Tata Steel set to axe 1,050 jobs as steel crisis worsens

Tata Steel is set to announce another round of job cuts in Britain as it significantly reduces production.

1050 jobs are set to go, 7% of the workforce and Wales will bear the brunt.

620 staff will go at Port Talbot, 115 at the Llanwern plant which was partly mothballed last August. The remaining cuts will affect support staff and steel mills further down the production process.

Tata, an Indian conglomerate, will announce its intention to reduce UK steel production from 4.6 million tonnes a year to 3.5 million tonnes as the steel crisis worsens.

The news will come as no surprise. The Port Talbot plant is thought to be losing £1 million a week.

In November, Tata announced its European operation made a loss of £24 million and wrote down the value of its UK business by £862 million.

Tata is Britain's largest remaining steel producer. This decision means the size of its UK workforce has reduced by almost 3,000 in the last six months.

The closure of SSI's plant in Redcar in September means that 5,000 jobs have been lost across the wider industry in total - one sixth of the workforce.

The last round of cuts was announced in October since then the price of Northern Europe Hot Rolled Coil - the type of steel made at Port Talbot - has fallen from 340 Euros a tonne to 320 Euros.

Britain's steel industry blames high energy costs, the strength of the pound and a deluge of cheap Chinese imports for its plight. China is a formidable rival. Labour costs are lower, its factories state of the art, its output remarkable.

China produced excess steel capacity of 340 million tonnes in 2014, that's more than double the EU's entire annual steel demand and 30 times what Britain produces every year.

There's no proof China is selling steel at below cost but the government has urged the European Commission to investigate.

The process seems to be taking an extraordinarily long time, meanwhile what's left of Britain's steel industry continues to wither.