, will shape how the eventual cost of nationalisation is judged, both against the money already spent and against the special measures and statutory powers ministers have leaned on to keep the Scunthorpe furnaces alight. For the SME suppliers, hauliers and engineering firms tied to the plant, the difference between intervention and collapse was never abstract. As the GMB’s evidence made plain, the bill for doing nothing would have landed somewhere too, just on workers and communities rather than on the Treasury’s ledger.