Emergency legislation allowing the government to instruct companies to keep loss-making steel operations in England open, or face criminal penalties for their executives, were passed yesterday during an extraordinary sitting of parliament.
MPs and peers trooped into Westminster for a rare Saturday sitting after prime minister Keir Starmer and a small team of cabinet ministers decided on Friday morning that special powers were needed for the business secretary Jonathan Reynolds to prevent the imminent collapse of British Steel’s Scunthorpe steelworks, with the furnaces going out, and the loss of thousands of jobs.
