A new report by the Centre for Progressive Policy (CPP), a centre-left economics think tank, suggests that workers with skills that most closely match those needed for green jobs are spread unevenly across the country. The report looks at “green” and “non-green” occupations and measures how transferable non-green workers are to green occupations. It then maps the workforces of England and Wales, to determine how ‘ready’ the workforces of different parts of the country are to transition into green industries. It finds:

• The net zero transition may help ‘level up’ some poorer communities, but it is not a silver bullet: The report finds that while there are some post-industrial areas – including coastal Cumbria, Lincolnshire, East Yorkshire, coastal East Norfolk, and Teesside – with a higher concentration of workers with the right skills to build green industries – they are the exception, not the rule. The report also finds there is no correlation between areas that face high deprivation or low productivity, and areas containing workforces with high potential to transition into green jobs.
• Workers who could be most easily retrained into higher-paying, higher productivity green jobs tend to live in areas that are already wealthy: the report identifies the City of London, South Cambridgeshire, Cambridge, Wokingham, and Richmond upon Thames, as five of the areas best placed to train workers to develop green industries.
• But there may be hope for some poorer areas due to a “relative pay” effect for workers switching into green jobs: The report suggests that for some places – such as Nottingham, Blackpool, Barking and Dagenham, and Luton – there are more workers with green skills who might stand to earn a pay rise switching into green jobs, making it easier to develop green workers than in already well-paying areas such as inner London or Derbyshire’s manufacturing communities.

In the run up to the election, both main parties have argued that net zero could be a central solution to the UK’s persistent regional inequalities, with Labour leader Keir Starmer stating in a recent speech that “we can use the opportunity of clean energy to create jobs to deliver security and bring back hope to communities that got ripped apart by deindustrialisation in the 1980s.”[1]

While this is a laudable aim, CPP’s report highlights that it is far from a given: green jobs will not automatically bring the biggest benefits to the poorest communities, and in many cases, areas and workers who are already wealthy are best placed to reap the rewards.

The think tank argues that to realise the potential of the net zero transition to help tackle our regional inequalities, policymakers must be wise to the fact that different areas are starting from vastly different positions. The report argues that a new green industrial strategy is needed but that a “one size fits all” approach - failing to acknowledge the vastly different starting points of different areas - will be insufficient. “Green” jobs may not secure the economic future of all places, so any industrial strategy should seek to boost other emerging industries. It also suggests policymakers think more about internal migration between regions in the UK as a means to match labour supply with demand for workers with green skills.

The CPP report, called Are we ready? Navigating the green transition in an age of uncertainty, is the first in a longer research programme looking at the economic transitions Britain faces over the next decade.

Ross Mudie, Senior Research Analyst at CPP and report author, said:

“The green transition presents considerable economic opportunities, but the delivery of economic prosperity to poorer areas is not a foregone conclusion. A green industrial strategy that is blind to the huge variation in workers’ skills across different parts of the country risks the benefits flowing disproportionately to communities that are already well off.

If we are to realise the potential of the green transition to help tackle our regional inequalities, we need to hear much more detail from politicians about how they plan to reallocate workers across industries to support the growth of the green economy. Doing this won’t be easy – and tough choices remain around which workers will be prioritised, where they currently live and work, and how we might target support. But over the next decade, these are choices the government will have to make.”

[1] https://labour.org.uk/updates/press-releases/keir-starmer-speech-unveiling-labours-mission-to-cut-bills-create-jobs-and-provide-energy-security-for-britain/#:~:text=It%20will%20power%20us%20forward,and%20clean%20electricity%20by%202030.