Region urged to grab wind turbine job opportunities

John Gummer, the long-serving Tory environment and agriculture Minister who now chairs the private consortium planning a 3,000 square-mile wind farm out in the North Sea, said Yorkshire is perfectly placed to become a major international hub for the rapidly-expanding industry of offshore wind turbine manufacturing.

In a wide-ranging interview in today’s Yorkshire Post, the former Tory party chairman – now ennobled as Lord Deben since stepping down as an MP after 35 years in the Commons – also launches a powerful broadside against forces within his own party and elsewhere who continue to deny the “inconvenient” reality of climate change.

He describes the stance of high-profile climate-change denier Lord Lawson – who served alongside him as Chancellor in Margaret Thatcher’s cabinet – as “highly peculiar”, and says right-wing sceptics abroad such as the Tea Party movement in America are “not true conservatives”.

The interview represents Lord Deben’s first major public intervention since taking on his new role as chairman of Forewind, the consortium of four energy companies which won the licence to build a nine gigawatt (GW) wind farm 80 miles off the Yorkshire coast at Dogger Bank, in an area of sea the size of North Yorkshire.

The Yorkshire Post launched its Powering Yorkshire’s Future campaign last year, aiming to drive economic growth in the region by attracting major wind turbine manufacturers to site factories along the banks of the Humber.

Lord Deben said it is down to Yorkshire to grasp a once-in-a-generation chance to revive its manufacturing heritage.

“It depends entirely upon how much Yorkshire grabs the opportunity,” he said. “There are huge opportunities there – this is the biggest offshore wind farm of all.

“We are going to connect into Yorkshire and Teesside, and it’s going to be a very remarkable opportunity for the whole of the East Coast.

“Yorkshire is right in the centre of that, and if it rises to that opportunity as it certainly should be able to… Yorkshire could make sure it is the centre of supply. And that is lots of jobs – real manufacturing jobs.”