MP issues dire warning over minerals failure
Half a million jobs ‘could be put at risk’
A FAILURE to secure a supply of the critical minerals needed to build the electric cars needed as part of Boris Johnson’s ‘green industrial revolution’ could cost half a million British jobs by 2030, a Yorkshire Tory MP has warned.
Rother Valley MP Alex Stafford says the Government “must take immediate and assertive action” to avert the “potential disaster” of the batteries and motors of electric cars not being made in the UK because of a lack of minerals such as copper, lithium and cobalt.
And with much of the world’s supply of ‘critical minerals’ dominated by China, he told the Commons that bringing as much of the supply chain as possible to the UK was vital to “safeguard the future prosperity of the United Kingdom and the west in the spheres of the economy, defence and energy”.
Mr Stafford, one of the 2019 ‘blue wall’ intake of Conservative MPs, led an adjournment debate
on the minerals which are vital for low-carbon industrial capabilities but which face supply chain vulnerability. He told MPs that awareness of where critical minerals come from is low and that “the Government are waking up to the fact that the race for critical minerals security is the new great game”.
Mr Stafford added: “It is vital that this House is made aware of the significant threat to our economy and our post-Covid and postBrexit recovery if we run out of the critical minerals needed to supply our low-carbon industries of the future.”
Mr Stafford said the biggest threat to the country’s supplies of critical minerals was the dominance of China – which refines 65 per cent of the world’s cobalt and 97 per cent of the world’s manganese – in the supply chain.
Highlighting the “stark” consequences of this in the automotive sector, he said that some 70 per cent of the value of an electric car comes from its battery and motor. He said: “If those components cannot be manufactured in the UK because we do not have the minerals coming into the country, the consequences for the automotive sector alone are bleak: it could cost up to 500,000 jobs by 2030. There is no doubt in my mind that the Government must take immediate and assertive action to avert this potential disaster.”