Inside Industry: Steel alive and kicking at Tata's Wednesfield Steelpark

The name over the door has changed, and the current factory was built on the site of a previous tube works, but Wednesfield Steelpark is living breathing proof that the British steel industry is alive and well.

It may face intense competition from cheap Chinese imports, but steel from Wednesfield feeds into every part of modern life, from office furniture and supermarket shelves to cars and electrified railways.

Current owner Tata Steel Europe, part of the Indian business combine that also owns Jaguar Land Rover, is in the process of mulling over seven bids after deciding to pull out of the UK earlier this year.

That decision has focused attention on the company's huge steelworks, at Port Talbot in South Wales, but for hundreds of Tata workers steel is still a core industry here in the Black Country.

More than 500 of them work at the four plants that make up the Wednesfield site, processing the steel for use by some of the biggest names in British industry, as well as a fair few foreign ones as well.

BMW makes its Minis with steel parts made at Wednesfield and, from later this year, a brand new laser-welding line will be churning out steel blanks that will go to the factories in Germany to be turned into pressings for BMW 5 and 7 series saloons.

At the same time Jaguar Land Rover, and many of its suppliers such as Stadco in Telford and Gestamp in Cannock, all take steel parts from Wednesfield.

The factory's automotive service centre has even adapted some of its production lines to handle aluminium for Jaguar's new lightweight saloons, like the XE.

While the future of the company is being decided in Mumbai and Whitehall, the men and women at Wednesfield Steelpark have a job to do; making and delivering the steel parts demanded by companies up and down the UK.

"It's business as usual for us," said Paul Steele, managing director at the Steelpark.

"We are investing in a new welding line, taking fresh orders and delivering for our customers. We have just had the busiest May in eight years.

"We are hugely encouraged that, despite the uncertainty, our customers have stuck with us. And that is because we continue to deliver. And we are all confident that there is a future for this business and for British steel. There may be a new name over the door at some stage, but in the meantime we carry on with the job of serving our customers.

"We get an weekly update from Tata, and the board is currently considering the bids and drawing up a shortlist."

For Paul Steele and his team at the Wednesfield Steelpark there is no question that the UK needs its own steel industry.

As part of Tata Steel UK's 'downstream' business, they take the raw steel plates and the rolls of sheet metal produced in South Wales and begin the manufacturing process.

That can be as simple as cutting out regular sheets, often bought by smaller factories, to making the complex shapes, or blanks, that are later pressed into shape to become car doors or body panels.

Every day more than 1,000 tons of steel, in a huge variety of shapes and sizes, is despatched on lorries from Wednesfield to companies across the West Midlands and the wider UK.

Wednesfield Steelpark, covering 50 acres, is the biggest steel-processing site in the UK, capable of handling up to 750,000 tons of steel every year. It employs around 525 people, rising to more than 600 when contract staff are included.

The Steelpark was built in Wednesfield in 1996, two years after the closure of the former tubes works. Why Wednesfield? Paul Steele explained: "50 per cent of the country's steel users are within 50 miles radius of this site. As well as JCB and JLR, that includes a large part of the construction market and the heart of the UK's manufacturing and metal-bashing."

As well as international customers like Indesit, GKN, Nissan and Honda, buying thousands of tons of steel a year, it supplies hundreds of firms across the West Midlands, from Metsec and Hadley in the Black Country to small workshops taking just a few tons a year.

And it is also at a heart of a fast-response delivery network: "We can take orders up to 4pm or 5pm in the afternoon for delivery at 6am the next day. We need to be able to turn work around quickly."

It is made up of four separate businesses. The automotive centre is the biggest single part of the site, with around 150 people working across the three shifts from Monday to Saturday turning out welded blanks for Mini, JLR and, soon, BMW in Germany, among others.

It is a tribute to the value that the site can add to a piece of steel that its work is in demand in Germany, often seen as Europe's premier engineering nation. In particular BMW want what are called 'tailor-welded blanks'. These are sheets of metal of different thicknesses and strengths, laser welded together and then cut into shapes that can be made into body parts for cars.

Lee Coates, a 30-year industry veteran and director of the automotive centre, said: "It is this kind of demand that led us to invest in another laser-welding line. It is due to start producing parts for BMW in November."

The demand for the Steelpark's work means around three-quarters of the new lines output is already sold before it is even installed. Meanwhile, the auto centre is churning out more than 1,000 car parts every shift.

Each part is laser-welded by one of the ABB robots and then inspected by a second robot – quality is a key selling point for the all the steel produced at Wednesfield.

Like the rest of the facility, it is running three shifts around the clock and that means more than one million car parts a year, just from one part of the Steelpark site.

Shift leader Mark Harpin has worked at the Steelpark for half his 36 years, starting almost straight from school. The Wednesfield father of five is the third generation of his family to work on the site. He says he'd like to see one of his youngsters become the fourth generation.

At the other end of the site, the Steelpark's profiling centre turns slabs of steel into heavy-duty parts for so-called yellow goods – construction and mining equipment made by JCB, Caterpillar and the steel wheels company Titan at Cookley, near Kidderminster – cutting the metal with computer-controlled gas and plasma machines. Steve Tromans, the site's head of plate and profiling, explained it also made the overhead gantries in its electrification of the railway network, and the base plates that fix them to the ground.

Steve is among those who worked at the former profiling site at Cradley, which was merged with the Wednesfield site as part of a major reorganisation three years ago.

The Light Gauge Decoiling centre takes rolls of thinner steel and turns it into sheets. Much of it is tailor made for Rittal, which uses it to make cabinets to hold data storage equipment, supplying the likes of Facebook and Microsoft.

And then there are the special one-off jobs. Commercial manager Ben Spinner explained: "We supply two of the biggest oil drum manufacturers in the UK: Ramsden in Tipton and Stokes in West Bromwich. We supply around 6,000 tons of steel to them a year, but it needs to be 'dry', without protective grease."

That makes the steel vulnerable to rusting. "It means we have to process it as quickly as possible.

"We have probably less than 48 hours to get it from the steelworks to the customers. Being able to do that if your steel comes from the Continent or the Far East just wouldn't be practical."

The Light Gauge Slitting Centre next door is a high-volume, low-cost operation turning coils of steel into narrower coils for customers that include the Royal Mint. Most of the small change in our pockets and purses started out as a coil of thin steel, sliced up at Wednesfield.

Paul Steele commented: "We just bought a new ironing board, made by Minky, who are one of our customers. So I was able to point out to the family something else we helped make."

It's a habit among many of the workers, a point of pride at being able to point out products made using their steel.

Part of that pride is their skill.

Richard Harding, the operations manager in the slitting centre, said the business of uncoiling steel, slitting it and then recoiling was 'a bit of black art'.

"The centre of a coil will always be slightly thicker than the edges.

"So you have to take that into account as you coil it up again.

"That takes experience and skill. We give our trainees their theoretical knowledge, but we put them with the senior operators as their mentors. They have a real understanding of the steel that they work with."