Published on: March 10, 2025 at 2:10 PM
Our CEO, Phil Beach, recently participated in a Clean Energy Skills Summit chaired by Secretary of State Ed Miliband, and co-chaired by the Skills Minister Jacqui Smith. This inaugural meeting provided participants with the opportunity to identify the current skills and workforce challenges facing the sector. He asked Government to establish the group on a more permanent footing, over the parliamentary term, to enable industry to collaborate on skills and workforce issues with ministers and senior officials.
Phil also explained that Energy & Utility Skills had already worked closely with members to develop a clear picture of the size and scale of the workforce challenge; we need to move at pace to deliver solutions. He encouraged ministers to reconvene the group before Easter to discuss opportunities for Government to make early inroads into the skills challenge. Summarising this exchange, the Secretary of State agreed to a follow-on meeting and encouraged participants to bring ideas for how early progress can be made. We are following up on this opportunity through our membership network groups.
One area of keen ministerial interest is a national clean energy jobs campaign. Phil has been in discussion with officials and has explained that a campaign of this type needs to be developed with employers, to ensure that the aims, objectives and approach is aligned with industry needs. Phil has gained agreement to explore this in an employer round-table that we will convene alongside Energy UK and invites will be issued shortly to a representative sample of our membership. We hope to take preliminary findings to the next meeting of the Clean Energy Skills Summit in April.
Reflecting member priorities, we have also been pressing ahead with our social impact work to improve equity, diversity and social mobility in the sector. We have stressed to government the importance of the issue and championed ministerial involvement. We held a social impact workshop before Christmas and this informed an inaugural Social Inclusion ministerial round table in February that Phil attended. The meeting was attended by employers (including some member representatives), industry bodies and trade unions and Energy & Utility Skills is working closely with Powerful Women to develop next steps. It is expected that this group will be established as a subset of the Clean Energy Skills Summit. We will make sure that we connect this work to our ongoing Diversity and Inclusion and Sector Attraction and Retention Strategy Groups and continue to encourage engagement with our wider membership, in particular the water and waste industries, that share many of the challenges and opportunities.