Industrial Strategy names steel, chemicals, and grid equipment. It already states the obvious problem: capital without skills is a stranded asset.
Britain has been here before. Governments announce advanced manufacturing hubs. Colleges close engineering courses because enrolment rules make them unfinanceable. Employers poach each other's trained staff instead of investing jointly. Immigration policy fills the gap until politics forbids that too. The hub opens. The vacancies persist. The press discovers a "skills crisis" as if it were new.
This companion exists because the series would be incomplete without saying plainly: rebuilding industry is also rebuilding the institutions that produce competent adults who can run it.
The current shape of the problem
Three facts matter.
First, FE has been treated as the poor relation of education policy for decades. Schools and universities get political attention. Further education colleges train the electricians, nurses' aides, welders, and maintenance technicians the economy actually runs on. Per-student funding in FE has lagged schools for years. Colleges respond rationally: cut expensive technical provision, survive on cheaper courses, chase whatever funding stream Whitehall offers this parliament.
Second, apprenticeship quality is patchy. The apprenticeship levy created paperwork and intermediaries. It did not reliably create three-year structured routes into strategic sectors. Too many "apprenticeships" are relabelled in-house training for existing staff. Too few are the kind of pipeline a new steel melt shop or grid transformer factory needs.
Third, health and housing compete for the same people. The Health & Social Care chapter needs hundreds of thousands of care workers. The Housing programme needs skilled trades at scale. Industrial strategy needs process engineers and maintenance electricians. These are not separate labour markets. They are the same twenty-five-year-olds choosing between precarious care agency shifts, self-employment in construction, or leaving their town.
What good looks like
Germany is cited too often as a magic example, but the mechanism is simple: employers, unions, and public colleges agree on occupational standards, and funding follows the standard rather than the other way around.
Britain does not need to copy the German constitution to copy the useful bit: sector skills councils with teeth, not advisory forums that publish PDFs.
For the sectors named in this programme, that means:
- Steel and metals: electric arc furnace operations, metallurgy technicians, non-destructive testing. Lead employers: British Steel successors, defence primes, major construction firms.
- Chemicals and ammonia: process operators, instrumentation technicians, safety engineers. Lead employers: chemicals majors, fertiliser producers, NHS pharmacy supply chain for contrast on standards.
- Grid and energy: high-voltage cable jointers, substation fitters, offshore technicians. Lead employers: National Grid, DNOs, offshore wind developers.
- Care and health support: roles that must be paid enough to compete, or the industrial programme loses women workers the NHS already cannot spare.
Each council would publish annual intake targets, approve college curricula, and face a simple sanction: strategic capital grants for employers who miss training obligations lose priority in the next funding round.
Funding that matches the decade
Skills policy fails when it is funded one year at a time while industrial plant is funded over fifteen.
This programme would:
- Index FE capital and teaching funding to strategic sector plans, not to annual bidding contests. Colleges in South Wales, Teesside, and Humberside need seven-year budgets to hire staff and buy equipment.
- Tie industrial co-investment to apprenticeship completions, as the Industrial Strategy chapter states, with public reporting by company and site.
- Integrate adult retraining with the social security system. A fifty-two-year-old former retail manager cannot live on student maintenance loans while retraining as a heat-pump installer. The Social Security chapter's earnings disregard and training support rules need to align with this pipeline, or the pipeline is for young people only, and there are not enough young people in the right places.
- Recognise migration as workforce policy where honesty requires it. The series threads immigration through sector chapters rather than running a culture-war magnet standalone post. Skills policy is one place the threading must be explicit: temporary visa routes for critical grid and care roles are a bridge, not a substitute for domestic training.
Cost and return
Full costing belongs in the Fiscal Framework. Order of magnitude: an additional GBP 2-4 billion per year in FE teaching funding, college capital, and apprenticeship incentives, phased as industrial projects commit.
That is not small. It is also not optional if the industrial capital spend is to produce British jobs rather than imported turnkey crews who fly home when the plant opens.
The return is measured in tax receipts from wages that stay in Port Talbot rather than leak to agency margins, in NHS vacancies filled from local colleges rather than perpetual international recruitment, and in a political coalition that can point to apprenticeships as proof the programme was for working people, not only for bond markets.
The next step in the series
Industrial strategy without skills is a capital programme for photographers. Read the parent chapter for sector priorities. Read Civil Service for the state capacity to administer funding without drowning colleges in compliance.
Parent chapter: Industrial Strategy. Optional depth: Industrial Strategy: Deep Dive.