No guarantee of a buyer for Tata Steel’s UK business, says Cameron
LONDON/PORT TALBOT: Prime Minister David Cameron said there was no guarantee a buyer could be found for Britain’s biggest steel producer after Tata Steel announced it was pulling out, and a state takeover was not the answer. Cameron is likely to take up the issue with Prime Minister Narendra Modi when they meet in Washington DC, The Guardian reported. Both leaders will be in the US capital for the Nuclear Security Summit on Friday.
Tata Steel acquired the Anglo Dutch Corus Group in a $12-billion deal in 2007. The then Tata Group chairman Ratan Tata had called the deal a “very visionary move.
Cameron said on Thursday he was doing all he could following Tata Steel’s decision to sell its British operation, a move that has put 15,000 jobs at risk and exposed the government to accusations of failing to protect the industry from cheap Chinese imports. Britain imported 826,000 tonnes of Chinese steel in 2015, up from 361,000 two years ago.
Tata’s biggest plant in Port Talbot, south Wales, is losing $1.4 million a day as a result of low steel prices and high costs.
“We’re going to work very hard with the company to do everything we can, but it is a difficult situation, there can be no guarantees of success because of the problems that the steel industry faces worldwide,” Cameron said after chairing an emergency meeting on the crisis on Thursday. “We’re not ruling anything out, (but) I don’t believe nationalisa- tion is the right answer.”
Cameron’s government has faced criticism over its response to Tata’s decision, with opposition lawmakers saying it was “asleep at the wheel” when the company said it was pulling out after nearly a decade in Britain.
The opposition Labour party and Britain’s media said the handling of the crisis had been “chaotic” after the government rowed back on a suggestion from a junior minister that it could nationalise the plants for a period.
“It’s extraordinary that they’ve been asleep at the wheel for this long,” Stephen Kinnock, the local member of Parliament in south Wales, told Sky News.
Steelmakers in Britain pay some of the highest energy costs and green taxes in the world.
Cameron said ministers had been working on measures to help the industry, including encouraging infrastructure projects to use British steel. The government’s intervention, he said, had helped avert an outright closure of the loss-making operations by Tata.