Liz Truss has pledged to protect Britain’s steel industry by extending measures to prevent a flood of cheaper foreign imports.
The trade secretary said yesterday that the government would go against the recommendations of the Trade Remedies Authority, an arm’s length body of the trade department, by temporarily extending safeguard protections on five of the nine steel products the authority said should be removed.
Safeguard measures inherited from the European Union for the UK’s 19 steel products were due to expire yesterday. The measures set tariff-free quotas based on historical trade flows. They were introduced in 2018 to limit further increases in imports in response to a global overcapacity of steel and trade diversions resulting from America’s introduction of steel tariffs.
Truss said safeguards would
