[1andrew1]

Another issue for Truss. I'm sure Johnson would have got the cheque book out but I'm less sure about Truss.

British Steel's Chinese owner seeks huge government aid package

Jingye Group has indicated that British Steel's two blast furnaces will not be commercially viable without hundreds of millions of pounds of taxpayer support, Sky News learns.

The owners of Britain's second-biggest steel producer are seeking an urgent package of financial support from taxpayers amid renewed fears for thousands of industrial jobs in the north of England.

Sky News has learnt that Jingye Group, which bought British Steel out of insolvency in 2020, has told ministers that the company's two blast furnaces are unlikely to be viable without government aid.

British Steel, which is headquartered in Scunthorpe, north Lincolnshire, employs about 4,000 people, with thousands more jobs in its supply chain dependent upon the company.

The request from Jingye poses a major headache for Jacob Rees-Mogg, the new business secretary, on the eve of the Conservative Party's annual conference in Birmingham.

While the precise scale of the support being sought by the Chinese industrial group was unclear this weekend, insiders suggested that it would need "hundreds of millions of pounds" to keep the Scunthorpe blast furnaces operational.

For Mr Rees-Mogg, who took over as business secretary less than a month ago, a decision over government support presents a politically undesirable menu of choices.

If no state funding is made available and significant numbers of jobs are axed, it would undermine a key tenet of the 'levelling-up' strategy that became a doctrine of Boris Johnson's administration.

An agreement to provide substantial taxpayer funding to a Chinese-owned business, however, would almost certainly provoke outrage among Tory critics of Beijing.

China's role in global steel production, after years of international trade rows about dumping, would make any subsidies even more contentious.

https://news.sky.com/story/british-s...ckage-12708894