The business secretary has declined to guarantee that British Steel will be able to secure enough raw materials in time to keep the Scunthorpe blast furnaces going.
Jonathan Reynolds said he would not “make my situation or the nation’s situation more difficult” by commenting on specific commercial details, the day after taking emergency powers to gain control of the Scunthorpe site.
If the blast furnaces run out of raw materials, they can never be turned back on.
Preventing that from happening was the primary reason for the Government recalling Parliament on Saturday to pass emergency legislation to keep the site open.
Reynolds told the BBC’s Sunday With Laura Kuenssberg: “If we hadn’t acted, the blast furnaces were gone, steel production in the UK, primary steel producing, would have gone.
“So we’ve given ourselves the opportunity, we are in control of the site, my officials are on site right now to give us a chance to do that.”
Reynolds also said the Government had decided to take emergency action when it learned that British Steel’s Chinese owners, Jingye, had not only stopped ordering more raw materials, but begun selling off the supplies it already had.
The company had also rejected an offer of support in the region of £500m, instead demanding more than twice that figure with few guarantees the blast furnaces would stay open.
In the Commons on Saturday, Reynolds said Jingye had not been negotiating “in good faith”, while on Sunday he suggested it had not been acting “rationally”.
He suggested the company’s ultimate plan had been to close the blast furnaces, but keep hold of the more profitable steel mills and supply them by importing steel from China.
But he declined to accuse the company of deliberately sabotaging the business at the behest of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
Jingye has links to the CCP, as do all major Chinese companies, but Reynolds said he was “not accusing the Chinese state of being directly behind this”.
He told Sky News’s Sunday Morning With Trevor Phillips: “I actually think they will understand why we could not accept the proposition that was put to us, in terms of losing that essential national capacity.
“I’m not alleging some sort of foreign influence.”
But he did agree there is now a “high trust bar” to bringing Chinese investment into the UK, and said he would not have allowed a Chinese company to invest in the “sensitive” steel sector.
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