UK Modern Industrial Strategy

Carla Denyer Excerpts

Monday 23rd June 2025 Commons Chamber

[Jonathan Reynolds]

I am tremendously excited by the opportunity my hon. Friend outlines. There are many tools she will recognise in the strategy, including the funding for innovation and for local economic development, and particularly the new strategic sites accelerator—for the first time, land assembly, getting the grid and planning in place—so we have these opportunities for the kind of inward investment offers that we receive. My hon. Friend has a very exciting local proposition, and I am looking forward to working with her on it, but we need more of them.

[Carla Denyer (Bristol Central) (Green)]

I welcome the investment in skills announced today. What seems to be missing, though, is a commitment to give wraparound support to the 3 million workers in the UK currently in high-carbon industries, who will need reskilling and retraining in order to make the most of the green jobs boom. Can the Secretary of State give us any information on what is planned for those workers specifically, and does he agree that the fossil fuel giants should be the ones shouldering the cost of that support?

[Jonathan Reynolds]

I thank the hon. Lady for the slightly positive tone of her question. I believe that the skills challenge for the UK is about not just making sure that there are opportunities for young people, but reskilling people too. We have taken forward some interesting measures inherited from the previous Government that will allow us to do it.

I would just say to the hon. Lady that when she condemns people who work in what she calls fossil fuel industries—[Interruption.] Well, perhaps “condemns” is too strong a word, but I ask her to recognise that we have sectors of our own economy that are, relative to other parts of our own economy, high-emissions industries, but on an international basis they are very competitive. It would not be appropriate to simply outsource those emissions to other parts of the world and import those products. There is a lot of Green policy that, frankly, does propose that we do that, but that is not the approach that the Government are taking. We are ambitious about those sectors for the transition and this industrial strategy is key to making it happen.