Lord Ravensdale (CB)

My Lords, I declare my interests as set out in the register, including as a chief engineer working for AtkinsRéalis and as a director of Peers for the Planet. I shall speak to my Amendment 36A; I thank the noble Lord, Lord Knight, for his earlier support. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Watson: I am a bit bemused that I was unable to mention Skills England in my amendments, but we are where we are. The skills landscape in the UK is undergoing seismic change and gearing up for both the industries of the future and the energy transition. In my engineering business, we are recruiting as fast as we can to deliver the transition in clean energy that is currently working its way through the economy. Renewables, carbon capture, nuclear, hydrogen and grid expansion are all seeing bottlenecks in terms of the skills availability in the UK to deliver the Government’s aspirations in this area. Of course, net zero is much broader than just the energy system. It is interesting to note, perhaps, the success that we are having in reskilling engineers from other industries. For example, we have recruited from Dyson many engineers who have fallen victim to the recent job cuts there and reskilled them to work on clean energy projects. They have gone from designing vacuum cleaners to designing nuclear reactors—no problem. In 2021, I worked on my first Bill, which became the Skills and Post-16 Education Act 2022. Following the excellent work of the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, and others, the Government agreed to include a climate duty in local skills improvement plans; this was a great step forward. Although that climate duty is very welcome for the development of LSIPs, what we have seen to date is quite a piecemeal approach in that area. I set out some of the issues with LSIPs at Second Reading, including the need for a greater, systems-level join-up of these plans in order to avoid duplication and ensure consistency. At the heart of this is the fact that we are currently without a national picture of how the UK can prepare workforces to close the skills gaps related to our net-zero targets; to seize new net-zero opportunities; and, crucially, to address the challenges posed by transitioning from high-carbon sector roles, for example in the oil and gas industry. That last point is crucial in maintaining public support for this agenda. Some really good work has been done at a sector level, which I think we can work from. I highlight the excellent work done by the Nuclear Skills Taskforce, which resulted in the National Nuclear Strategic Plan for Skills. Crucially, it recognised that a tailored approach to the UK regions was necessary; as a result, we now have a number of new regional skills hubs for nuclear that co-ordinate approaches across regions, all tied together through an overarching strategy. We can learn from that. In the Midlands, we are planning to expand this regional hub approach more broadly across clean energy. One of our offers to the Government includes working to set up regional skills hubs and to provide the skilled workforce that will be so important if we are to maximise the opportunity from the energy transition. But we do need that national plan. It reminds me in some ways of the commonality here with how we are implementing clean energy. We have local area energy plans rolling up to regional plans and the national plan, which is the Strategic Spatial Energy Plan. In the same way, we need that roll-up through the skills system, as also brought out by the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, in his excellent Amendment 31.