Promises of a green jobs revolution have turned to rust in Steel Town

On the site of the former steelworks in Redcar, local workers are still waiting for the boom in employment promised by the government’s net zero target, writes Jeevan Vasagar

- Jeevan Vasagar

There is nothing left to see now of the giant steelworks that once stretched for miles along the south bank of the Tees, where the river empties out into the North Sea at Redcar.

Teesside steel helped build the modern world. Steel made here went into Sydney Harbour Bridge and the frames of some of New York's earliest skyscrapers. The fires in the coke ovens were extinguished in 2015, and the site has since been levelled: a stark reminder of Britain's manufacturing decline.

The antidote, championed in government by Ed Miliband, has been “green jobs”. A policy document his department released last year said that the clean energy workforce will nearly double by 2030 to 860,000. But the “goldilocks” window — when new green jobs outnumber oil and gas losses — will not, in the government’s own modelling, materialise until 2027 at the earliest, and the cabinet is now riven with an argument about whether to restart drilling in the North Sea.

At the last Labour conference, Miliband explicitly called out Reform’s opposition to net zero as “a war on the construction workers building carbon capture and storage in Teeside”. But for the residents of Redcar, which voted heavily for Brexit in 2016, the green jobs revolution feels like a chimera.

“God help us if we have to go to war with anybody,’ says Frankie Wales, a former steelworker who runs an amateur boxing club. “Because how are we going to build anything?”

Green manufacturing arrived on the former steelworks site last year, when a giant factory built by Korean company SeAH Wind became operational, cutting steel plates for windfarm foundations.

The government announced nearly £22bn in funding to support carbon capture from a gas-fired power plant and the production of hydrogen here and on Merseyside, backing the growth of new industries and, in the prime minister’s words, “reigniting our industrial heartlands”.