Energy conference debate: What does industrial strategy mean for energy workers?
One of the highlights of the Prospect Energy Sector conference in Birmingham on Wednesday, 11 June was a panel debate looking at industrial strategy and what this would mean for energy workers.
The panel debate at the Prospect Energy Sector Conference 2025
Chaired by the Sector Vice-President, Richard Clatworthy, the speakers on the panel were:
- Scott Young, Renewable UK
- Josh Emden, Senior Research Fellow, IPPR
- Paul Gallagher, Operations Director, National Grid
- Jamie Reed, Director of Socio-Economics, NDA
Each panellist was asked to make opening remarks before the session was opened up for Q&As with the conference delegates. Here are their verbatim opening remarks, which have been edited for length and clarity.
Scott Young, Renewable UK
My day-to-day work is principally looking at the skills agenda for offshore wind. So, looking at matters around our work on attraction, recruitment, and retention in the sector. We think about how we develop career pathways to support the energy transition, and importantly, our work with the trade unions.
Scott Young, RenewableUK, (centre)
To some extent, the issue of the industrial strategy can seem a little bit abstract from my perspective. But representing a sector where, within the Clean Power Action Plan, offshore wind is expected to triple by 2030 in terms of current generation, and onshore wind to double in that same period, it’s obviously critical.
We need that industrial strategy to deliver for the sector, and therefore also the workforce. For me, really, what it boils down to is ensuring that developers, investors, and suppliers to our sector can plan, construct, and implement their projects as quickly as possible.
Number one is commitment. The Clean Power Plan means that by 2030, wind energy will represent around 70% of the UK’s electricity generation capacity. Last year, it accounted for a third of the UK’s energy needs, overtaking gas for the first time.
So, I think we must put renewables on a par with some of the leading sectors – such as defence, and so on. I think that commitment from government has to be there. It’s a capital-intensive sector with long lead times to develop projects, but it can obviously be a big source of growth, jobs, and economic benefit to the UK.
Having clean power and wind at the heart of the industrial strategy can signal to industry, training providers, suppliers looking to diversify, and to communities and job seekers that we’re here to stay.
We’re now the incumbent part of the energy sector; we are not immature disruptors anymore. Aligned with that, we need to look at how we deliver long-term social and economic dividends.
Collaboration and co-investment are the other two elements that I would highlight. A year ago, we launched something called the Industrial Growth Plan that identified potential sectors, or technologies, for growth in the offshore wind supply chain right across the UK. It outlined the steps by which we secure private sector investment to develop some of those technologies, so floating offshore wind, ports investment, and the like. Obviously, we need government support as well.
Briefly, let me mention communities. I think that is the other critical thing that needs to feature in the industrial strategy. Our sector offers big employment opportunities, and good quality ones at that, in many rural and coastal communities up and down the country. So, I think having an industrial strategy that places communities at its heart is critical.
Josh Emden, Senior Research Fellow, IPPR
The overarching message is to discuss, from the perspective of workers, what needs to be seen in an industrial strategy in terms of the workforce.
Josh Emden, IPPR
As Scott said, certainty is absolutely crucial, both for investors and for the workforce as well, in the future. This includes the detail of what goes into the industrial strategy – what’s being built, where, why, and when.
But there’s also a huge transition that we’re expecting from the workforce at large. Research done in 2019 from the LSE showed that across the economy, about 6.3 million workers are expected to be affected by the net-zero transition. That’s not just in the energy sector; that’s across the whole piece.
Out of that, 3 million are expected to have high demand for their skills, and 3 million will be expected to undertake some kind of upskilling or retraining to move from one job to another. That’s a huge number of people that will be affected, and there needs to be a corresponding workforce plan to account for that change. I want to address three critical components in that.
The first is understanding the workers that are in the existing workforce. What’s going to happen to them? What skills do they have? How transferable are those skills, and what could they move into?
Then there’s the question of the new labour market entrants. What’s the demand for skills, and what are the gaps that need to be filled by new people coming into the labour market?
There’s also a third group, which is what happens to those that don’t have those transferable skills? Who are working in high-carbon industries, who might not be able to move into a green job and might find themselves without a job. Those are the three categories we need to consider.
I think our reflections from the work that we’ve been doing is that, so far, the government is starting to get an understanding of the first two categories. But less so when it comes to support for workers who are moving out of the sector.
We’ve done a little bit of work on this. We looked a little bit at some workers across different gas sectors: upstream oil and gas, power stations, gas networks, gas boiler makers. What we wanted to ask is, not just how many of these workers can move into green jobs, but how many of these workers could move into other jobs that are, I guess, compatible with a net-zero future. The way to think of that is, we don’t want to be recommending people moving from one high-carbon job to another high-carbon job.
