LONDON — British ministers have two months before an influx of cheap foreign imports wipes out the domestic steel market, an executive at Britain’s largest steel producer has warned.

“We’ve basically got eight weeks to save the British steel industry. I know it sounds like a radical statement to make, but I think we are really there,” Russell Codling, director of markets and business development at Tata Steel UK, told MPs on Tuesday.

The government “needs to take similar levels of sweeping action in the way in which the EU and the U.S. is choosing to take,” Codling told lawmakers on the Business and Trade Committee.

With the U.K.’s existing steel safeguards regime due to expire in June, ministers are consulting on new measures to protect the sector from cheaper imports from China and other countries.

Codling said ministers should look to the EU where officials are planning to halve the tariff-free steel quota while increasing tariff rates to 50 percent, matching the higher duties imposed by the U.S. last year.

U.K. ministers also need to “halve the quotas that are in position as they stand at the moment,” Codling said. “Otherwise, we’re just left exposed as the dumping ground of the world for the excess amount of steel,” he added.

U.K. Trade Secretary Peter Kyle is expected to head to Brussels soon to discuss a U.K. carve-out from the EU’s incoming steel tariffs. The steel sector is “better served by the EU, America, and the U.K. working collaboratively, cooperatively, and respectfully together,” Kyle told reporters last week. 

Britain’s Steel Strategy, which is expected to set out the new regime replacing safeguards, has been delayed until early this year as the government works to resolve the future of the Chinese-owned firm British Steel.

“If the UK doesn’t act, we won’t have a steel industry not many months from now,” said Codling. “If we need to act by the first of July, then we need announcements,” he said. “The market needs to be able to understand what’s happening and it doesn’t.”