I was in Parliament over the weekend supporting emergency legislation aimed at saving British Steel, after the government took the rare step of recalling MPs for a Saturday sitting. The Steel Industry (Special Measures) Bill will allow the government to take control of British Steel and intervene to keep Britain’s last blast furnaces going. It gives ministers the power to take control of steel assets, order materials to make steel and ensure steel workers are paid. Anyone breaching this law could face a jail sentence of up to two years.

The ability to produce low-carbon steel from scratch is vital to our net zero transition. The UK needs steel to build wind turbines and upgrade our railways. The least carbon-intensive way of doing this is to manufacture it here in electric arc furnaces powered by green electricity. This has the added benefit of maintaining high-quality green jobs.

British Steel’s collapse highlights the issue with allowing essential sectors of the economy to remain in investors’ hands. When these sectors are profitable, company executives extract high returns for their shareholders. When they are not, company executives go to government with caps in hand safe in the knowledge that these companies are too important to fail.

We have seen the consequences of privatisation playing out similarly across our water and energy sectors in recent years. Again and again, the public has paid whilst shareholders rake it in. It would be irresponsible of the government to let the public take on the risk of a loss-making company without a plan to ensure that they also share in the rewards. It would be wrong for the government to put large amounts of public money into British Steel without giving the public a say in how they are run.

I was pleased the government did not rule out the prospect of nationalisation but am concerned that it took financial collapse to prompt state action. Nationalising key industries like steel shouldn’t be done as a last resort; it is an essential prerequisite to securing their future. With steel under public control, not only would the government be able to protect precious manufacturing jobs in neglected regional economies, it would be able to position Britain as a genuine leader in green manufacturing. That’s the kind of ambition we need to see from the government here.