Recommendation 6

HM Government · verbatim extract Not Addressed

The government partially agrees with this recommendation The clean energy workforce is already providing good jobs to hundreds of thousands of people across the UK. Our priority is to keep growing this domestic skill base to meet the increased demand to deliver our clean energy ambitions, and we will do this by investing in our future pipeline of workers key to our clean energy mission. We recognise that there may be exceptional cases where skilled workers from abroad could be required to fill critical workforce gaps. The government agrees with the concerns noted in the report that more needs to be done to encourage investment in the domestic workforce and reduce reliance on international recruitment. As the report notes, the government set out its approach to tackling this longstanding issue in our Immigration White Paper (IWP), ‘Restoring Control over the Immigration System’, which we published on 12 May 2025. We have established the Labour Market Evidence Group (LMEG) link migration policy and visa controls to skills and labour market policies, so that immigration is not used as an alternative to training or tackling workforce problems in the UK. The Temporary Shortage List (TSL), which is currently being reviewed by the independent Migration Advisory Committee (MAC), will only include occupations where they are key to the industrial strategy or delivering critical infrastructure, where the MAC has advised it is justified, where there is a workforce strategy in place, and where employers seeking to recruit from abroad are committed to playing their part in increasing recruitment from the domestic workforce. Over time, the LMEG will also be able to make recommendations about further areas where workforce plans and strategies are needed to tackle labour market problems. The MAC will be able to review progress against those strategies to assess whether further restrictions should be recommended in future – allowing us to go further in bringing net migration down as we improve skills, productivity and growth in the UK. And we have increased the Immigration Skills Charge (ISC) for the first time since its introduction, by 32%. The IWP set out that funding will be used to support skills funding for priority sectors to upskill the domestic workforce and reduce reliance on migration over the medium term. We do not currently plan other labour conditionality measures beyond those we set out in the IWP, however we keep all our policies under review to ensure they are working effectively in the best interests of the UK.