‘Modest’ job losses at Corby’s Tata Steel plant as as Port Talbot reels from news of blast furnace closures

Corby’s Tata Steel site will face job losses after the closure of Port Talbot’s blast furnaces, the company has confirmed this afternoon (Friday, January 19).

The firm announced today that there will be about 2,800 job losses across its business as it drastically alters the way it makes steel. An unknown number of those will be in Corby.

Traditional blast furnaces at the Welsh plant will be replaced with greener electric arc furnaces which will use UK scrap as their raw material.

The steel train from Port Talbot brings coil to Corby’s Weldon Road plant every morning, which is then used to produce tubes.

The changes mean that during a four-year transition period, the materials used in Corby will likely have to be imported.

Speaking to the Northants Telegraph this afternoon, a company spokesman said: “The majority of the jobs will be lost in Port Talbot.

“We will know more when consultation with staff starts next week but every site will have some job losses.

"We believe the impact on jobs at most of the downstream sites will be modest.”

He said that it was hoped that some of the job losses at Corby could be absorbed by not filling vacancies or by voluntary redundancies and that there would be no significant strategic changes at the tube works.

It will take four years before the electric arc furnace system is in operation and during that time it’s thought that Tata will import that 30-tonne blocks that it currently casts at the Port Talbot, which ultimately become Corby steel tubes.

"The downstream sites will be kept supplied during the transition,” said the spokesman.

Back in 1980, 10,000 steelmaking jobs were lost overnight in Corby when the works closed down, leaving just the tube making plant in Weldon Road.

One Corby steelworker today said there was huge sympathy among workers. He said: “We know what they’re going through in Port Talbot because our own fathers went through this in the 80s.

“We feel really great solidarity with them.

"The management haven’t been able to tell us if jobs are going to be affected in Corby but we’re not really thinking about that so much at the moment. Not with what’s happened to our colleagues. It’s really awful.”