Government must turn the Industrial Strategy into a green jobs blueprint
4 min read
Support for ‘frontier’ clean energy technologies sits at the heart of the government’s new sector plan. Carla Denyer, Green Party Spokesperson for Energy and Net Zero, urges Parliament to go further by backing her Energy and Employment Rights Bill to safeguard workers during the transition
Bold leadership on industry, energy and the green transition has never been more needed in this country. We are running out of time to prevent the most catastrophic impacts of the climate crisis, with communities across the country already suffering from the effects, from extreme heat to flooding. Meanwhile, we are haemorrhaging jobs as North Sea oil and gas dries up, industries are left to decline and big corporations pull out of towns and cities across the UK, leaving workers and their communities high and dry.
And yet successive governments, instead of taking decisive action, have simply lurched from crisis to crisis, acting only when it’s already too late. Take the scramble to save jobs at Grangemouth oil refinery − where the Prime Minister pledged £200m of funding to boost investment only after 400 workers had been made redundant. The very definition of too little, too late.
Sadly, the government’s Industrial Strategy looks like another missed opportunity to make a clear, proactive plan for the transition away from high-carbon industries towards the green economy of the future. There’s investment in skills, which is welcome, and the move towards clean sources of power like wind and solar offers huge opportunities for good-quality jobs in future-proofed industries.
But the missing part of the jigsaw is the pathway needed for us to harness the wealth of skills and experience that exists in industries like North Sea oil and gas, and use them to power the UK’s transition to a green energy superpower. An estimated three million workers across the UK will need to reskill and retrain to make the most of the green jobs boom.1 They should be supported to do so, and fossil fuel giants must shoulder the cost of this.
“An estimated three million workers across the UK will need to reskill and retrain to make the most of the green jobs boom”
My Energy Jobs Bill, which I tabled in Parliament a few months ago, sets out this path. The bill would compel the government to set a timeline for the phasing out of oil and gas production, and to make a comprehensive plan to harness the skills and expertise of workers in high-carbon industries, particularly oil and gas, to turn the UK into a clean energy superpower.
It includes a furlough-style scheme to guarantee a proportion of wages for oil and gas workers after leaving the industry, supporting them while they retrain and find new employment − and it would establish a training fund for those workers to help them reskill. Crucially, this would be funded by a levy on oil and gas companies, which are currently abandoning their workers after spending years making obscene profits from polluting our environment.
The bill would also require GB Energy’s investments to support UK jobs. The manufacture and assembly of wind turbines is where the majority of job opportunities in wind are,2 but a typical North Sea turbine contains more than three times as much material from abroad as it does from UK manufacturers. These missed opportunities cost us up to £30bn from 2008 to 20223 − we can’t afford to keep losing out.
We have already seen decades of missed opportunities on this, leaving communities hollowed out and people forced out of work. This government must act fast to turn the corner and put Britain first in the race towards the economy of the future – my Energy Jobs Bill shows how this could be done.
Carla Denyer is Green Party MP for Bristol Central
References
- Place-Based Climate Action Network; Tracking local employment in the green economy: The PCAN Just Transition Jobs Tracker
- Greenpeace; Autumn Statement Briefing, 2024
- TGS; UK falling behind in offshore wind manufacturing, threatening Net Zero goals, 2024
