10 September 2026 – By 30 September, the Dutch government will decide on billions in subsidies for Tata Steel. The same administration is currently revoking the permit for the coke plant receiving that support. What is being subsidised, therefore, is not progress but legal compliance.
Tata Steel: Legal Compliance for Billions in Subsidies?
At the end of September 2025, The Hague pledged Tata Steel Nederland up to €2 billion for direct reduction and an electric arc furnace in IJmuiden. By 30 September 2026, this is supposed to become a binding agreement.
Two environmental organisations calculate that the conversion could cost the state more than €10 billion by 2045. That is a scenario produced by campaigning organisations, not a government budget figure. It does not have to be correct to be troubling.
Because the real scandal can be found in the files of the authorities themselves.
The State Is Buying Legal Compliance
Phase one of the funding replaces Tata Steel’s Blast Furnace 7 and Coke Plant 2. Coke Plant 2 is precisely the facility whose permit the provincial regulator has been revoking since May 2026. Emission limits have been exceeded for years, penalty payments have been enforced and deadlines have expired. Revocation means closure.
Since July 2026, the operator has also been facing prosecution over unlawful emissions. The presumption of innocence applies. The Hague is therefore paying for a closure that it is already enforcing as a public authority.
State aid requires an incentive effect: the company must do more than the law already requires. Here, it is doing less. The site is not supposed to become climate neutral until 2045. ETS and CBAM require 2040. What is being subsidised is delay.
Coke Plant 1, the second candidate for permit revocation, does not even appear in the agreement. The maximum possible penalty payment for years of violations amounts to less than two per cent of the pledged subsidy.
Europe Is Auctioning Off Its Industrial Sites
Tata Steel IJmuiden is not an exception. Germany has pledged around €6 billion for hydrogen based steelmaking, with France, Spain and Belgium following close behind. On top of that comes the quiet parallel subsidy of free ETS allowances. The EPP and S&D-dominated Commission has given its blessing to the CISAF framework.
This is not competition. It is an auction. The winner is not the best operation, but the deepest public purse. Smaller Member States lose their plants to the fiscal firepower of the larger ones. All while PwC finds not a single competitive scenario for energy intensive primary steel production in Central Europe.
€50 for the Steelmaker, Market Price for the Machinist
The price is paid by those who were never asked. Germany’s approved industrial electricity price of €50 per megawatt hour applies to steel production, not to metal processing and mechanical engineering.
Through their taxes, SMEs finance the electricity bill of their upstream supplier and, since 1 July 2026, buy more expensive steel from that same supplier under reduced safeguard quotas. Across Europe, around 300,000 jobs in steel production receive the relief. Millions of jobs in downstream processing are expected to pay for it. Whether they want to or not.
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