As John Lennon sang, life is what happens while you’re busy making other plans. His lyric must be ringing in ministers’ ears this week. The UK’s last two blast furnaces – the final embers of a 160-year industrial legacy – may go cold within weeks. British Steel, which is owned by China’s Jingye, has reportedly cancelled raw material orders while seeking more government cash. The Scunthorpe site, which supplies 95% of Britain’s rail tracks and supports thousands of jobs, is now running on fumes.
The UK government has a strategy. A consultation. A council. And £2.5bn – eventually. But this crisis demands more than paralysis by analysis. With a global trade war brewing, this is no time to lose industrial sovereignty. The government ought to take the advice of the business select committee chair, Liam Byrne, and nationalise British Steel – because it offers a clear way forward. Keep the furnaces hot. Buy time. Launch a green steel transition – with public oversight, investment in new technologies and workforce planning.
This isn’t about ideology, it’s about economic security. It is about whether Britain wants to retain the ability to make the steel that underpins its national infrastructure. Or whether it prefers to outsource part of its sovereignty in exchange for a cleaner conscience and some polite consultation. The government prefers a “commercial solution” with private investment and public support. Of course it does. Who wouldn’t prefer a solution where someone else pays, invests and takes the risk. But that’s not how it works.
British Steel lost money under Jingye’s stewardship, which the parent company covered by loading the UK subsidiary with debt – and charging interest. A rushed state takeover could force the Treasury to repay British Steel’s £700m loan – a windfall for Jingye as it paid less than a tenth of that amount for the company in 2020. That’s privatising the gains and socialising the risk. A better option might be to let British Steel go bankrupt and repay Jingye a reasonable fraction of what it is owed.
The potential nationalisation of British Steel isn’t just about saving jobs, though that’s important. If the UK lets its blast furnaces close without replacement, it will be the only G7 country without a virgin steel industry. That might be a bold step to take, although the government has commissioned a report to tell it whether it needs that capability or not. The fact is that making virgin steel by smelting iron ore is carbon-intensive. Moving to use electric arc furnaces (EAFs), with lower greenhouse gas emissions, seems imperative.
The UK steel industry faces a structural crisis, not just a climate one. Scunthorpe’s 1970s-era blast furnaces are obsolete. The global shift to EAFs reflects not just lower emissions but far higher productivity – some US plants match Port Talbot’s output with a fifth of the workforce. But EAFs aren’t a direct substitute for blast furnaces – they use scrap to make steel, while blast furnaces produce the virgin iron that EAFs can’t.
High-quality steel still needs virgin iron, sourced from either blast furnaces or direct reduced iron. DRI isn’t widely traded and is mainly produced in Russia, making domestic production strategically vital. The UK also lacks enough “scrap” to scale beyond the UK’s historic 7m tonnes of output. Without investment in DRI and modern EAFs, Britain risks losing competitiveness and industrial sovereignty. A genuine green transition means rethinking steelmaking from the ground up – not simply shutting furnaces.
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