Specialist recruiter Randstad CPE has warned the crisis in the British Steel Industry could lead to a wider industrial skills emergency…
Failure to act in the steel crisis could trigger a wider industrial skills emergency. Specialist engineering and construction recruiter Randstad CPE warned the problems facing the British steel industry were likely to boil over into other areas.
A poll of specialist engineering and construction workers revealed 94 per cent supported government action to help the UK steel industry regain its feet and become profitable. More than a third (35 per cent) supported actions to impose tariffs on foreign steel imports. Only 14 per cent supported nationalisation of the sector.
Randstad Construction, Property & Engineering’s managing director Owen Goodhead said: “Jobs and skills simply don’t behave like volatile commodity markets. Once you have a skills shortage, it is here to stay.
“Steel itself could just be the tip of a terrible iceberg – and the start of a far longer industrial skills emergency.
“Today the price of steel is low because of an error of oversupply on the other side of the world. If that was a permanent factor, we might need to think twice about trying to compete. It is not. But as a result we are talking about permanently shutting down our own centres of global engineering expertise.
“A whole ecosystem of specialist firms is dependent on the expertise that comes with a flourishing steel industry, just as many of them are also dependent on a sustainable source of steel itself.
“Our economy in ten years’ time will depend on the support for talent and ambition we can offer workers now – as employers and at all levels of government.
“The British economy of the 2020s will barely remember the latest blips and eddies of last week’s steel price. Will cheap steel be available from elsewhere in 2026? And more importantly – will the engineering jobs, the strategic defence contractors, the rail workers or the much-needed construction capacity be here in a decade’s time, if Britain jettisons its industrial heartland in 2016?
“Competing with a fundamentally better competitor is a bad idea – but throwing in the towel after a couple of hard knocks is just as shameful.
“Against unfair and aggressive competition, dumping steel in European markets at a loss, there is space for a constructive and proportionate response.
“This isn’t controversial in other areas – for example the public accepts supplying a large proportion of our own food as a ‘strategic’ priority, and subsidise British agriculture happily. But steel is treated differently.
“Even as France declares the yoghurt company Danone a ‘strategic industry’, British ministers are too scared to tiptoe towards the letter of the law. Their Chinese equivalents would have no such scruples.
“There is so much more that could be done to support valuable workers, boost industrial productivity and invest in the human capital we will always need for the future. Meanwhile, Britain needs millions of tonnes of steel every year – and it will have to come from somewhere.
“This country produces both too little steel, and too few skilled people to feed our industrial economy, and this combination is forming into a growing Skills Crisis.”
