The Transition That Forgot the Workers: Britain's Green Promise Running on Empty
Photo of Ed Miliband, via Wikimedia Commons
When this government took office, it pledged to deliver clean power by 2030, alongside commitments to hundreds of thousands of green jobs. The rhetoric of a 'just transition' — the idea that decarbonisation must bring employment and prosperity to the communities that powered the old economy — has become a fixture of ministerial speeches. The delivery record tells a thinner story.
What Has Actually Been Delivered
There is real progress to acknowledge. The government's Clean Power 2030 Action Plan, published by the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero in December 2024, set out an accelerated pathway for onshore wind, solar and grid expansion. Contracts for Difference auctions have secured substantial offshore wind capacity, and the publicly owned GB Energy, established by legislation in 2025, is intended to invest in public clean energy projects. Grid connection queues — a genuine bottleneck — are being reformed.
But ambition in generation targets is not the same as an industrial strategy for workers. The TUC has repeatedly warned that the UK's green jobs pipeline lags behind what the transition requires, and that without active industrial policy — domestic manufacturing, supply chain investment, and skills guarantees — much of the employment created will be lower-paid, insecure, or offshore altogether.
The Ghost of Previous Transitions
The scepticism in former industrial communities is not abstract. The closure of the coal industry in the 1980s and 1990s devastated towns across Yorkshire, Durham, South Wales and the East Midlands, and successive governments made no serious effort at replacement employment. The result — documented in studies such as the UK2070 Commission's work on regional inequality — is a map of persistent, concentrated deprivation that coincides almost exactly with the old coalfield.
The fear now is not that the green transition will fail, but that it will succeed while bypassing the very places that were promised renewal. Offshore wind turbines manufactured in Asia, installed by subcontractors on casual contracts, powering cities that were never coal towns — that is not a just transition. It is the same economy with a new coat of paint.
The Strongest Objection, Taken Seriously
Defenders of the current approach argue that governments cannot conjure supply chains overnight, that private investment must lead, and that jobs will follow capacity. There is force in this: the offshore wind industry genuinely did not exist at scale in the UK two decades ago, and it now employs tens of thousands.
But the comparison flatters only if you ignore the counterfactual. The European Commission and other comparable economies have paired targets with explicit local content requirements, public manufacturing investment and sectoral wage standards. Britain has chosen, repeatedly, not to. That is a policy choice, not an economic law.
What Is at Stake, and for Whom
For workers in places like Grangemouth, Redcar and the Humber — where refinery and heavy industry closures are live or imminent — the question is not rhetorical. The Scottish Government's own Just Transition Commission has repeatedly cautioned that planning for Grangemouth's petrochemical future has been inadequate and slow. These are communities being asked to bear transition costs on trust.
The Politics of Broken Green Promises
If the green transition arrives as redundancies without replacements, the political consequences will be severe — and deserved. Populist movements have already demonstrated their appetite for harvesting the resentment of communities that feel sacrificed to distant targets. Climate policy that forgets workers does not merely fail them; it hands ammunition to those who would abandon the transition entirely.
The verdict: a just transition is not a press release — until it shows up as a unionised job in a town that was promised one, it is a promise Britain is quietly breaking.
