At the main entrance to Scunthorpe steelworks on Saturday a small but determined group of plant workers and their union representatives gathered to hang a banner emblazoned with the words “Save Scunthorpe Steel”.
In front of them, rising into a hazy blue sky, were four giant metal towers — blast furnaces named after four former Queens of England: Anne, Bess, Victoria and Mary. Only Anne and Bess remain operational.
Making steel here gives almost 3,000 people good-quality jobs. “Without these steelworks, this place will become a ghost town,” said Ian Linklater, 58, who works in one of the mills at the site, and had arrived to help pin up the banner. Linklater is also one of the plant representatives for the Community trade union. “I’ve seen it before, 25 years ago, when they shut the steel furnaces in Teesside. We can’t let the same happen here.”
This sprawling plant is the home of British Steel, the company that made the steel for the landing craft that carried troops to the shores of northern France on D-Day.
In recent weeks the British government has been trying to work with Jingye, the Chinese owner of British Steel since 2020, and had offered £500 million of financial support to help the company transition to a greener steelmaking process. This was rejected by the firm, which wanted £1 billion.
• Chinese execs ‘tried to access key areas of plant’
The blast furnaces in Scunthorpe cannot be easily started up again, and it was concern over raw materials, such as coal and iron pellets, running out that led to an emergency meeting of parliament on Saturday. MPs passed the Steel Industry (Special Measures) Bill, which will allow the government to instruct steel companies to keep their furnaces and production running, and to take over those companies if they fail to comply.
While politicians debated, police vans were patrolling the perimeter of the sprawling site in Scunthorpe, full of warehouses and mills, giant chimney stacks, metal pipes and the blast furnaces themselves, where iron-ore pellets are melted down at the beginning of the process of making quality steel.
It was here, rather than Westminster, that the real drama was taking place. Plant workers apparently saw off a delegation of Chinese executives attempting to access critical parts of the steelworks. Representatives from Jingye arrived at the site at around 8am, according to plant insiders.
Workers mounted what sources described as a “heroic” move to block the executives’ way to their offices, fearing the delegation was trying to force the closure of the works. Once the furnaces die down they are extremely difficult — but not impossible — to turn back on.
A Humberside police spokeswoman confirmed a suspected beach of the peace had taken place at 8.30am on Saturday morning. “Upon attending, conducting checks and speaking to individuals in the area, there were no concerns raised and no arrests were made,” she said.
Inside the steelworks
While police calls are rare, pressure has been building on the workers for years, and the atmosphere has been fraught for a long time.
Every Thursday, an email is sent out to the almost 3,000 workers, offering them mental health support. “It’s been terrible,” Linklater said. “There’s a lot of anxiety among workers, of course there is. We’ve been going through this for three or four years now, under the Conservative and the Labour governments.”
In recent days, employees received an email saying the “company will begin consultation on three scenarios”. These are “closure of the blast furnaces by June 2025”, “closure of the blast furnaces in September 2025”, or “closure of the blast furnaces at a future point beyond September 2025”.
There was real concern that the highly skilled engineers responsible for keeping the plant and the furnaces safe would start to look for jobs elsewhere, due to the uncertainty. “To be fair to every one of them, the engineers stayed,” said Linklater. “They didn’t go to other jobs. They stayed here to keep the steelworks running.”
Workers at the site have been fighting for months to keep the furnaces hot and capable of melting the iron ore needed to make steel. Plant insiders claim the two working furnaces have dropped in temperature a number of times in the past 18 months; staff questioned the quality of coal being ordered by the Chinese company.
“There’s some in there who deserve medals for keeping those furnaces going for the town,” claimed one worker, who said one of the managers had been instructed to switch off the furnace by Chinese executives. They demanded the order be given “in writing”, claimed the plant source, rather than taking a verbal instruction.
Steel workers fear the plan was to turn off Bess on Monday, a process that would have taken three days to complete.
Making steel involves melting iron ore in a furnace that burns coal to reach temperatures up to 2,000C. The contents are then moved in a “torpedo” — a metal container — by rail to one of the steel plants on the 2,000-acre site.
Scunthorpe is one of the last plants in the UK capable of producing virgin steel, used to make rail tracks, construction beams, nails and screws, steel rods, caterpillar tracks for construction vehicles and masts for forklift trucks.
The furnaces require coking coal for fuel and iron-ore pellets to melt. The weekend’s escalation of events comes amid uncertainty over the amount of these raw materials left to keep the furnaces running.
A separate shipment of iron-ore pellets is also said to be sitting untouched in the dock. Without those raw materials, British Steel would be forced to shut the furnaces. The site has enough fuel to last only until mid-May, according to plant sources — a situation that has caused uproar in the local community, where steel has been made in various forms in Scunthorpe since the late 19th century.
Jingye is claimed to have attempted to starve the plant of crucial materials. Uncertainty remains over a shipment of coking coal sitting in the port of Immingham, 25 miles away from Scunthorpe’s steelworks. The coal remains undelivered, amid claims the Chinese company tried to sell it.
“I worked at those steelworks when the sky was dirty with it,” said Brian, 82, a retired worker, outside Morrisons supermarket nearby.
Times of uncertainty
The government had been in prolonged negotiations with Jingye to keep the steelworks afloat. In recent days, negotiations were focused on an improved state subsidy deal, worth £500 million, with ministers also offering to spend tens of millions of pounds to purchase the coking coal the furnaces rely on to keep firing. Jingye repeatedly pushed back, demanding up to £1 billion and refusing to allow the government to purchase the coal.
By Thursday, Sir Keir Starmer had become increasingly involved as concerns grew about the furnaces being shut down. Jonathan Reynolds, the business secretary, is said to have concluded that no offer, no matter how lucrative, would have been accepted by Jingye — and that the company was no longer acting in good faith.
He later told parliament that Jingye had demanded “hundreds of millions of pounds” extra, but without any conditions to stop the company transferring funds to China, or to ensure the blast furnaces were “maintained and in good working order”.
By Friday, Starmer decided that emergency legislation was needed to take control of Scunthorpe and that parliament should be recalled at the earliest opportunity. This weekend, near the plant, he met workers in a village hall as he discussed the new laws being brought by the government to stop the plant being shut.
“A future for steel matters to you, your families, the next generation,” he told them. “I hope there’s some relief.”
The future
On Saturday MPs passed laws to allow the government to instruct steel companies to keep their furnaces running. The government’s actions have given many in Scunthorpe relief that at last “something is being done”.
“It’s an exciting day for Scunthorpe,” said Linklater. The town has a population of around 80,000. Although there are almost 3,000 jobs at stake at British Steel, unions and plant workers point out the knock-on effect would go far beyond that in the wider supply chain. “An estimated seven jobs in the region [rely] upon the full-time salary of a single steel worker,” said Paul Warren, 53, Community’s regional organiser.
As MPs gathered in Westminster, thousands of people in Scunthorpe came out for the steel workers, marching to Scunthorpe United’s Glanford Park stadium. The football club has close links to the works and has publicly backed the campaign to save it.
In the past, matches would kick off at 3.15pm to allow the 6am-2pm shift workers to arrive in time. Yet more proof that the entire town is powered by the steelworks.
