The green transition is already creating jobs across Yorkshire - Lucy Holdaway
Visitors to the Magna Science Adventure Centre in Rotherham have no doubt been in awe at the size and scale of the former steel mill. A hulking corrugated building rising out of Don Valley across the M1 from Meadowhall, it stands as a monument to the region’s industrial heritage.
The nature of industry in this area has changed almost beyond recognition over the past 50 years, but if you know where to look then engineering ingenuity is alive and well.
Just half a mile down the road from Magna is Magtec. Founded in 1992, the firm is a world-leader in ‘repowering’ heavy goods fleets – swapping out noisy, polluting diesel engines for clean, quiet electric ones in buses, bin lorries and even military vehicles.
Magtec employs more than 100 people, most of them local, in highly skilled engineering roles, and is one example of the thriving net zero economy that is currently powering Yorkshire.
A new report commissioned by the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU) with analysis provided by the independent consultancy CBI Economics and The Data City notes that across the UK the sector has expanded by 10 per cent in the past year and is now worth £83.1bn in Gross Value Added (GVA) to the British economy.
Magtec employees are some of the 70,500 FTE workers of the net zero economy across Yorkshire – 2.8 per cent of the county’s total workforce – and the report shows they are making it count.
Net zero jobs provide a proportionally bigger boost in productivity to Yorkshire than they do anywhere else in the UK, with labour within net zero businesses estimated to be 77 per cent more productive than the region’s average.
Despite the impressive figures, percentages and pound signs do not do justice to the way residents and businesses across Yorkshire are embracing opportunities for modern reindustrialisation.
For the past two years the Local Storytelling Exchange, a network of journalists across the UK, have been working in Yorkshire to find the real people behind the economic facts and tell their stories of innovation.
“When you repower a vehicle, you create jobs - not just in our factory but across the supply chain,” Marcus Jenkins, founder of Magtec, told us recently. The same is true in all four corners of the county.
In Scarborough, locals may know SeaGrown for their seaweed-based body products. But now the company, founded by former fisherman and British Navy diver Wave Crookes, has partnered with RWE Energy on a major project to restore marine ecosystems around offshore wind farms.
An example of the transformational effect the offshore wind industry can have on a coastal economy can be found just 70 miles down the east coast, across the Humber Estuary in Grimsby.
“It’s created thousands of local jobs. People I went to school with, played football and cricket with,” Grimsby resident David Laister, former business editor at the Hull Daily Mail and now a director at Humber Marine & Renewables, told us.
The range of industries who make up those 65,900 employees building a cleaner, greener future are as diverse as the county itself.
In West Yorkshire a major project is underway to restore vital, carbon-capturing blanket bog across the uplands. Alex Smith swapped her job making bicycle wheels to work for Yorkshire Peat Partnership on the initiative.
Meanwhile, back in Rotherham, Matrix Energy Systems apprentice Lewis Thomas is one of a new generation of plumbers being trained to install heat pumps.
Across Yorkshire the green transition is already well underway, providing people like Lewis and Alex, and companies like Magtec, with the jobs and opportunities for now as well as the future.
Lucy Holdaway is executive director at the Local Storytelling Exchange.