Achieving this goal could bring a number of substantial benefits to our environment, economy and local communities.

But to do this, we must overcome two key challenges: transforming the UK’s energy infrastructure and ensuring our workforce is equipped with the necessary skills for a thriving green economy.

Policy certainty is at the heart of both these challenges. When it comes to skills, policy shifts and political dynamics create an uncertain foundation for prospective employees, their eventual employers and training providers. This makes long-term planning difficult and discourages anticipatory investment in skills.

The government has announced a new Growth and Skills Levy (replacing the existing Apprenticeships Levy) which includes greater flexibility for employers over they spend their funds, as part of wider reforms to the apprenticeships system. While employers welcome more flexibility, this has inevitably led to uncertainty about how this package of changes will affect industry over time.

Policy certainty also provides a stable framework within which labour market intelligence can be used effectively. Without some level of certainty around project timelines, workforce forecasting becomes a tricky business and the skills system can only use a best guess when it comes to planning course development and delivery.

Training providers are businesses too and, like any business, they need assurance of demand before developing a training programme. Without this they’re unlikely to invest in creating new training products.

Skills England – the new arms-length body set up by government – has a mandate to tackle skills shortages and support sustained economic growth. It also has a keen eye on the importance of equipping the UK workforce with the skills needed to support the government’s clean energy superpower mission.

Since its commissioning, it has conducted an initial analysis or current and future skills needs and developed an ‘occupations in demand’ index to track employment levels for occupations in critical demand.

This will certainly equip national and regional skills stakeholders with a single source of intelligence on the current and future workforce landscape but it does seem like the government has missed a bit of a trick. Skills England will only do what the name suggests: focus on skills for England, not the devolved nations.

If we are to tackle the big issues of our day – managing skilled migration, unlocking anticipatory investment in skills, and ensuring the right skills are available at the right time and in the right places to staff this new green future – a more comprehensive approach, which includes an UK-wide perspective on skills, would be far more beneficial.

In 2023, the Hydrogen Skills Alliance (HSA) was established to work with a large and diverse group of stakeholders to identify and address the skills challenges involved in meeting the UK’s net zero targets for hydrogen.

The HSA – a collaboration between the National Composites Centre (part of the High Value Manufacturing Catapult) and my organisation, Cogent Skills – helps UK science and technology employers access the skills they need and supports them with the skills they need for that transition to more sustainable processes.

Early next year, the UK’s Hydrogen Skills Strategy – a dynamic action plan to deliver the workforce and skills needed for a 2030 10GW hydrogen scenario – will be published, which will bring together key insights from employers across the hydrogen and clean energy sector.

The potential is enormous and the possible impacts both far-reaching and long-lasting. If we get it right, it could help to address some of the UK’s economic and social challenges by opening up new international markets, creating thousands of jobs, stimulating economic growth and revitalising local areas. The stakes could not be higher and the work to deliver this has already begun.