Skills in the East of England need an integration strategy

Eastern Powerhouse
2 hours ago
4 min read

The East of England has many of the sectors that ministers say will define Britain’s future. On paper, that should make it one of the country's strongest skills regions. In practice, it looks more like a warning. Demand is rising fast, but the system remains too fragmented to turn that demand into local opportunity.

Skills England’s first annual report makes the case clearly enough. It says demand for priority jobs will continue to grow in sectors including clean energy, construction and digital, and its sector assessments show how unevenly that demand plays out across places. In professional and business services, for example, the East of England benefits from strong research, innovation and business ecosystems. Variation across areas reflects where clusters and regional service centres are concentrated. In construction, national demand is projected to rise sharply as government tries to deliver housing and infrastructure, while defence occupations are projected to expand rapidly too. [1]

That matters for the East because the region is carrying several nationally important bets at once.

Sizewell C announced that the project will move as much work offsite as possible, shifting welding and other tasks into factories to manage risk and productivity amid a construction skills shortage. That may be rational from a delivery point of view. But it also changes the local jobs equation. A project sold partly on its regional economic benefit may end up creating fewer on-site construction opportunities than local communities expect, while the most valuable work is captured elsewhere in the supply chain. Skills policy in Suffolk therefore cannot just be about training more people for “construction” in the abstract. It has to ask which parts of the value chain will actually be local, and how local people are connected to them. [2]

This is the wider lesson of the East’s skills challenge. Place matters not only because demand differs by sector, but because the geography of delivery increasingly differs from the geography of benefit.

The same issue arises in defence. The government has just awarded defence skills funding to a number of colleges and providers, including Lincoln College, as part of a wider package that also includes new Defence Technical Excellence Colleges. Lincoln College says its share is worth more than £750,000 over five years, while the government describes the overall programme as part of a broader effort to strengthen the defence workforce. That is good news for Greater Lincolnshire, but it also sharpens the question for places such as Huntingdon, where ambitions for a defence cluster are growing quickly around Project FAIRFAX and the Huntingdonshire Defence Cluster. If other regions are now locking in funded technical capacity, Huntingdon will need to develop its skills proposition in partnership with the combined authority, local colleges and universities. [3]

That means a defence cluster cannot just be a land-use or investment story. It has to be a skills and labour-market story too. The East will not secure high-value defence work simply by hoping employers arrive and training follows later. It needs local institutions, progression routes and workforce planning that are integrated from the start. [4]

This is also why the NEET crisis matters so much. Nationally, the number of young people not in education, employment or training has risen above one million, and government is increasingly focused on youth transition. But in places like the East of England, the answer cannot be to deal with NEETs in one policy silo and sector skills in another. The problem is precisely that these systems are too disconnected. Young people need routes into real labour-market demand, not generic holding patterns dressed up as opportunity. [5]

There are useful clues here in the evaluation of JobsPlus by the Institute for Employment Studies. The pilot’s results suggest that hyperlocal, community-led employment support can engage residents who are further from the labour market, with 27 per cent of participants achieving a positive employment outcome and many reporting improvements in confidence, mental health and readiness for work. Around a third of participants were aged 16 to 24, much higher than their share of the local population. In other words, when support is rooted in place, wrapped around people’s lives and linked to practical progression, it can reach those whom mainstream systems miss. [6]

Hertfordshire's JobsPlus pilot in Borehamwood shows that employment support works best when it is integrated, not added as an afterthought. It needs to be woven into local institutions, neighbourhoods and progression pathways. Hertfordshire does not just need programmes; it needs the kind of joined-up local ecosystem that can connect employment support, training, health and employer demand in one place.

That is really the East of England’s challenge in one sentence. The region does not simply have a skills shortage. It has an integration shortage.

Skills England is right to emphasise sectors and place. But the next step is harder: building a system that matches the two. In the East, that means training linked to actual supply-chain geography at Sizewell, a defence skills proposition that matches Huntingdon’s cluster ambitions, and youth employment support that is tied much more closely to local growth sectors. Without that, the region will carry national economic priorities without capturing enough of the jobs, progression and prosperity meant to accompany them.

The East does not need more disconnected initiatives. It needs a genuinely integrated skills strategy: one that treats youth unemployment, sector demand and regional growth as parts of the same problem.