Steel town Port Talbot braces for impact of Tata closure

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The steel town of Port Talbot is braced for the same “devastating” decline suffered by a string of once-thriving South Wales valley communities, trade unions have warned, after Tata on Friday said up to 2,800 jobs would go at its main UK site.

The Indian company’s decision to shut down the two remaining blast furnaces at the plant came after it rejected union proposals for a more gradual transition to decarbonisation. But when news of the closure leaked this week, what remained of the workforce’s hopes were dashed.

“People are calling us in tears trying to figure out what they’re going to be doing with themselves if the worst happens,” said Abbey Gutteridge, regional organiser for Community, which had put forward alternative transition plans along with the GMB union.

She said Port Talbot, whose skyline is dominated by the steam and metal of Britain’s largest steel plant, now faced the same fate as Ebbw Vale. The struggling nearby town lost its Corus works 23 years ago, with Tata Steel acquiring Corus in 2007.

“Port Talbot is known as a steel village — it’s the steel town,” added Gutteridge, whose family have worked in steel making for three generations. “This is where people have the passion for this. You can’t throw a stone without hitting someone who works in the steelworks.”

Peter Hughes, Welsh secretary of trade union Unite, agreed that the towns of Ebbw Vale, Llanwern and Bryngwyn — all of which lost steel plants at the turn of the century — had set the template for what would happen next. 

“It’s been like a death by a thousand cuts over the last 20 years,” he said, standing outside the Tata site on Friday, as passing drivers honked their horns in solidarity with the workers.

“You look at Ebbw Vale, it was like a ghost town for 10 or 15 years, Bryngwyn not much better. Llanwern is only a shadow of what it used to be.”

Tata’s decision would have a similarly “devastating effect”, not just on Port Talbot but “the wider communities across the valleys”, he added.

The company said about 2,800 jobs would be cut across its heavily lossmaking UK operation as part of a four-year transition to green steel, with the bulk of the redundancies at Port Talbot.

It intends to replace existing manufacturing processes with an electric arc furnace, which makes steel from scrap and requires a much smaller workforce.

Tata will invest £750mn to finance the restructuring, backed by a £500mn grant from the UK government.

The Welsh government and unions said London should have provided additional funding, however, to allow one blast furnace to stay open for longer. That would have reduced job losses and ensured the UK retained the capacity to make steel from scratch, they said.

Vaughan Gething, economy minister for the Labour-led devolved Welsh administration, said Tata’s decision would leave the UK as the only G7 country “reliant on . . . steel being made for us”.

He said it was impossible to “underestimate the level of concern” within the local community, and that for each of the “really well- paid” jobs at risk, at least three more in the wider economy would also be lost. 

“It’s a huge amount of employment to suck out of a community like this,” said Gething, who is running to become Wales’ next first minister.

He added that if the UK government was serious about “levelling up” — the promise to boost the economic prospects of struggling regions — it would “need to recognise the scale of the additional challenge that is being created here”.

The nearby Llanwern plant lost its steelmaking function in 2001. Andrew Gutteridge, Abbey’s father and chair of the Multi Unions Llanwern works at what remains of the operation, said that “if you look at all the surrounding areas” of the town now, “there’s nothing”.

The uncertainty that had hung over Port Talbot since redundancies were first mooted last year had “absolutely” damaged the workforce’s mental health, he said.

While alternative proposals were on the table, there had been “hope . . . but when the news leaked, it was absolutely decimating”, said Gutteridge.

Hughes said meetings with Unite members would begin next week.

“Obviously at the moment they’re very angry, tensions are running really high, so it’s to gauge what they want to do,” he said of potential industrial action. “And if I was a betting man, I know what they want to do.”