Iron-y corner
British Steel , Issue 1647 A BELATED recognition that the world's sixth biggest economy needs a steel-making capability – and that parliament must be recalled to salvage it – shows what a shambles successive administrations' policy-making has been.

This might be because it has been handed over to management consultants McKinsey under a series of deals that effectively outsourced decisions on how to deal with the economic, technical and even geopolitical questions involved.

After the last government approved the sale of British Steel to Jingye of China five years ago, it brought in McKinsey on an £834,000 contract to advise on "options for the UK's steel sector". This was followed in 2021 with a £1m deal for the same thing. Then in 2022 came yet another contract, valued at £862,000.

Dual purpose
McKinsey was a heavily conflicted choice for trusted counsel. In the months leading up to the March 2020 deal, it had been working for, er, Jingye, and bending the ear of successive business secretaries Greg Clark and Andrea Leadsom at meetings, alongside the strongly state-controlled Chinese company.

As Eye 1538 put it four years ago, with concerns such as dumping from China and given McKinsey's extensive connections in the country, "the UK might do well to watch what insights China is gaining from all this".

This wasn't the Eye's first warning. In March 2020, after then business secretary Alok Sharma hailed the sale to Jingye as a "vote of confidence in the UK's steel industry" and Boris Johnson promised that the sounds of the steelworks "will ring out for decades to come", Eye 1518 pointed out that nationalisation would have been a viable option and that "dependence on China" was "the last thing Britain needs".

But with the help of the firm that advised Jingye on the deal, McKinsey, that's what Britain has been left with.

Plus ça change
Current business secretary Jonathan Reynolds said last weekend he "wouldn't put a Chinese company into our steel sector". There's one unhealthy dependence he does seem happy with, however.

Last month Reynolds appointed consultants, at a cost of £415,000, to work on the "commerciality of primary steelmaking production in the UK", providing "the evidence base to underpin subsequent policy decisions... [including] on spending up to £2.5bn in funding for the steel industry as outlined in the manifesto".

The lucky firm? Yep, McKinsey.