Gradually, then suddenly

What do we want? People for Net Zero! When do we want them? Ermm...

Lots of learned folk are busy counting on their fingers and toes, estimating how many people we’ll need to get the UK super tanker turned in the right direction for Net Zero, let alone moored up to the jetty. But when some kind of consensus is reached, our guess is there will be quite a few shortfalls around some of the critical technical roles.

There will be the major infrastructure projects: in wind, for nuclear power stations, and to sort out our to-be National Grid. Alongside that, there’s all the heating and energy efficiency for the built environment, from domestic fabric first retrofit projects through to new heating, energy storage and micro-generation schemes. All this before we even start to think about mobility, nature and agriculture, and the rest.

Any further delays caused by hopscotching around the big decisions will simply result in the big labour market lumps becoming, well, bigger and lumpier. As Hemingway wrote, it happens in two ways: gradually, then suddenly.

Image: Reddit

But what do we know so far about how many people we’ll need? Well, someone we feel has a good handle on this is Professor Dave Reay, who chaired an expert advisory group for the Climate Change Committee and produced a report on Skills and Net Zero that we’ve referred to a few times on The Green Edge. The number of green jobs quoted there is somewhere between 135,000 and 725,000, and when we talked to Prof Reay a few weeks back he was careful to point out that these are net­ new jobs. He told us: “That ‘net’ is crucial; we hear quite a lot about the green or Net Zero transition meaning risks to jobs, but actually the net effect is an increase in jobs. And that’s a huge opportunity”.

That same report goes a stage further and makes estimates of how many people in the current workforce are in jobs that will affect – or be affected by – the green transition:

About 20% of workers are currently in sectors that will have a core role to play in the Net Zero transition, by growing, phasing down, or redirecting their processes towards low-carbon [and] a further 20% of workers are in sectors with a role to play by enabling others to support the transition to Net Zero.

Source: Skills and Net Zero (CCC, May 2023)

We’ve got our fingers and toes out now: that’s around 13 million people!

But how do these numbers relate to the whole UK labour market and the way it’s moving and shaking? Well, in the project we’re doing right now with City & Guilds (did we mention we’re working with City & Guilds? - we may have done), we’ve had the privilege of talking to many knowledgeable people, including Prof Reay up there in Edinburgh and Tony Wilson, Director of the Institute for Employment Studies (IES) down there in Brighton. Tony told us the labour market is like bathtubs and buckets. He said: “If you imagine the labour market is a bathtub with the plughole open and the taps running, then the bath is always pretty much full. In recessions we tend to see more water coming out of the bath and a bit less goes in, while in recovery the taps are running and perhaps there’s less water coming out through the plughole because people might stay in work for a little longer.

“With [the estimated number of new green jobs], it's like pouring one or two buckets into the bath. The replacement and displacement of some jobs, and the addition of new green jobs won't fundamentally alter the depth of the bathtub. It will be a small but really important contribution”.

But the bathtub itself is changing, and it’s interesting and perhaps even a little alarming to look through the slides from Tony’s presentation at an IES Director’s Retreat earlier this year. Participation in Britain’s labour force is stagnant, with nearly a million fewer post-Covid than if the trend of the last thirty years had continued. There are half a million fewer young people in the labour force than a decade ago, with lower numbers of incoming migrants – the effect of Brexit, of course – and more people with long-term health conditions. And, perhaps most scary of all, an ageing population that means whereas thirty years ago there were four people of working age for every pensioner, in thirty years’ time there will be just two.

And, according to Tony, these are permanent, structural changes. As he said when we talked to him a month or two back: “We’ve had three years of turmoil and if anyone thinks things are going to go back to normal, they’ll be waiting a very long time”.

An inevitable effect of all this is, of course, competition for talent. Anyone who’s played the ‘it could be you’ phone lottery at 8am for an appointment with their GP or tried to get a decent meal for less than a hundred pounds a head down (and sometimes not even then) in Dorset will know how that plays out. And there are big moves afoot: the NHS Long Term Workforce Plan (June 2023) covers the next 15-years and will move the Service to the point where 1 in 11 workers will be engaged in care and health roles, presumably also including care of the creaky old Service itself. On top of that we have all the other churn related to the advances of the information age, automation, post-Brexit trade, home-working (how long will that truly remain, we wonder) and the geopolitical changes involved in building resilient supply chains, especially around critical materials like minerals for the burgeoning battery industry.

Image: TGE

At some stage, we feel, post-Brexit notwithstanding, the m-word has to come into the reckoning. After all, Brexited Britain still has in-migrants, with almost 300,000 skilled work visas granted by HM Gov over the last 12 months to help grow the UK economy (tagline: It Matters More Here).

But how strategic could in-migration be? A quick skim of the devolved administration skills strategies shows the Welsh Plan for Employability and Skills (March 2022) bemoaning lower immigration as one of the reasons for a reduction in the Welsh labour force in 2021, but – as far as we could see – not actively planning to reverse the trend. Plenty of stuff on migration support for humanitarian reasons (which we wholeheartedly support) but not much visible for shoring up the workforce. We see a similar picture for Northern Ireland.

But Skills Development Scotland (SDS), with its (more recent) strategic plan seems to have its eye on the skilled in-migrant ball. While acknowledging that ‘the potential for in-migration to counter natural population decline is impacted by Brexit’, it nonetheless plans to…

…contribute to Scotland’s ambition to grow the size and diversity of the available talent pool [through] actions to attract and retain talent, including the development and implementation of a Talent Attraction and Migration Service for Scotland.

Source: SDS

Of course, this all refers to skills and jobs across the board, not just those in shades of green. Weather and how this will translate into an in-migration strategy as part of SDS’s Climate Emergency Skills Action Plan (CESAP), we have yet to see. In a similar vein, though, we’ll be looking at the extent to which the Green Jobs Delivery Group’s upcoming (in early 2024, we hope) Net Zero Workforce Plan might signpost in-migration as a viable approach for the Net Zero implementation, in certain areas at least. Also, the extent to which it takes heed of the observation made in the aforementioned CCC Skills and Net Zero report that ‘extending and enhancing the UK’s ‘Graduate Route’ offer for overseas students could help to avoid acute skills shortages, such as in research and development for Net Zero’. And let’s not forget the other side of the migration coin, that talent can (and does) move out as well as in. The same CCC report recommends:

DESNZ should assess the potential impact of overseas Net Zero policy on international talent attraction and retention in the UK and, working with DSIT, DfE and the Migration Advisory Committee, provide an updated approach to schemes such as Global Talent and Graduate Route that overtly addresses the skills needs of the UK Net Zero transition and that safeguards capacity in source nations.

Source: CCC

This is by no means unprecedented in the world labour market. We’ve commented in previous posts on the bilateral agreement German has made with India for bringing in the latter’s Suryamitra skills programme into the former’s solar industry. Meanwhile, Canada is looking to see whether it needs to beef up its policies to attract more digital nomads, possibly even to support its Digital Action Plan for a sustainable future.

Who knows, maybe the idea of the Green Skills Passport, just launched by Microsoft and EY, might inspire an international programme that spreads green talent around the world and ensures every country, not just us oldies here in the UK, gets to Net Zero on time.