Nuclear investment will unlock the prize of growth
The new Labour government can generate economic growth and high-quality jobs by investing in new nuclear projects. The industry is primed to deliver investment and opportunity to the places that helped put Labour into power.
New nuclear is one of the best ways to create good, long term jobs and drive sustainable growth in the places that put their trust in Labour at the recent election.
The industry today provides a blueprint for broad-based prosperity right across Britain, as well as the essential foundation of clean, reliable, sovereign power for our future energy system. The industry sustains 87,000 jobs in the UK, 85 per cent of them outside London and the South East, and 40 per cent of them in the most deprived areas of the country. The average nuclear worker adds more than £100,000 in value to the UK economy each year, nearly twice the national average. Power station workers command wages two or three times the local going rate, and every pound spent by the nuclear industry generates double that through the multiplier effect.1
The places where nuclear is strong are also the places who put the Labour Party into government. Hartlepool on Teesside, Heysham on Morecambe Bay, Torness in East Lothian, and Sizewell on the Suffolk Coast host all our operational nuclear power stations, and all were Labour gains at the last election. The Cumbrian coast employs more nuclear workers than any other: those constituencies are Labour, as are supply chain centres in Warrington and Bristol, Derby and Stoke. They are all looking to Labour to deliver.
The first thing the party can do to deliver is to get Sizewell C to a Final Investment Decision. Nuclear jobs are surging in this country: we have added nearly 30,000 in the last four years alone. They are surging from the impetus of Hinkley Point C, which sustains tens of thousands of jobs across the country, but also on the expectation that the industry will build a replica station at Sizewell C.
That project would generate historic investment for Suffolk and life-changing opportunities for young people there, but it is more than that. It means work for pipe makers and fabricators in Wrexham, Teesside and Tyneside. It means contracts for engineers in Glasgow, Warrington and Workington, and it means orders for Welsh steel. In all, 70,000 jobs will flow from that one project, and tens of billions of pounds of economic activity.
Our ambition, however, should go beyond just one more project to a full programme of nuclear construction. It should embrace a fleet of Small Modular Reactors, another large-scale station at Wylfa in North Wales, and a plan to convert ex-coal sites bereft of industry into nuclear sites that are thriving again. If we do that, we could create 200,000 new jobs and all but eliminate our reliance on burning gas to generate power. The more reactors we build, the better we will get at nuclear construction. While building the first new nuclear for a generation, we are also building workforce experience, proj e c t management expertise, supply chain capability and everything we need to deliver clean power for net-zero and energy security that will benefit the next project, and all future projects, as part of a coherent and clear programme.
Nuclear is then ideally positioned to help secure the future of our country’s energy and the future of so many communities across the country at the same time. That is an opportunity worth seizing for a prize that is Labour’s for the winning.
1. Oxford Economics, “Delivering Value: The Economic Impact of the Civil Nuclear Industry”, January 2023. https://www.niauk.org/wp-content/ uploads/2023/01/Delivering-Value_Economic-Impact-Civil-Nuclear.pdf.
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