Left Field: Local skills and training are key to future benefits

By Councillor John Divers (Elgin South)

Last weekend, Zero Carbon Moray hosted a Community Energy and Climate Action fair at Elgin Town Hall.

The event involved a great many local groups, and helped make the case for far greater community benefit from the green energy revolution. I must confess to being somewhat surprised, however, the day before, to see the case being made for far greater community benefit by our local MSP and Scottish Government Minister, Richard Lochhead, in his Northern Scot column. As Minister for Just Transition, Employment and Fair Work, Mr Lochhead was responsible for green skills and the low-carbon economy at the time wind farm leasing rights were auctioned off by the Scottish Government.

Earlier this year, the Common Weal think tank published a report by Dr Craig Dalzell on the ScotWind auction, conducted by Crown Estate Scotland, in 2022. The report makes a number of startling findings, the most concerning of which is that the Scottish Government agency appears to have undervalued Scottish offshore wind rights by placing a maximum ceiling on bids, possibly underselling rights by billions of pounds.

The companies that won these licenses include some of the world’s biggest energy companies, such as BP and SSE. Ministers will point to the Scottish Government’s community benefit guidelines, but if these companies back out of their community benefit obligations, the maximum they will pay is £250,000 – a drop in the ocean for companies making billions in profit each year.

I certainly agree with Richard Lochhead that a lot more needs to be done to ensure greater community benefit. I know from experience the benefits that an energy revolution can produce for Moray and the north of Scotland. After I came out of the Royal Navy in 1978, I worked for over 15 years at McDermott’s fabrication yard at Ardersier. The increased demand for skilled workers drove up wages and working conditions across the north of Scotland. Like thousands of others across the highlands, I benefited from skills and training that might not have been available otherwise.

While McDermott’s started winding-down almost 30 years ago, closing entirely more than 20 years ago, many of the skilled workers here in Moray today gained those skills as part of Scotland’s first energy revolution. I know people in their 40s who first trained at Ardersier, which means we will still be seeing the benefit of that training 40 years after McDermott’s closed. What this demonstrates, is that when you develop the local supply chain, the benefits can last for decades.

There was a time when the offshore energy sector in the UK was supplied entirely locally. Today, despite the claims by ministers, the promises of supply chain protections have not been met. Only a little over a third of the minimum investments committed to ScotWind will take place in Scotland, and these commitments can be resiled from at relatively little cost.

At this week’s meeting of the Moray Council, my colleague, Sandy Keith, proposed a motion calling for an urgent inquiry into the ScotWind leasing process. Hopefully lessons will be learned from this process, so that others can benefit from genuinely local supply chains and community benefits just like my generation did in the 70s and 80s.

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