My hon. Friend sets out clearly how the situation affects her constituents. The impact on not only the directly employed workforce in all the plants and operations across south Wales and the UK, but all those working in the associated industries, cannot be overemphasised.
While we have the steel backbone that I described, we also have steel veins and arteries running out into many other industries—related manufacturing, training and expertise, and engineering. The loss of highly skilled jobs in the plants themselves has a knock-on effect on communities right across south Wales and the UK.
I pay tribute to the trade unions and especially Community, which plays a constructive role not only in these debates, but in facilitating the relationship between us and workforces in the plants to enable us to understand what is happening on the floor of the melt shop, and in the rod and bar mill, so that we can see with our own eyes the efforts that the workforces are putting in.
I will not reiterate a lot of points that I have made in previous steel debates, whether from the Front or the Back Benches. Instead I shall emphasise several of the points that have been made and ask specific questions of the Minister. I will focus on constructive solutions. I praise the work of the current steel Minister, and the Secretary of State for Wales has been open about and engaged on this matter with me and other south Wales Members but, to be honest, a lot of this is far too little, far too late. When I was elected in November 2012, one of my first meetings was about the steel industry. The Celsa management and I went to the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills to meet senior officials and Ministers. We presented detailed and carefully constructed warnings about what was happening in the market in terms of Chinese dumping and energy costs. We presented thought-through solutions, and we wanted to work together co-operatively and in partnership to find solutions. Unfortunately, a lot of the warnings were ignored.
I think back to a particular meeting I had in November 2014 in the Wales Office with the Secretary of State for Wales and the then steel Minister, who is now the Minister for the Cabinet Office. To be fair, the Secretary of State made an effort—I genuinely think that he cares about the future of the industry in south Wales—but I am sorry to say that that was simply not matched by the former steel Minister, the Chancellor of the Exchequer and officials in the Treasury and elsewhere. There has been a constant battle between those in government who genuinely accept that there is a problem and want to do something, including the current steel Minister, and others who either act with typical Whitehall caution, saying, “Oh, we can’t do this, Minister. We can’t do that, Minister,” or are actively not interested at all and are pursuing a laissez-faire ideology.