HS2 should be built with British steel, why isn’t it? – Sir Andrew Cook

So why is the Government-owned company responsible for HS2’s construction buying French reinforcing steel for the high-speed rail project’s tunnels?

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I suppose this is better than using Chinese steel, which is known to have severe quality and safety deficiencies, but it still begs the question: why French steel? Why not use British steel? Especially as the British steel industry, which is of great strategic importance to the country’s future, is generally in pretty poor shape, thanks in no small part to previous Chinese dumping at below cost.

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How can this have come about, when there appears to be ample supply of UK steel rebar in the market and a perfectly capable factory at Scunthorpe to make it? Allow me to make a few suggestions.

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First and foremost on my charge sheet is the Department for Transport. If the multiplicity of contracts which govern the construction of HS2 contain any “Buy British” clauses at all, I’ll hazard a guess these will be qualified by a number of get-outs, ranging from availability to cost. So the British-made product has to be unavailable only in the time permitted, or more expensive, and the “Buy British” clause will cease to function.

Fair enough, you may say, and I would agree… up to a point. But British management cannot escape responsibility for any lack of product availability. If the product is made in Britain, as reinforcing bar assuredly is, then it should be readily available, especially for a massive project like HS2.

But here I come to the second accused on my charge sheet, which is certain British manufacturers. I have noted throughout the long pandemic how Covid has become the universal excuse for any failing; a catch-all to counter any criticism for inadequate performance. “Sorry, we’re shut due to Covid” may have been a valid reason for the closure of hotels, shops and restaurants, but it is no excuse for manufacturers.

My own factories, thanks to a rigorous regime of staggered shifts and social distancing, have kept producing throughout the pan-European Covid era. “Blaming Covid” simply doesn’t hold water as an excuse not to supply. Yes, furlough payments have helped greatly, but in the end a manufacturing business depends on its customers, and if you can’t supply what the customer wants, he will look elsewhere.

Which brings me to France and the French. The HS2 contractors and its French steel suppliers are criticised for not being quality approved. That’s all very well, and it is inexcusable for any product used in such a safety critical application as a high-speed railway not to be fully quality assured. But how was it that the French supplier was able to supply at all?

Was it not also shut down by Covid? Well, from my own experience, I suggest “probably not”. At the height of the pan-European Covid lockdown, I had to visit a steel factory in a small town in the centre of France. My hotel was all but shut. I had a bedroom and a bathroom but the only meal was a cold collation on a tray left at my bedroom door.

However, the factory I visited the next morning was humming away busily as if nothing had happened. No sign of Covid, no masks, nothing abnormal. Whatever else it may do, Covid was not going to stop that factory producing.

So it is not beyond the realms of possibility that the French supplier to HS2 stepped into the breach when the British failed. But what about the price?

Here the answer lies fair and square in French government purchasing policy. From day one of the famously successful French TGV project, the supply of materials has been exclusively French. That is state policy, and can one criticise this, if it is just confined to France? But this policy has an important side effect. French manufacturers, supported by their eternally loyal domestic customer, the SNCF, and by extension the French taxpayer, can export their surplus capacity to Britain, in the process even adjusting their prices to suit the British budget. Their bread-and-butter work is assured by the domestic market, so this British business is just jam on that bread.

Again and again this happens in Britain, where a combination of government detachment, weak contracts and unimaginative suppliers end up with British taxpayers’ money being spent needlessly abroad.

Yes, the Department for Transport needs to act to stop this happening, but I am bound to say, so does certain elements of British industry.

Sir Andrew Cook is a Yorkshire industrialist and chairman of William Cook Holdings.

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