You give no context for your photograph of a worker cleaning a melting pot at the Salzgitter steelworks (Bringing a shine to steelworks, 8 March). To provide some background, you might like to point out to your readers that the local state of Lower Saxony holds shares in Salzgitter and also in Volkswagen. This doubtless helps ensure that the steel maker gets plenty of offers from the car group. By contrast, Port Talbot’s largest car customer is Vauxhall, which, according to the APPG report, buys 70% of steel requirements from this plant. The purchase of Opal/Vauxhall by Peugeot, which is owned by the French government, might well result in French steel mills supplying more to this group at the expense of Port Talbot.
Graham Cooper
Church Stratton, Shropshire
- This letter was corrected on 14 March 2017. Shares in Salzgitter are held by the state of Lower Saxony, not North Rhine-Westphalia, as originally stated.
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