Question

To ask the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, what steps his Department is taking to prevent a skills shortage in the nuclear sector.

The 2013 Nuclear Industrial Strategy set out Government and Industry’s joint ambitions to meet the rising demand for nuclear skills in the UK by identifying future skills shortages and establishing training programmes to address them.

The Nuclear Industry Council’s (NIC) skills workstream oversees this work and has a detailed assessment of the current and projected future nuclear workforce skills demands across the UK, allowing it to take action to address key future gaps. The latest version of this, the Nuclear Workforce Assessment 2014, was issued in November.

The NIC workstream, nuclear developers and skills bodies, the latter acting collectively through the Nuclear Energy Skills Alliance, have developed a raft of initiatives to tackle the skills shortages identified by earlier NWAs.