THREE North-East MPs have appealed to the Government to involve Teesside’s threatened Corus plant in state and Olympic building projects as a means to ensure the site’s future, and that of its 3,000 workers.
Vera Baird, Ashok Kumar and Dari Taylor – whose Teesside constituencies stand to be worst-hit by the potential closure of the Teesside Cast Products (TCP) plant – have written to several Government departments highlighting the plight of the Redcar site.
The MPs have stressed the importance of involving TCP in any capital spending projects, and have urged the Government to bring forward such schemes – which include projects laid out in the Building Britain’s Future programme and its Olympic building strategy – to as early a date as possible.
The Northern Echo exclusively revealed last week how Prime Minister Gordon Brown personally pledged to help with efforts to safeguard the future of TCP, and said he would hold talks with Corus’s parent company, Tata Steel, but now MPs are targeting individual Government departments.
Ms Baird, Mr Kumar and Ms Taylor have written, and will lobby, ministers at the Ministry of Defence, the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills – which manages the Building Colleges for the Future programme, the Department for Children, Schools and Families, the Department for Transport and the Olympics Delivery Authority.
The future of Corus’s TCP plant has been in doubt since an international steelbuying consortium, headed by Italian- based Marcegaglia, tore up a ten-year agreement to buy 80 per cent of TCP’s output.
The deal was due to last until 2014.
It is believed that a memorandum of understanding to boy the TCP plant, signed by Marcegaglia and Dongkuk Steel of Korea, in January, expired last night.
TCP’s future has been secured until August due to orders placed from within the Corus group. The plant could be mothballed if a buyer for the site, or an alternative buyer for its output, is not found.
Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland MP Mr Kumar, who raised the issue in Prime Minister’s Questions in Parliament last week, said: “The state is, at the end of the day, the biggest influence in UK infrastructure, and if all the proposals in the Building Britain’s Future programme are to come to fruition, there will be a huge demand for steel as the building blocks for such things as power plants, bio-process plants, high speed rail lines and integrated flood defence systems for towns and cities. Teesside’s steel industry will benefit greatly from this approach, and this is why we are making this statement to ministers.”
Ms Baird, MP for Redcar, said that the move was a “heartfelt plea” from affected MPs on behalf of their constituencies.
“Corus chief executive Kirby Adams asked me to do everything possible to ask ministers with a building budget to advance their steel buying, so that we can try to harvest some orders in the relatively short term,” she said.
Ms Taylor, MP for Stockton South, added: “Like my Teesside colleagues, I believe that getting all big spending departments, from transport to the 2012 Olympics, buying British and Redcar steel significantly strengthens the chance of keeping steel rolling.”
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