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Steel Industry (Special Measures) Bill

I am afraid the right hon. Member is right. The difficulty is that we are in a new world. The terrible thing is—the House will only ever hear me say this once—that Trump has a small point in some respects, and we have to deal with the world as it is.

Moving on to the sunset clause, I can imagine that the instinct is not to put a sunset clause in the Bill, because we are dealing with a difficult negotiator, and putting in a sunset clause would be putting in a backstop. When we put a backstop on ourselves, we give the other side a negotiating advantage. In his speech, the Secretary of State mentioned that the Civil Contingencies Act 2004 would be a route. For those who have not read that legislation, we spent a year putting it in place under the Blair Government, and it has recourse to Parliament at every turn: Ministers are properly controlled, it must be transparent, and so on. I suggest to him that at some point he might organise a transition to that, so that the House has greater control. The Coronavirus Act 2020 did not have that—it missed all those defences—and look what happened to the policy as a result.

This is what I would like to see: recourse to Parliament over the actions the Secretary of State takes to manage the survival of Scunthorpe and the policies to ensure its viability and, in the post-Putin and Trump era, the security of supply. We want to see all those things, and we can organise legislation to permit them. I ask the Secretary of State to take the House into his confidence and do this properly.

12.50 pm