The British steel industry remains in deep crisis and the jobs of many thousands of workers directly employed and in the supply chain continue to hang in the balance.
This is as true today as it was over a year ago when the steelworks at Redcar was closed and Tata announced the sell-off of its entire UK enterprise.
Much of manufacturing that relies of steel products — everything from mighty infrastructure programmes to the production of the humble paper clip — will suffer if homegrown steel products cease to be available.
In the midst of all this, the Tory government continues to dither and seems only capable of looking at solutions that perpetuate the private ownership of this vital industry.
Over the past few months the crisis facing our steel industry has almost dropped out of the news while the focus has been on the EU referendum and its fallout. Despite this, developments in the industry have not stood still.
Earlier in the the year when Tata had announced the sale of its British operation, including Port Talbot, a number of potential buyers were lining up to make bids for the industry.
Most prominent among these was Liberty House, owned by the Gupta family. Liberty had indeed bought two small plants in Scotland, while Greybull Capital has bought the much larger long products division in Scunthorpe.
In the unfolding story there have been some dramatic developments over the past few months, not least of which has been the decision by the Tata board that it may not put Port Talbot up for sale after all.
This has led to most of those lining up to submit bids for the plant to pull out, although as late as June 21 Liberty was still claiming that it would have no difficulty in raising the finance to go ahead with the purchase.
Although a sale to Liberty now seems unlikely, it may not be entirely off the table and, from what Liberty House executive chairman Sanjeev Gupta has said publicly about its plans, it could spell the end of primary steel production in Britain with the replacement of the blast furnaces by electric arc furnaces which would be used to recycle scrap rather than produce new steel.
Source:Morningstar