Watching from the Promenade
Why coastal towns can sit beside the green economy without young people finding a clear route into its jobs — and what needs to change. Our Top Read post for May.
It’s kind of ironic, isn’t it. We can stand on the edge of lots of British seaside towns and see the future turning in the distance — offshore wind, ports, maritime engineering, clean power, climate adaptation — while, just a few streets inland, we may well find lots of young folk struggling to see a future for themselves at all.
That is why our Top Read this month is UCL’s Green Jobs for the Future? Opportunities and Challenges for Young People in Coastal Communities, led by Rachel Wilde and published in April 2026. It focuses on Great Yarmouth, but it is also about something much larger: the uncomfortable gap between where the green economy is being built and who is actually able to step into it.
Of all places, seaside towns are often where the transition ought to be most visible. Offshore wind comes ashore there. That’s were the ports are. Maritime industries are there. Clean-tech supply chains often pass through them. Yet these same places frequently sit at the sharp end of deprivation: weaker labour markets, poorer health outcomes, lower educational attainment, fragile housing, transport barriers and vulnerability to climate change itself. They are not just “left behind” in the old cliché. They are often left beside — beside opportunity, beside investment, beside the infrastructure of the future, but not always connected to it.
That makes coastal towns a kind of microcosm of the national green-skills problem. The UK now has worryingly high numbers of young people aged 16–24 not in education, employment or training. And, as the Rt Hon Alan Milburn’s recently-published interim report into Young People and Work suggests, the support system remains heavily weighted towards benefits rather than helping young people back into work. That is not a criticism of benefits; rather it is a criticism of a society that is better organised to administer failure than to prevent it. If the green transition is to mean anything socially, it must become part of that prevention story.
In our opinion, our Top Read report is especially useful because it refuses to treat “green jobs” as a magic phrase. In fact, one of its strongest insights is that the phrase itself may be part of the problem. What is a green job? A wind-turbine technician? A retrofit adviser? A marine engineer? A data analyst working on energy systems? A project manager in a port? A chef in a low-carbon visitor economy? A young person cannot aspire to a category. They need to see a job, a person, a route, a wage, a workplace, a story. “Green jobs” may work well in policy briefings; it is much less clear that it works in a school careers conversation.
That leads to the second big issue: careers advice. Things have improved, not least through the wider adoption of the Gatsby Benchmarks, but the report makes clear that there is still a long way to go. For many young people, careers advice remains too general, too intermittent and too weakly connected to the local economy. In a coastal town, that matters enormously. The point is not simply to tell young people that green jobs exist somewhere in the abstract. It is to show them what is happening in their own place: which employers are growing, which roles are emerging, which qualifications matter, which routes are realistic, and what a first step might look like.
This is where labour-market intelligence becomes more than a technical exercise. The Enlgish Local Skills Improvement Plans (LSIPs) should, in theory, be helping to improve the flow of current and future labour-market information. Skills England should have a role too, as should equivalent bodies in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. But intelligence only matters if it travels. A beautifully designed skills dashboard is not much use if it never reaches the careers adviser, the FE tutor, the youth worker, the employer, the parent, or the teenager who has already decided that “jobs like that aren’t for people like me.”
The third issue is engagement. This is the unglamorous hinge on which so much turns. Work placements, work experience, employer visits, T Levels, vocational pathways and apprenticeships are not side dishes to the skills system; they are how opportunity becomes real. They let young people test the texture of work. They turn “offshore wind” from a distant national asset into a place with tools, shifts, colleagues, training routes and pay packets. They also allow employers to stop talking about “skills shortages” as though talent were a missing mineral deposit and start building relationships with the young people already nearby.
The fourth reason this report matters is that it sits within a much wider body of evidence on coastal towns. We have seen this story again and again: in work on the future of seaside towns, in the Royal Town Planning Institute’s (RTPI) coastal urban regeneration studies, in the University of Bath’s research on left-behind places, in the work of the Coastal Communities Alliance and the Productivity Institute. The cupboard is not short of diagnosis. If anything, it is groaning under the weight of it. We know a great deal about coastal disadvantage. We know a great deal about fragile local economies. We know a great deal about poor transport, seasonal work, weak progression routes and patchy public services. The question now is less “what is wrong?” and more “why are we still so bad at joining the pieces together?”
And yet this is not a counsel of gloom. Coastal towns are not blank spaces waiting for policy to rescue them. There are already signs of reinvention. Remote working has brought new residents and digital workers to places such as Whitby and St Ives. Cultural and creative regeneration has changed the mood and identity of Folkestone, Hastings and Margate. Morecambe is looking to Eden Project North as a catalyst for a new visitor economy. Hartlepool, the Humber Estuary and the Norfolk and Suffolk coast show how renewable energy investment can reshape local industrial futures. None of these examples is perfect. Some bring new pressures around housing, affordability and local identity. But they do show that coastal places are capable of renewal when assets, ambition and coordination align.
That is the story this UCL report helps us tell. Green opportunity is not enough. Proximity is not enough. A turbine on the horizon does not automatically become a job in the family. A port investment does not automatically become a career pathway. A national net-zero strategy does not automatically become confidence in a 15-year-old deciding what to do next.
What is needed is the connective tissue: clearer language, better careers advice, real local labour-market intelligence, employer engagement, work experience, vocational routes, apprenticeships and sustained local coordination. In other words, the green transition has to be made legible. It has to be visible from the classroom, the college, the youth centre and the kitchen table.
In reality, the opportunities for young people in coastal communities are often much fewer than their inland compatriots, which is why Green Jobs for the Future? is our Top Read. It takes one of the most hopeful phrases in the sustainability vocabulary and asks whether it is actually doing its job. It reminds us that the green economy will not be judged only by how many gigawatts it installs, how many tonnes it saves, or how many investment zones it announces. It will also be judged by whether young people in places like Great Yarmouth can look at the future being built around them and say: yes, there is a place for me in that.
We do see some good things being done in certain querters, though. The Ørsted website, for example, says a few things about what it is trying to do to tackle some of the issues raised in the report. The Crown Estate is also active in helping individuals and communities. Both are convening local stakeholders to tackle the long term issues.
But the bottom line is this: if the clean economy rises on the edge of a coastal town but leaves its young people watching from the promenade, then it may be clean. But it will not yet be just.