I do not intend to take up too much time, because there are hon. Friends wishing to speak who have had job losses in their constituencies in the last week or so in the ongoing steel crisis. However, I do want to pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Aberavon (Stephen Kinnock) and to the Backbench Business Committee for allowing us to have the debate.
I also praise my hon. Friend the Member for Hartlepool (Mr Wright) on his excellent speech, and the fantastic BIS Committee report on steel. That excellent piece of work illuminated many points that we needed to look at and raise. It is because the all-party parliamentary group for the steel and metal related industry is one of the most effective APPGs in Parliament, especially for using Parliament’s time to raise issues in the steel industry over the past four or five years, that so many Members have spoken today on this important issue.
In the past week there have been redundancies in Port Talbot, Llanwern, Hartlepool, Trostre, Corby, Sheffield and South Yorkshire. As a former union officer for the trade union, Community, I know some of those sites well and some of the people individually. The redundancies come off the back of a situation relating to Tata long products and, of course, the well documented and tragic events in Redcar at SSI.
I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Newport East (Jessica Morden), who raised a lot of issues about strip products. I will go into a few issues that my colleagues have gone into, but I want to check what industry is doing. I will be making critical comments about what the Government have and have not done but, as a trade unionist, I still wear my trade union hat and I still want to question what industry is doing. Employees trust employers to hang in there. I know that is very difficult for the industry at the moment. The five industrial asks are acute and critical, but I often ask myself what Tata—just one example—is doing regarding its relationship with this country.
I ask myself about Tata’s integrated industrial strategy in relation to Port Talbot, Llanwern and its own automotive sector. Jaguar Land Rover, as well as the rest of the automotive sector, is growing, developing and doing well but, irrespective of the fact that both companies are owned by the same parent company, one does not necessarily procure from the other. The Government have to step in and, not necessarily force, but certainly induce and use clever mechanisms to try to encourage ways and means by which that relationship could be bettered for workers in the steel industry. I find it hard—I am sure that colleagues do too—to make the argument that a parent company is not procuring from its own site. It is for not just the Government, but the very industries that sit in our nation to justify their industrial actions and procurement policies.
I have spoken at the Sheffield rally, as have my colleagues. A year ago, I managed to get our Front-Bench team to lead the debate on the UK steel industry. My hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff South and Penarth (Stephen Doughty) spoke from the Front Bench in that landmark debate. I believe that the issue of steel had not been brought forward as an Opposition day debate for some time, so it was a significant indicator of how bad the situation was getting.