The King’s speech called for clean British energy – Britain’s engineers keep saying no

The King’s Speech called for Britain to build clean energy at speed, but executive search firm Newman Stewart says the engineers needed to build it are refusing to move for the jobs.

The firm warned that the maths simply does not add up as on-site engineering and operations roles in UK industry are taking longer to fill while salary expectations climb in lockstep with the country’s industrial ambition.

A workforce that won’t move

Newman Stewart said that a key part of the issue is not money but rather geography.

Candidates for senior engineering, operations and leadership roles in Britain’s heavy industrial sectors are increasingly refusing to relocate for jobs that demand a full-time on-site presence.

Hybrid is off the table when the workplace is a turbine hall, a substation or a process plant, and the pool of professionals willing to move themselves and their families to a depot in Teesside or a refinery on the Humber has shrunk to something close to a puddle.

“Employers are facing the dual challenge of elevated salary expectations and reduced candidate mobility at a time when critical roles simply cannot be left unfilled,” said John Tilbrook, Managing Director of Newman Stewart.

“These are not roles that can be easily adapted to hybrid models, which immediately narrows the available talent pool. When you then factor in candidate reluctance to relocate, the gap between supply and demand becomes even more pronounced.”

The King’s Speech problem

This would be a difficult market in a normal year. It is not a normal year.

The King’s Speech put expanding clean British energy production at the centre of the legislative agenda, which on paper means more wind, more nuclear, more grid build-out, more hydrogen, more carbon capture, more of everything that needs a hard hat and a clearance check to operate.

On the ground, it means every utility, every contractor and every Tier 1 engineering firm in the country is fishing in the same pond for the same people at the same time.

Newman Stewart’s view is that companies leaning on local talent markets in industrial regions are running out of road. Those markets were already thin.

Now they are being asked to staff a transition that the government has explicitly accelerated. Roles are taking longer to fill, processes are getting more complex, and the cost of hiring is rising significantly.

Money is doing less work than it used to

For most of the last decade, the UK industrial recruiter’s playbook has been simple: throw more money at it. Higher base, sharper bonus, fatter relocation package, problem solved. Tilbrook’s argument is that the playbook is failing on its own terms.

“Employers are having to rethink not just what they are willing to pay, but also how they approach the entire hiring process,” he said.

“Speed, clarity and competitiveness are now fundamental. In reality, this is a broader workforce challenge. Retention, succession planning and internal development are just as critical as external hiring.”

Translation: if you can’t buy the talent on the open market, you’d better grow it inside the building. UK industrial firms have, on the whole, not been brilliant at this.

The apprentice pipelines that fed the previous generation of power stations and process plants were thinned out across the 2010s, and the engineers who survived that period are now either in their fifties or being aggressively courted by every clean-energy operator in Europe.

The bit nobody’s mentioning yet

Here’s where it gets uncomfortable for anyone with a household energy bill, which is everyone. If the people needed to build out clean British energy aren’t there, the build slows down.

If the build slows down, the timetable on which cleaner, in theory cheaper, power reaches the grid slips to the right. And if the timetable slips, the period during which UK consumers are paying for gas-heavy generation and legacy capital costs gets extended.

A clean energy push without the workforce to deliver it is a clean energy push that comes in late and over budget, and bills don’t tend to come down when projects come in late and over budget.

The King’s Speech is a statement of ambition. Newman Stewart’s note is a statement of supply. The two are pointing in opposite directions, and somebody in Whitehall is going to have to reconcile them before the first sod is turned.

Britain wants the energy, Britain’s engineers want to stay where they are, and the gap in the middle is getting expensive.

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