Liberty Speciality Steel enters administration and Government receivership

21 August 2025

Liberty Speciality Steel will enter administration following a winding down petition in the high court. Liberty Speciality Steel is now placed under the control of special managers appointed by the government’s official receiver.

Liberty employs around 1,450 people within the Speciality business and provides a wide range of specialist steel products. 

Speciality Steels provides vital steelmaking capacity in aerospace, defence and power generation. The steel made by Liberty Speciality Steels can be found in vessels including aircraft carriers, military aircraft components and defence systems, landing gear, controls and in components for oil and gas, power generation, rail and beyond. 

UK Steel Director General, Gareth Stace, said:

“UK Steel welcomes the Government’s recognition of the importance of the Liberty Speciality Steel assets and hopes that a new owner is found quickly and can inject the investment and working capital required to return production volumes to previous levels.

“The assets produce high quality, specialist steels that serve high value markets. The low production levels of recent years have left significant holes in the domestic supply chain that have been filled by imports. We hope to see these holes quickly filled by UK-made steel.

“The Government must continue to push on trade defence and reducing the burden of energy costs so that the Speciality Steels business, and the rest of the UK steel ecosystem, is sustainable, and steel workers will in future be spared from the limbo state that the employees in South Yorkshire have endured.”

Contact details  

Louise Young, Campaigns and Engagement Manager, UK Steel 

07388 370176 | Lyoung@makeuk.org 

Liberty Steel UK: 

• Liberty Steel UK produces a wide range of long and flat products; hot rolled and cold finished bar, merchant bar, rebar, billets, blooms, ingots, plate, hot rolled coil, cold rolled coil, narrow strip, precision strip, hollow sections, pipe, semi-finished products and powder metals.
• Their steel is used in: aerospace, construction, infrastructure, oil & gas, power generation, automotive, marine and yellow goods.

 Liberty Speciality Steel: 

• Speciality narrow strip steel: available from low carbon and free-cutting steels to high carbon, alloy and stainless steels.
• Engineering Bar: offering bright drawing, bar turning, cut pieces and heat treatment including stress relieving (or similar) for automotive forging.
• Steel & Bar: includes primary and secondary EAF steelmaking, vacuum degassing, ingot casting, continuous casting, bar and coil rolling, and bar processing & inspection.
• Stocksbridge High Value Manufacturing: Offering VIM steelmaking, VAR and ESR re-melting, primary rolling, finishing, stockholding and machined components.

 National security: 

• The Royal United Security Institute’s (RUSI) paper, At the Crux: UK Steel Risk in the Energy Transition, 2023, noted that: “Although the UK is a major outlier in terms of the small size of its steel production, it has until now managed to maintain a notable presence in most product segments, which is important for the ongoing functioning and resilience of the economy. Further loss of capacity would leave segments of the economy entirely reliant on imports, in some cases from single international suppliers.”
• The report goes on to note that: “Loss of capacity at a large scale might take decades to recover, if it is recoverable at all, because of the loss of supporting infrastructure and expertise.”

 Defence: 

• The Defence Select Committee report ‘Ready for War?’, February 2024, identified a pressing need to strengthen domestic production capacity across the board.
• UK Steel’s Defence Procurement Position Paper, May 2024, noted that: despite its criticality as the building block material for many of our military assets, the MOD does not currently treat steel as a ‘strategic asset’ requiring support and protection in procurement decisions, despite the security implications of offshoring steel supplies, as identified by RUSI.

About UK Steel: UK Steel is the trade association for the UK steel industry. It represents all the country’s steelmakers and most downstream steel processors. The UK steel sector:  

• Produced 4Mt of crude steel in 2024 and supplied 35% of the UK’s annual demand of 8.1Mt
• Employs 36,800 people directly in the UK and supports a further 46,000 in supply chains
• The median steel sector salary is £39,245, 24% higher than the UK national median and 33% higher than the regional median in Wales, Yorkshire, and Humberside, where its jobs are concentrated
• Directly contributes £1.7 billion to UK GVA and supports a further £2.2 billion
• Directly contributes £3.1 billion to the UK’s balance of trade
• 96% of steel used in construction and infrastructure in the UK is recovered and recycled to be used again and again

For further information about the steel industry, please see the 2025 press pack, Why the UK needs a strong steel sector or the 2025 UK Steel Key Statistics report.