Britain's brick and tile manufacturing industries could be devastated if the EU's scheme for cutting carbon emissions is not made fair, a senior MEP has cautioned.Anthea McIntyre, Conservative MEP for the West Midlands, issued the warning in Brussels at a meeting of the European Parliament's Ceramics Forum to discuss the next phase of the EU's Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), which obliges industry to pay for its carbon emissions, over and above any free allocation.
She called for common sense over the principle of "tiering" in the scheme, which applies differing carbon tariffs according to the perceived risk of the industry sending production abroad.
"The so-called tiering approach cannot be implemented without creating unfair distortions of competition," she said.
Miss McIntyre, Conservative employment spokesman in the parliament and vice-chairman of the forum, pointed to 1,500 ceramics jobs in the West Midlands at installations covered by the scheme.
She said: "In the Employment Committee I spend time looking at how we can "re-shore" jobs - bring jobs back to Europe that have gone abroad. So I am very concerned that we are going to see the manufacture of bricks and roof tiles increasingly going abroad rather than coming home.
"I visited Dreadnought Tiles in my constituency last week and was really impressed with all I saw and especially the investment they have made in energy efficient manufacturing.
"Dreadnought have cut their carbon emissions by 20 per cent since 2005. We should be incentivising not penalising them.
"But tiering could well put companies like Dreadnought Tiles out of business. The costs of buying all their carbon after 2027, will exceed their profits.
"Britain needs to build 200,000 new homes every year. Let's build them with locally produced bricks and tiles.
"There is a great opportunity to be able to invest in extra and energy efficient manufacturing capacity for construction products. Why don't we look at carbon emissions spread over the lifetime of the product? Bricks and roof tiles last for a hundred years.
"We need a common sense approach to EU-ETS and we must make sure that by de-carbonising the EU we are not de-industrialising it too."