Teesside Electric Arc Furnace at risk in British Steel talks
Plus: A deep-dive into loans TVCA has lent and the National Trust chopping down trees
Thanks again for reading The Teesside Lead, arriving in inboxes and fighting spam filters twice a week, and now reaching its fourteenth edition. My, how time flies.
This week I spoke to The National Trust about their plans to chop down 100 trees in the hinterland where Teesside and North Yorkshire blend, as well as covering the potential rude awakening to Ben Houchen and his dream of bringing steel manufacturing back to the area.
For this week’s paid subscribers I have details from a freedom of information request which shows all of the loans for which the Tees Valley Combined Authority is the lender. The thirteen loans total a gobsmacking £455,350,553, and some are more likely to be repaid than others.
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There were reports this week that the government was considering nationalising British Steel.
An “exclusive”, published by The Guardian, but unceremoniously scooped by The Telegraph (who published their story ten minutes earlier), said how the government was considering taking the lossmaking company under its control as a “last-ditch attempt” at saving jobs in Scunthorpe and Teesside.
Last month I reported on how British Steel’s Chinese owners, Jingye, were giving the cold shoulder to the new government in negotiations over the future of its UK operations.
Jingye are holding out for a support package from the government that’s similar to the £500m it agreed to pay to Tata Steel to close its blast furnaces in Port Talbot and transition to greener steel production.
The package originally on offer for Jingye was believed to be worth around £300m, with the Chinese company investing £1.25bn in building electric arc furnaces in Scunthorpe and Teesside.
British Steel’s sites in Lackenby and Skinningrove use steel produced in Scunthorpe to create finished products like beams.
However, lower down in the articles on nationalisation is the detail that talks to build the new furnace on Teesside, which would melt scrap steel, have now been ditched, with the government instead focusing on saving operations in Scunthorpe.
Reading between the lines of a statement sent to me from the Community Union, whose members include steelworkers, it appears this may be true.
A spokesperson for Community Union said:
"Government and the unions are still in discussions with Jingye about the next steps for British Steel in Scunthorpe, and we will be doing everything we can to secure a future for the plant."
Speaking to GB News on Wednesday, Tees Valley Mayor Ben Houchen said: “There are many, many thousands of jobs, both on Teesside, but particularly in Scunthorpe that are at risk if the government don’t sort this out.”
A government figure told the FT nationalisation “is one of several options we have considered”, though officially the government denies it.
A spokesperson for the Department for Business and Trade told me:
“We have no plans to nationalise British Steel.
“We’re working across government in partnership with trade unions and businesses to secure a green steel transition that’s right for the workforce, represents a good investment for taxpayers and safeguards the future of the steel industry in Britain.”
The GB News interview with Lord Houchen was quite insightful, and while readers of The Teesside Lead might regard him with scepticism, I found this particular interview from him to be pretty fair and accurate.
“I know that all options are still being considered by the government, and you would rightly expect them to be looking at all potential avenues,” he said, pouring cold water over the presenters’ hopes of whipping up fear of some pinko Commie takeover of a business in the free market.
He continued: “The obvious thing to me is for the government to get around the table, come up with a solution, build the new steel plant in Teesside, keep the one going in Scunthorpe for a period of time while that’s being built, [and] try and transition those jobs across.”
When Lord Houchen announced in November last year that he was “bringing steelmaking back”, the caveat from the Chinese owners stood next to him for the photo call at Lackenby was always that this was “subject to appropriate support from the UK Government.”
Sadly, it looks like this may be coming back to bite Houchen.
On Friday, Lord Houchen deployed one of his favourite comms tools and publicly shared a letter he sent in private. This one was addressed “To MPs representing Teesside, Darlington and Hartlepool.”
He wrote: “We all have a collective responsibility, for the sake of our communities and national security, to ensure that the blast furnaces in Scunthorpe remain operational until the EAF is built and running.”
It’s worth pointing out, though, that the electric arc furnace would only deliver about 250 jobs in Teesside if it does ever get built. Lord Houchen has invested a lot of political capital into the project, but the government is prioritising actual jobs rather than ones that are yet to materialise by concentrating its efforts on Scunthorpe’s green transition.
Perhaps the last word should go to Lord Houchen and his assessment of the situation on Wednesday: “The risk is [the government] don’t get [the transition] right and we lose potentially north of 5,000 jobs in Scunthorpe alone - communities devastated, people without work and we’re left without a steel industry in the UK.”
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The National Trust has submitted an application to Redcar and Cleveland Borough Council to cut around 100 trees at Ormesby Hall, largely because of ash dieback disease.
Planning permission is required as the historic home is in a conservation area.
The majority of trees which need to be felled are in the Pennyman’s Woods area, which runs along Ladgate Lane on the northern edge of the estate.
Mark Bradley, Countryside Manager for The National Trust, told The Teesside Lead: “The work is part of our ongoing woodland management plan at Ormesby, which is required to maintain the safety of the trees and improve the health and biodiversity of the woodland, including ash dieback reactive works.
“The woodland at Ormesby, for the most part, is of a similar age structure, with a band of trees through Pennyman’s woods planted in the 1980s. To create an ideal woodland, the woodland should have a diverse and uneven age structure with canopy, scrub, field and ground layers. This means the woodland needs to be thinned at times to allow for specimen trees to establish and become veteran trees in the future.”
He says the trees chosen for the chop either have ash dieback disease, or are “poorly formed trees that will not make specimen species,” including sycamore, birches and poplars.
“Where specimen trees have been highlighted,” he says, “some of the surrounding trees will be thinned. This is called haloing and allows the specimen tree to strengthen itself against future storms.”
Ash dieback disease leads to crown dieback, lesions and the eventual death of infected trees, meaning they pose a risk to woodland users.
“Our surveys highlighted nearly one hundred trees with the disease. We only remove trees with a crown loss of over 50% and, where possible, monolith them (leave some of the trunk, which is good for deadwood and not a risk to visitors),” he added.
The felling work is planned to take place during January and February next year, with planting to take place at a later date to create uneven age structure and provide a more diverse woodland habitat on the estate.
This week I experienced both sides of the experience of freedom of information requests, with one request being given a full response, providing everything I had asked for. However, requests to three other councils did not receive responses by their statutory deadline, with one admitting they had missed the original request a month ago.
Doing this sort of journalism, it’s one of those things where it really is a case of “some you win, some you lose.”
As I wait for those three councils to pull their socks up and provide the information I’ve asked for, here are the results of the successful FOI request which was returned this week…
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