Steel in the blood

On January 14 this year the future of steel, according to David Cameron was as follows: “We are working as hard as we can to make sure we keep steel production growing in our country….Under this government employment in the steel industry is up, where it was down under Labour….We are getting Britain back to work.”

Fast-forward nine months and the rhetoric – some might think just lies – has run out of road and into the reality. The UK steel industry is in crisis, the SSI plant in Redcar has closed and a giant shadow has been cast over the future of steel plants in Scunthorpe, Motherwell and Cambuslang.

Despite thousand of job losses to hit the UK steel industry these are still steel towns. And it is not a declining industry.

The World Steel Association estimates steel demand will rise from 1.5bn tonnes a year worldwide to 2.5bn tonnes a year worldwide by 2050. It’s the type of manufacturing and making which should attract bright young people and offer them a long-term working future over decades.

Young people like 25-year old working mum, Charlotte Upton. She works as an electrician in the plate-mill at the steelworks in Scunthorpe. She told UNITElive:

“I love my job, the people I work with are second to none. I like fixing things, I like the camaraderie. I’ve always loved it.

“I left school when I was 16. I was good academically but I couldn’t really afford to go through Uni. My uncle saw a job advert – it was Corus at the time – with the apprenticeship. It looked good, I could use my academic skills, and get an income through my four-year apprenticeship.

“It was the sort of company that would push you on to get higher qualifications. And it’s great. I react to any breakdowns on the cranes or on the mill. I fault find and then fix them. When that isn’t happening I do preventive maintenance to keep machinery running smoothly and operating efficiently.

“We’ve had tough times when the recession hit in 2009. As a workforce we have done everything that has been asked of us, and we helped the company ‘weather the storm’.”

Highly skilled

Charlotte continues, “This is a highly skilled and experienced workforce. We all pulled together and found ways of saving money and working even more efficiently. I don’t think the government has done all it could. It seems to think the market rules and it does not want to intervene.

“The Chinese are dumping cheap steel they can’t use at home. They’ve cut the value of their currency to make it even cheaper. Osborne was in China asking them to bid for the HS2 contract. You’d think as a country – as others do – that we’d insist that we made the steel for the project in our own steel industry.

“Scunthorpe has the rail making capacity and the highest quality railway steel in the world. Why not insist we use this steel for our rail industry? – because that’s what other countries do.

“That’s part of a manufacturing and procurement strategy. Why would you not use our steel on our projects? British steel used on British contracts rather than allowing others to dump artificially priced cheap steel on us.” A pertinent question indeed.

Short-sighted

And as for any practical government support for the industry? “What happened at SSI Redcar was short-sighted and disgusting,” she says. The government just sat on its  hands. It does not appear interested in keeping manufacturing in the UK.

“But behind it all the facts and figures we are real with real lives. There are people coming up to Christmas who might struggle to even pay their mortgages.”

For Charlotte, steel is in her blood – even in her DNA. “My great grandfather, my grandfather and my grandmother all worked in the steel industry. There are other families like that who have steel embedded in their genes.

“What’s happening now is so short-sighted. This is a growing modern industry and the government is sitting back and watching it be destroyed. The social impact would be devastating. Scunthorpe, Redcar and other places could just disappear, and all of that avoidable.

“The government might sit back and let this happen. We’ll keep campaigning, arguing and demanding we keep a steel industry in the UK, it would be crazy not to.”