Daniel Cope is a chartered environmentalist and director at Green Lark Environmental Solutions, with ongoing involvement in skills and training initiatives at Stoke on Trent College.
Here, he discusses how investing in green skills is key to strengthening Staffordshire’s economy, supporting local businesses, and creating better career opportunities for young people.
“Across Stoke on Trent and Staffordshire, businesses are facing a moment of real pressure. Energy costs have settled at levels that many firms now see as the new normal for the foreseeable future, and this is reshaping decisions across every sector.
Competition is tightening, and many organisations are having to make difficult choices simply to stay commercially viable. At the same time, young people are navigating a labour market that feels more uncertain than ever, with fewer clear routes into stable and meaningful work.
Within these pressures sits an opportunity that deserves more attention.
On the surface, the political conversation around energy and competitiveness can look polarised. When we look closer though, the overlap is far greater than the differences. Every party wants stronger energy resilience. Every party wants lower costs for businesses and households. Every party wants the UK to stay competitive in a global economy that is evolving rapidly.
Skills can become the defining factor in how regions like ours move forward. They influence competitiveness, they influence opportunity, and they influence the choices available to young people and employers across Staffordshire.
The transition to low carbon technologies is often framed as an environmental issue, but it is fundamentally an economic one. Whether it is improving the performance of buildings, modernising heating systems, installing new technologies or helping businesses reduce their overheads, the demand for skilled people is growing faster than the supply.
Retrofit is now one of the UK’s most significant skills gaps, with national estimates calling for hundreds of thousands of additional workers over the next decade. Employers across Staffordshire are experiencing the same pressures, particularly when trying to bring younger people into technical roles that support energy efficiency and modern building systems. They need technicians, installers, engineers and coordinators who can deliver the solutions that keep them competitive.
This is why the recent opening of the Advanced Green Technology Centre at Stoke on Trent College matters. It reflects a point where education, industry and local partners are beginning to move in the same direction. The technologies taught there are the very systems businesses are relying on to manage costs and strengthen their position, and the college is preparing learners to work with them from day one.
As a society, we must help our young people see that these disciplines are not second choices. They are routes into real opportunity. And we must speak with genuine respect about the skill, precision and technical mastery these careers require.
If we want to keep talent in Staffordshire, if we want businesses to thrive here, and if we want this region to move with confidence, then skills must be treated as a strategic priority.
Skills define competitiveness. Skills create opportunity. Skills give the next generation a future they can build here, in a region that has shaped the world before, and has every reason to do so again.”