Yes, we want to help workers move if they have transferable skills. But we also want to support workers to move into other climate-compatible jobs if there’s not an obvious green sector that they can move into.
Paul Gallagher, Operations Director, National Grid Transmission
I’d like to talk about the economic importance of the energy networks and how they will develop and grow over the next few years. Plus, I’d like to talk about what we’re doing to support the workforce; and what we’re doing to support the development of that workforce and the growth of the workforce that is desperately needed.
Paul Gallagher, National Grid
Networks play a critical part in the government’s growth mission and that will be massively underpinned by the industrial strategy. They obviously provide power to businesses and homes across the UK but are critical for the connection of all the new green energy generation, increased demand and new industries.
We’re proposing to spend about £35 billion on investment of our networks over the next five years well, which is the most we’ve spent by a factor of three, and that will enable double the power flow across the network. It’s a massive transformation.
I’ve worked in National Grid for 33 years and I would say that I’ve seen more change in the last two or three years than I saw in the first 30 and that is going to continue. We’ve talked [on the panel] about reskilling workers, but I am also having to reskill myself.
If can achieve what we want with our network investments, we believe that will lead to the development of around 55,000 jobs across the UK economy over the next decade. It’s critical, not just for us, not just for those generation connections, but also for enabling workers, and we pride ourselves on the work we do with our supply chain to enable that.
It’s clear that our business needs to expand, every other network business needs to expand, and every other energy company needs to expand to enable the clean power and mission growth.
We’ve doubled our entry programme over the last five years. My team had about 1,000 two years ago; we’re now at 1,200 and we’re looking to get to 1,500 in the next 18 months. That’s huge growth in just one area of the business.
It’s a challenge finding those people but we we’re looking to recruit around 2,300 apprentices and graduates between now and 2030. That brings huge opportunity but also lots of training and development challenges.
We’ve been working across the industry to lead accelerated apprenticeship frameworks, not just to deliver the old skills that we’ve always needed, but for the skills we’ll need in the future. Part of that is re-thinking how we accredit and authorise people onto our network, but that takes a huge amount of time to achieve.
We recognise that people, as the opportunities grow in the industry, people want move around. So, we know that we’re training people for an industry, not for ourselves. An example is that we’re in the process of introducing a competency passport for line workers that allows people to move between companies.
We’re aware that growth means we need to build. We need to build new capabilities, whether it’s over lines cables, substations and all those things. We work across government, business, trade unions and other affected stakeholders, and if we all get this right, we can create a world with good, well-paid, highly skilled employment and with opportunities within networks, energy companies and the supply chain.
This is a huge national endeavour. We’re a critical part of it but also recognise that we’re just one cog, and it’s important that it all comes together.
Jamie Reed, Director of Socio-Economics, NDA
First of all, as the NDA Director of Socio-Economics, what do I do? We’ve got 17 legacy nuclear sites around the UK that are in the process of being decommissioned. With 17,000 workers in the NDA group, my job is to make sure that the transition is dealt with in an equitable and just way as we decommission our fleet.
Jamie Reed, NDA
I think we are at the beginning of a golden age, if we want to be. Central to that, I believe, are trade unions, particularly your trade union. In January last year, I was invited to join a lobby, with Ed Miliband then Shadow Secretary of State for Energy, by Sue and her team, to help create an industrial strategy, not just for the West Cumbria community, but for the UK. I think we saw yesterday [with the investment for Sizewell C] just how successful that can be. The power of having really informed, effective unions that lean into the policy debates couldn’t be more important.
The energy sector – energy workers, I’m an energy worker – is central to everything that we want and need to do as a country. Energy policy is central to wealth creation, it’s central to economic growth, it’s central to regional regeneration, training, higher education, the transition towards net zero, and national security itself.
For a long time in the UK, we are really policy rich in this area. We have lots of progressive, exciting new policy for the UK going forward. But we’re delivery light. We’ve been delivery light for as long as I can remember. When I was listening to the exchange in the Commons yesterday about new energy policy, it’s the same arguments, that I was making as a much younger man 20 years ago in the House of Commons. Nothing’s changed.
So the job isn’t done yet for the energy worker lobby. Because I think what needs to happen next is for Prospect, GMB, Unite, everybody else involved in this sector, to lean into delivery. Without delivery, everything that we talked about for the short, medium, and long term as part of energy security in the UK, as part of our energy needs, as part of the energy transition, probably won’t happen.
But one of the most important things, I think, for the energy sector to do, is this: if there is any residual opposition to net zero, then I think the energy sector is in real difficulty.
We also need to lean into planning reform, because that’s the key to delivery. Unless we do that, the future we want to see, I think, is unlikely to appear.
Fundamentally, and finally, I don’t think the policy job is done. There still needs to be a lot of work to make sure that the future we want to see does materialise.
