British Steel Taken Into Public Ownership
The government took British Steel into full public ownership today, after the Steel Industry (Nationalisation) Act received Royal Assent yesterday, in one of the final acts of the Starmer government. The move secures the Scunthorpe blast furnaces — the last in Britain able to make steel from raw materials — and around 2,700 jobs, after the previous Chinese owner, Jingye, moved to halt operations. The Business Secretary, Peter Kyle, said “British Steel now belongs to the British people”; Jingye is seeking compensation, to be set by an independent valuer.
Nationalising British Steel is a decision the government reached reluctantly and framed as a matter of security rather than ideology: losing the Scunthorpe furnaces would have left Britain the only G7 nation unable to make virgin steel from scratch, dependent on imports for a material that underpins defence, construction and the railways. The cost is real — the furnaces were losing around £1.3m a day, and the compensation owed to Jingye could run to hundreds of millions — and the state now owns a business that must be either turned round or transitioned to greener electric-arc production. It is a striking end-note to the Starmer premiership, an interventionist act from a government that came to office promising fiscal restraint, and it hands Burnham an industrial policy already in motion. Watch the compensation settlement, the plan for the furnaces’ future, and whether ministers can find a private partner or commit to running it for the long term.