National College for Wind Energy

Debate between Melanie Onn and Gordon Marsden

Tuesday 1st November 2016 Westminster Hall

[Gordon Marsden (Blackpool South) (Lab)]

It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Bailey. I warmly congratulate and applaud my hon. Friend the Member for Great Grimsby (Melanie Onn) on securing this debate. As she said, she has a long track record on this issue. It is extremely disappointing that, almost two years after the proposed national college for wind energy was first announced, the Government still have not finalised the funding or the strategy and still have not given an open date for developing a college that would help to address the skills shortages in the industry and the wider region.

I obviously listened with great care to my hon. Friend’s speech, but I also listened to the hon. Member for Cleethorpes (Martin Vickers) and what he said about the importance of seeing the whole area as a forcing point for these technologies. The hon. Member for Aberdeen South (Callum McCaig) spoke a great deal of sense about the need for a holistic approach.

In a way, the little episode that my hon. Friend the Member for Great Grimsby described, about the Department that never was, indicates the issue. The hon. Member for Aberdeen South and I were both relocated, if I can put it like that, in the summer period, and I am no stranger to changes to the machinery of government. I remember the issues that were discussed in 2007 when the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills, as it was called, was split from the Department for Education.

When we have such changes, such necessary disruption, it only becomes more important that things that have been sitting in the filing tray, virtual or actual, should be looked at with greater urgency by the incoming Department. That is not too much to ask when we know that offshore wind presents a great opportunity for expanding our low-carbon generation profile and can play an important role in helping us to decarbonise the power sector and meet our climate change targets.

In August 2016, a strategic review of east coast port facilities identified the offshore wind sector’s enormous potential to accelerate economic growth on the east coast of Britain. It found that east coast ports have the capability to support the ambitious pipeline of offshore wind projects that will be built out on the North sea in the decades ahead. The construction of such major infrastructure projects will stimulate economic activity in some of the most economically deprived areas of the UK.

As we have seen in other industries, such as the nuclear industry or the aerospace industry—I am particularly familiar with the aerospace industry, having BAE Systems only a few miles down the road from me in Blackpool—supply chain companies would serve projects in British waters and export goods across the world. We all know that jobs created directly in an industry are often exceeded two or threefold by the jobs created in the supply chain. The secret ingredient in that process, of course, is skilling and training, particularly high skilling and training. That is one of the reasons why the college that my hon. Friend the Member for Great Grimsby is so strongly advocating would be essential.

My hon. Friend has said that the Humber area is an ideal location for the college. Grimsby is the renewable energy capital of England, not least because of the involvement and investment of Siemens in the region since 2014. Siemens has announced its decision to invest £160 million in wind turbine production and installation facilities across two locations, and its port partner, Associated British Ports—ABP—is investing a further £150 million in the Green Port Hull development.

In my first spell as shadow Minister for further education and skills, I was privileged to visit Hull to meet the local enterprise partnership and other stakeholders about their hopes and expectations for this project. We spoke about how crucial it is for the area’s wellbeing and the local enterprise partnership’s strategy. When I moved across to become shadow maritime Minister, I was lobbied on the issue by the excellent port group, ABP, because it was keen to see progress. Now that I have returned to shadowing the Department with responsibility for further education and skills, I find that the same issue has cropped up again in my new portfolio, which shows how important and widespread the project is. We need to cut across the silos of Government to get the results that my hon. Friend wants.

The then chair of the Humber LEP employment and skills board, Mike Parker, welcomed the project in 2014:

“Our economy is growing; building on their Grimsby presence, Siemens are set to locate in Hull, and E.on, Centrica, Vestas and Dong Energy have chosen the south bank of the estuary as their preferred sites. Supporting the generation companies is a growing supply chain of maintenance and facilities management. Wind energy generation is still relatively new and demands higher level skilled employees, the lack of an able qualified workforce has led to the sector facing a serious challenge in filling vacancies.”

The hon. Member for Cleethorpes made that point when he spoke about generating skills locally, rather than importing them from Germany and Scandinavia.

[Melanie Onn]

Does the shadow Minister agree that growth and new investment from DONG Energy, which has decided to establish its operations and maintenance base in Grimsby, make it even more vital that we have enough young people and skilled local people able to take on jobs at the site when it is built?

[Gordon Marsden]

I absolutely agree. My hon. Friend makes a critical point: there has to be a synergy—a symbiosis, if I can put it that way—between the timing of the creation of these new initiatives and the supply chain of skills to feed them. Getting that wrong would not only cause great disruption in that supply chain but send out a message to other potential investors that this is not an area in which to risk their money.

Let me quote again from the former chair of the Humber LEP skills and employment board:

“Having a dedicated National College will be a major step forward in helping the UK to bridge that gap.”

The need to tackle skills shortages has not shrunk but increased over the past two years. One has to ask why the Government have still not committed to the college.

