Up to 2,800 steel jobs to be axed under taxpayer-funded electric shift hitting Port Talbot hard

Tata says it will cut up to 2,800 jobs in the UK, the majority of them at the country’s biggest steelworks in Port Talbot, South Wales.

The Tata steel plant in Port Talbot

Of the losses, 2,500 could be in the next 18 months, the steel giant said. A further 300 jobs may go in three years.

Statutory consultation on the cuts will begin, the company added, but it did not specify when.

Voluntary redundancies will be sought and more than £130m will be committed to a support package for affected employees, it said.

It follows the announcement Tata will press ahead with plans to close blast furnaces and replace them with electric arc furnaces under a plan to reduce emissions and costs.

The first blast furnace will close around mid-2024 and the remaining heavy end assets will wind down during the second half of the year, Tata announced on Friday.

It said the move will cut carbon emissions by about 85% and the UK’s overall CO2 output by about 1.5%. The Port Talbot site is the UK’s single largest emitter of CO2.

The new furnace will be powered by UK-sourced scrap as the raw materials.

At present almost all the raw materials for the current blast furnaces need to be imported, Tata said.

The steel giant in September confirmed details reported by Sky News that it had secured £500m of taxpayer cash to support the site’s transition to cheaper, greener steel production to cut emissions and stem financial losses.

Job cuts had been expected as part of the deal though 5,000 UK staff are due to remain within the wider UK operations following the agreement with the government.

The redundancies will see nearly three-quarters of the 4,000 staff on site put out of work.

The Tata Steel workforce currently accounts for 12% of the coastal town’s entire population and many had expressed concerns for their families’ futures when it emerged that big job losses were expected.

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Stephen Kinnock, Labour MP for Aberavon, home of the Port Talbot plant, told Sky News: “Steel is the beating heart of manufacturing and of our entire infrastructure and, of course, of our national security.

“Do we really want to be a country, given the dangerous and turbulent world in which we live, that isn’t able to produce its own steel?

“There isn’t a single household in my Aberavon constituency that isn’t connected to the steelworks in some way, and the impact would be utterly devastating.”

Unions met the company on Thursday after presenting alternative proposals aimed at saving jobs but sources said Tata rejected them.

The viability of domestic steel production has been hampered over many years by high UK energy prices, which have damaged competitiveness.

As a result, the GMB union has said up to 2,000 jobs at British Steel’s Scunthorpe plant are also under imminent threat.

The Chinese-owned company cut 7% of its workforce in February. That was despite continuing government talks with Jingye Group about potential taxpayer aid at the time.