Question to the Department for Transport:

To ask the Secretary of State for Transport, what recent assessment he has made of the extent of opportunity the construction of HS2 presents for creating skilled jobs throughout the North.

Providing opportunities for Skills and Employment is one of the seven strategic objectives of HS2. HS2 Ltd’s 2018 Skills, Employment and Education (SEE) Strategy sets out the company’s aim to help the next generation develop the technical skills to not only design and build HS2, but to deliver the project pipeline of the UK’s future infrastructure and leave a lasting skills legacy for the country. Currently around 9000 people are working on HS2 and since Royal Assent in April 2017, over 350 individuals have started an apprenticeship on the project.

Underlying the SEE Strategy were labour and skills forecasting data and analysis which assessed the labour and skills that will be required to deliver the construction and rail engineering elements of the HS2 programme against an assessment of the future availability of those skills. This analysis provided a preliminary assessment of potential mismatches between HS2 labour and skills requirements and their availability. Given the changes to both the HS2 project and also the macroeconomic environment size since 2018, HS2 Ltd is about to begin a reforecasting exercise to update the demand, supply and skills mismatches for HS2. This work is due to be completed by April 2021.