In response to the strategic review carried out earlier this year, the new Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, the right hon. Member for Tunbridge Wells (Greg Clark), commented:

“The UK is the world leader in offshore wind and it’s important that we make the most of the many jobs and business opportunities that arise from this growing industry.”

What more appropriate way to achieve that than by taking action on this project?

When the college was first announced in 2014, it was envisaged that it would open its doors in late 2016. A significant feature of the college—not least in view of some of the issues that the Minister and I discussed in an earlier debate in this Chamber today about the balance of skills and apprenticeships—is that it would offer new and mature students professional qualifications and short courses in addition to bespoke programmes directed and sponsored by employers.

Beyond the specifics of this project in Grimsby, that would help to address the bleak situation that many adult learners face in further education and higher education. As the Opposition argued when we debated the Higher Education and Research Bill, we really need to put the same emphasis and passion that have been put behind the apprenticeships programme into the expansion of adult learning and skills. Those are the areas in which we have lost big time over the past four or five years, especially in comparison with our continental counterparts.

The TUC’s report “Powering ahead”, which my hon. Friend the Member for Great Grimsby has already mentioned, states—rightly, in my view:

“The TUC believes there should be a fourth pillar of energy policy: skills…It is…essential that if today’s workers are to become tomorrow’s workers, using new technology, they will need the skills for this change. Upskilling must become a normal and regular part of a worker’s life.”

That is crucial. We will have more than 13 million job vacancies over the next 30 years, but only 7 million school leavers to fill them, so reskilling adults is paramount. That growing skills gap has to be at the heart of the agenda to bridge the gaps and shortages appearing across the workforce. There is so much potential in lifelong learning, but unfortunately the Government are still moving too slowly and letting the sector down.

Wind energy is a growing industry. Employment is expected to increase and engineers, technicians and other specialist roles will therefore be in greater demand. Many of those roles can and should be filled by young people starting their careers. However, there are other roles, including at other levels, in which experience will be extremely important, particularly in coastal environments. We know that there are already large skills gaps across the wind energy sector and that 37% of vacancies are found to be difficult to fill. A national college in Grimsby would go a long way towards providing a strategy on addressing those shortages and would help new and mature students to advance their skills.

I have great sympathy for Grimsby in this case. Like me, my hon. Friend the Member for Great Grimsby represents a coastal constituency that has seen challenges. Second-level towns, particularly seaside and coastal towns, have been particularly challenged in recent years by the decline of traditional industries and traditional sources of income. They are the towns that particularly need regeneration and the benefits that come with it—skills, jobs and potential spin-offs—especially given all the unknowns and uncertainties that their communities face, whatever happens as a result of the 23 June referendum.

Opposition Front-Benchers, alongside the TUC and others, have been pushing for a review of the increasing demands on adults to take out advanced learner loans to fund vocational upskilling. As the TUC report “Powering ahead” states:

“In light of the fact that the bulk of funding for apprenticeships will switch from government to employers in the coming years, there is a strong case for government providing more direct subsidy for retraining and upskilling of adult employees in priority areas as the economy transitions to a sustainable industrial scenario.”

If funding for the college is an issue, the Government really ought to give their attention to it. They have to rebalance their skills basket to focus on adult workers as well as on those starting out. The message of the Leitch review, which is now nearly a decade old, is still very pertinent: because of the democratic demands, new technologies and new skills cannot simply be left to the young.

The take-up of advanced learner loans is not very good: only about 50% of the money allocated is being used and the rest is being sent to the Treasury, so the Government need to find a way to incentivise adults to take out loans. Initiatives such as the potential national college for wind energy would offer a fantastic opportunity for people over the age of 24 or 25 to gain new skills and a path into employment in a fast growing, vital industry. As well as dealing with today’s skills, a college such as the one proposed for Grimsby could also promote cutting-edge research into new skills for generation 2.0 and 3.0 of these innovative new technologies.

I sat on the Innovation, Universities, Science and Skills Committee when it did a report on renewables in the late 2000s. We spoke in that report about the lost opportunities for UK plc to capitalise on the expanding renewables markets, and about the dangers of relying on assemblage outside the UK for our renewable technologies. Sadly, some of the Committee’s fears have come to pass, but that is why it is even more important that we take the initiative now that we have the opportunity. Frankly, the Government have delivered enough knocks to renewables initiatives in the past couple of years—first with the problems in trying to decide whether to have nuclear as well as renewables, and then by encouraging subsidies for solar power, knocking them back and dithering over onshore wind. The signals that that approach sends out are not encouraging.

In Blackpool, our own energy college, Blackpool and the Fylde College, is going to look at renewables. When I look out from Blackpool towards Liverpool bay, I have a particular interest in seeing those new renewable energies offshore continuing to flourish. The national college for wind energy in Grimsby that my hon. Friend the Member for Great Grimsby has promoted so valiantly today would be an important part of that strategy. We hope the Minister will be able to say some positive things today to get it moving on its course.