Questions Without Notice from the Party Leaders

Part of 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 1:53 pm on 17 November 2020.

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Photo of Adam Price Adam Price Plaid Cymru 1:53, 17 November 2020

Diolch, Llywydd. First Minister, according to media reports, Tata Steel UK is currently seeking £500 million of funding from the UK Government as part of the Project Birch initiative in order to sustain its future. Accepting this support, it's said, will require Tata to close both its two blast furnaces at Port Talbot and replace them with electric arc furnaces that will produce steel from scrap rather than iron ore. While this will reduce the emission of greenhouse gases in Wales, it will also lead to very significant redundancies among the steelworks' employees. If this happens, history tells us that the probability of the re-establishment when clean technology becomes available is small, and Wales will have lost a vital part of its industrial base. Would you agree that a policy of reducing UK greenhouse gases, while increasing them in other countries via imports, at the expense of Welsh workers jobs, would represent a short-term fix rather than a genuinely sustainable industrial strategy, and is the very opposite of a just transition to a decarbonised future?