Tata Steel to axe a further 1050 British jobs, including 750

Port Talbot is Britain’s biggest steelworks, in terms of both workforce and output, and employs around 4,000 people in the town.

A Department for Business Innovation and Skills (BIS) spokesman said he wouldn’t comment on commercial matters.

REPORTS say 1,000 jobs are set to be cut at Tata Steel plants in Wales.

This came on top of 700 job losses at Tata’s speciality steel plant in Stocksbridge, South Yorks, last summer, as well as 250 contract posts at the company’s plant in Llanwern, Wales.

The plant is thought to be losing about £1m a week amid an unprecedented crisis that has cost thousands of jobs across the country since the summer and triggered the collapse of SSI’s Redcar plant and Caparo Industries in the Midlands.

British steelmakers pay some of the highest energy costs and green taxes in the world and are also struggling to compete with record Chinese steel imports.

The plan drawn up by managers at the 152-year-old Scunthorpe plant and consultant McKinsey is believed to hinge on retaining its coke oven and two blast furnaces to continue making 2.8 million tons of steel a year rather than becoming a processing plant as feared. The Indian company enforced 400 redundancies in the summer of 2014 and a further 600 in November 2012.

The Government responded to the crisis previous year by holding a summit and pressing the European Union to help high energy using firms.

Unions welcomed the announcement, following a spate of job losses in the steel industry and fears for the future of Tata’s long products business.

But October also saw the Liberty Steel plant on the banks of the River Usk re-open.

The news comes just three months it was announced plants in Scunthorpe, Motherwell and Clydebridge would close with a loss of more than 1,000 jobs, to much protests from workers.