Fresh opening for Tata meeting

Dec 31 2009 by Sue Scott, Evening Gazette

MPs fighting for the survival of Teesside Cast Products plant at Redcar said a meeting with the Prime Minister at his home yesterday had cleared the way for talks between Number 10 and senior executives at parent group Tata in India.

Initial discussions between Business Secretary Lord Mandelson and Tata senior executives ended in stalemate before Christmas with little hope of a last minute intervention in subsidiary Corus’ decision to mothball the plant by January 31 with the loss of around 4,000 jobs.

MPs including Middlesbrough & South Cleveland’s Ashok Kumar have long been urging talks between the PM and Tata Steel chairman Ratan Tata, and yesterday’s 45-minute meeting appeared to improve the chances of such a discussion taking place.

“(The PM) said he saw no difficulty in such a discussion after further work had been undertaken to explore the issues in more detail,” said Mr Kumar, who joined the delegation to Kircaldy with Stockton’s Dari Taylor, Redcar’s Vera Baird and minister for the North-east Nick Brown.

MPs went into the meeting saying nothing less than rescue of the stricken plant would do and called for “creative” thinking on the part of government to broker a deal between Anglo Dutch Corus and a buyer.

Speaking before the meeting, Dari Taylor said she was convinced that Tata was not pressing for closure of the plant, but could not continue to support it without a commercial partner.

In the short-term, government could act as that de facto commercial partner by providing essential investment that would make TCP more attractive to a private investor.

“The Prime Minister was very focused on the issues and we are very happy he is giving this his attention at this time,” said Mrs Taylor.