Calls for green training centre to bridge Humber’s skills gap

Businesses and local authorities across East Yorkshire and
northern Lincolnshire will be called on to help deliver the project, which is aimed at ensuring people are equipped with the skills relevant to access the jobs market linked to the offshore wind industry.

It is one of 36 recommendations after a year-long independent review commissioned by the Humber Local Enterprise Partnership (LEP), which took a long-term look at the challenges, issues and barriers businesses face in respect of skills.

Compiled by the Humber LEP’s Skills Commission, the research took evidence from energy firms, blue-chip businesses, schools, colleges, training providers, voluntary organisations, councils, emergency services, and dozens of small and medium enterprises.

The recommendations include a call to create a Humber Careers Hub which would be charged with collating information, advice, training and guidance to become a single reference point for industry, students and jobseekers.

The report recommends that the LEP’s new Employment and Skills Board, which will meet for the first time next week, takes charge of skills issues across the Humber, including the delivery of the training centre and the careers hub, and directs Government skills spending through the Hull and Humber City Deal.

Chaired by Scunthorpe MP Nic Dakin, a former college principal, the commission recommends the Employment and Skills Board be responsible for making sure the region is equipped to match the employment needs of the coming years.

He said: “Between now and 2020 there will be more than 65,000 job opportunities available across the Humber region – opportunities which everyone in business, politics and education wants to see filled by people from across East Yorkshire and northern Lincolnshire.

“There are a huge number of opportunities for young people who are leaving school now through to those who are currently studying in Year 7.

“If these jobs were available now we would have the numbers of people available but they would be insufficiently skilled to fill them. If we do not act now, we will be in the same position by 2020 and will have to import skills and expertise while our own school leavers and young adults continue to languish in unemployment.

“However, we do have the best of everything in the Humber in isolated pockets, the problem is that it doesn’t exist consistently everywhere.

“By working together, we can get everywhere in the Humber up to the standard of the best examples. A pan-Humber training centre would become the epicentre of this reform which will transform the region.

“We need to do this if we are to realise the huge opportunities that are within our grasp.”

The report draws on research which predicts that at least 6,000 jobs will be created in the offshore wind industry by 2023, including in manufacture and component assembly, vessel-related activity, operations and maintenance.

This, however, was before MPs voted against a requirement in the Energy Bill to set a legal target to significantly reduce carbon emissions from electricity generation by 2030.

Supporters of the target said it would have sent a strong signal to investors to back clean energy, and it now remains to be seen what impact it may have on global manufacturers such as Siemens, which has been intending to set up a wind turbine factory in Hull as part of a £210m investment in the port.

Hull MP Diana Johnson said she feared many jobs may now go abroad.

Earlier this week Hull College also pledged to boost “green skills for green jobs” by focusing more of its courses on science, technology, engineering, and maths.

Chief executive Gary Warke said: “We risk having too few skilled workers to take advantage of the well-paid, long-term careers we have craved for so long.”