The Nationalisation Bill sits as the third doctrinal layer in a three-layer settlement for UK steel: (1) emergency control, (2) strategic envelope, (3) permanent acquisition power.
The bottom layer is the Steel Industry (Special Measures) Act 2025 1, a fast-tracked statute that gave the Secretary of State direction powers but not ownership. The NAO's March 2026 investigation 2 is the doctrinal hinge: it finds the Government spent £377m at Scunthorpe with no exit strategy and concluded that DBT 'intervened without a clear exit strategy', and recommends that the steel strategy 'minimise the need for further emergency interventions'. That is the explicit policy logic for converting time-limited direction powers into a standing transfer power.
The middle layer is the UK Steel Strategy (CP 1532) 34, laid alongside parallel WMSs HCWS1419 5 and HLWS1425 6 on 19 March 2026. The Strategy supplies the public-interest content the Bill's gateway test will operationalise: national security, critical national infrastructure, support for the economy (per the King's Speech briefing 7). It also names the funding envelope (£2.5bn) and the parallel trade-measure track (new tariff-rate quotas from 1 July 2026, with 50% out-of-quota rate) — important to distinguish doctrinally, because trade remedies and nationalisation are separate instruments addressing different vectors of the same problem.
The top layer is the proposed Bill itself, with three operative components per the King's Speech briefing 7: (a) a power to transfer ownership of steel undertakings, by share or property transfer; (b) a public-interest test as the statutory gateway, with an 'indicative list' of factors on the face of the Bill; (c) a compensation regime to be set out in regulations after Royal Assent, with independently assessed compensation determined by a valuer.
Two cross-cutting layers will engage on any actual use. First, the National Security and Investment Act 2021 89 would govern any contemporaneous private-sector acquisition or change of control during a transfer process — and the public-interest test in the new Bill is conceptually adjacent to (but legally distinct from) the NSI 'national-security' call-in test. Second, the subsidy control regime applies to any post-transfer public funding of a nationalised entity, as the 2024 Tata Steel SAU referral [62080 analogue] illustrates.
What the Bill cannot do is dispense with Article 1 Protocol 1 ECHR scrutiny on compulsory acquisition; an ECHR memorandum compatible with the s.19 HRA 1998 declaration will be required at introduction. Lord Stockwood made the equivalent s.19(1)(a) declaration on the Industry and Exports (Financial Assistance) Bill [docpk=195067] — the same drafting team and Lords minister are likely to discharge the equivalent function here.