There are 245 people at the Saltend Chemicals Park wondering what happens next.
INEOS has mothballed its three chemical plants there. But mothballed is not closed. The company is keeping its workforce together while it searches for cheaper gas and a route back into production.
That distinction matters. There is still something to fight for.
I have worked with Ineos for years and, as the pressure on Saltend has intensified, have been meeting the company, other businesses on the site, Ministers and regulators. I have now asked the Business Secretary for an urgent meeting and have written to the Prime Minister asking him to direct the Government response.
Because Saltend poses a question far bigger than the future of one company: can Britain remain a country in which it pays to make things?
For Ineos, the immediate problem is gas.
At Saltend, gas is not merely an energy source. It is also a feedstock — a raw material from which the chemicals are made. Its price therefore goes directly to the competitiveness of the plant.
Ineos says British gas can cost 12 times as much as in America. No amount of cost cutting can bridge that gap.
The workforce has not suddenly become less skilled. The plants have not suddenly become inefficient. The products have not ceased to be needed.
What has changed is the economics of producing them in Britain.
And these are not obscure products of marginal importance. Chemicals manufactured at Saltend go into medicines, cars, clothing, cosmetics, detergents and construction materials. Acetic anhydride produced there also has defence applications.
If Britain stops making these chemicals, we do not stop using them. We import them instead.
That also exposes one of the contradictions in our approach to carbon emissions.
Ineos says its British production has a substantially lower carbon footprint than competing production in America and China. Closing a relatively efficient British factory and importing the same product from a more carbon-intensive producer does not abolish emissions.
It exports them — along with the jobs.
Saltend has another vulnerability. It is an integrated chemicals park. The businesses there share infrastructure, energy systems and specialist services. They are not isolated factories conveniently sitting beside one another.
If a major operator disappears, costs and consequences can spread across the site.
We have already had a warning. Vivergo, next door to INEOS, employed about 160 people directly and supported many more in its supply chain. I worked with its management and workforce and pressed Ministers for a solution.
We failed to save it.
Industrial capacity is much easier to lose than recreate. A chemical plant is not merely tanks, pipes and buildings. It is engineers, technicians and operators carrying years of accumulated expertise.
Once that workforce disperses, rebuilding it is difficult and expensive.
Which is why much of the debate about “reindustrialisation” gets things backwards.
Of course Britain should compete for tomorrow’s factories, technologies and investment. The Humber should be at the front of that queue.
But there is little point celebrating a factory that might arrive in 2035 while allowing productive industrial capacity to disappear in 2026.
Keeping what works matters too.
Government cannot dictate the international gas price and it cannot order a private company to manufacture at a loss. Nor did the Government cause every increase in international energy prices.
But government is not a helpless spectator.
It decides taxes and levies. It designs industrial energy relief. It determines what support strategically important industries receive. And over the longer term it profoundly influences domestic energy supply and security.
Other countries understand this.
Germany also suffers high energy costs, but its government has concluded that allowing energy-intensive industries simply to become internationally uncompetitive imposes costs of its own. It has intervened to reduce some of the burden.
Britain need not copy Germany’s policies line by line. But we should at least recognise the same arithmetic.
The immediate task is simpler: find out whether Government and Ineos can get Saltend producing again.
That means Ministers sitting down with the company and examining every credible option while the plants, skills and workforce are still there.
There is then a larger question: how does Britain provide the abundant, secure and competitively priced energy without which an advanced industrial economy cannot function?
The Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, has put reindustrialising Britain’s regions at the heart of his economic message. Saltend offers a practical test of what that means.
Here is a major northern industrial site. It employs a highly skilled workforce. It produces goods Britain still consumes. Yet one of its biggest operators says energy costs have made production uneconomic.
If reindustrialisation means anything, that problem deserves attention at the top of Government.
That is why I am writing to the Prime Minister. I want Government to work with Ineos now to see whether these plants can restart — and then confront the wider question of whether energy-intensive manufacturing has a viable future in Britain.
The opportunity has not yet disappeared.
The plants remain. The skills remain. The 245 people who know how to run them remain.
But the window will not remain open indefinitely.
Britain says it wants investment, industrial jobs and greater economic security. Those ambitions require more than speeches about manufacturing.
We have to make it economically possible to manufacture here.
The Prime Minister says he wants to reindustrialise the North.
Saltend would be a good place to begin.
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