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The UK cannot simultaneously re-arm and rebuild its nuclear energy industry without remaining open to skilled migrants, according to a leading voice in the country’s trade union movement.
Mike Clancy, general secretary of the Prospect trade union, said the government’s ambition to raise defence spending to 3 per cent of GDP and meet its net zero targets including through new nuclear energy projects would be constrained by skills shortages.
Building the energy infrastructure for net zero would require an ageing workforce to expand by 150,000 by 2030, he said. If ministers pursued new defence projects at the same time, “a great deal of the engineering, science, mathematical, project management, cyber [skills] are absolutely the same in those sectors — so where do the people come from?”
“These are fantastic opportunities potentially. Their realisation is enormously difficult because of the crossover of the skills,” Clancy said in an interview with the Financial Times, adding that engineers and scientists were often lured to higher-paying finance jobs mid-career.
Clancy was speaking just before the government announced £11.5bn of new state funding to build a new nuclear reactor at its Sizewell C site in Suffolk — a project forecast to support about 10,000 jobs.
As Prospect’s general secretary since 2012, Clancy represents around 157,000 professionals working across the public and private sectors in science, engineering and other technical specialisms.
Many of these areas had been “very international” before Brexit, said Clancy, a long-standing advocate of closer ties with the EU, and current chair of the Domestic Advisory Group of civil society groups affected by the UK-EU trade deal. The nuclear industry was among those where the UK’s skills base had shrunk, he added.
The challenge for the government, he said, was “to convince UK citizens that they’ve got a stake . . . in the infrastructure build” while also explaining that “in the short term, without managed immigration, particularly in certain occupations, we can’t do what we need to do”.
Overseas recruitment has become significantly more costly for UK employers as a result of changes to visa rules and fees made since 2023 by the previous Conservative government.
Further policy changes, set out in a white paper last month, will restrict skilled worker visas to graduate level jobs, raise salary thresholds and fees still further, and make employers’ access to visas contingent on their commitment to training UK-born staff.
A review of overseas hiring in the IT and engineering sectors by the government’s Migration Advisory Committee has since found no evidence that employers in these sectors were overly reliant on international recruitment, but said migrants were helping fill skills gaps and making a big contribution to the public finances.
The current salary thresholds had “potentially caused some regions [of the UK] to be increasingly priced out of the system”, however, and made it harder to sponsor visas for younger, lower-paid workers in the early stages of their career, the MAC found.
Clancy also warned of the potential for further clashes — and industrial action — between the government and unions over public sector pay, reflecting “pent-up frustration” over the long squeeze under the Conservatives and a lack of progress since Labour was elected last summer.
The warning is striking given Clancy’s broader message is that businesses and unions need to forge a more consensual approach to industrial relations, as the government brings in reforms that will give workers’ representatives a stronger voice.
The Employment Rights bill “should be a pathway to better employment relations, not just more conflict”, he said, referring to joint work with the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, the employers’ group, to rebuild negotiating skills on both sides, and give unions a role in redesigning work for the age of artificial intelligence.
“We don’t believe the growth of trade union membership in the private sector is going to rise through constant conflict,” he said. “People in the workplace want their problems solved.”
