Industry demands harsher trade duties and faster action to save Europe's crisis-hit steel sector, but little hope of action from European Commission
Britain’s crisis-hit steel industry looks unlikely to get any relief from imports of subsidised Chinese steel flooding the European markets, despite a high-powered summit to tackle the problem.
Industry chiefs and government ministers are currently meeting with European Commission officials in Brussels to demand tougher action to stop Beijing-backed steel makers from dumping their products here.
They want the Commission to hit imports of Chinese steel with higher trade tariffs, saying the current duties are too low to act as a deterrent and that Brussels is too slow at introducing the tariffs.
Steel makers also want the EU to block China’s attempts to gain market economy status with the World Trade Organisation until it stops dumping steel.
Gareth Stace, director of industry body UK Steel, is at the event and said that swift action needs to be taken to “halt the ever rising flood of Chinese imports”.
“We are calling on the UK Government to spearhead the action to get tariffs introduce faster, the whole European steel industry is united on this issue,” he said.
The Commission argues that it is already using trade tariffs to block imports. It announced three new anti-dumping investigations last week and has more than 30 measures in place so far to try to combat subsidised steel imports.
But opening the summit, Jyrki Katainen, competitiveness commissioner, warned “there is not one silver bullet or medicine to swallow to keep our position as a continent of competitive industry”.
Sources at the summit said they felt there was little likelihood of the industry winning fast action to ease the pressure, which in the UK alone has resulted in 5,000 job losses in the past year. Some of the biggest losses have come at Tata’s plants in Port Talbot and Scunthrope, and SSI’s blast furnace in Redcar.
Karl Koehler, chief executive of Tata Steel Europe, said the Commission’s efforts so far to fight unfair competition have been “slow and half-hearted”.