British Mining’s Succession Problem

Britain's depleting reserves of mining engineers highlights problems in wider industry.

British industrial employment is skewed towards the old. As they retire, they will leave behind a depleted and severely underemployed workforce. It is at this moment that the risk of accelerated decline in manufacturing becomes the most severe. British industry has by some measures not exceeded the output it achieved in 2007. High electricity prices, growing borrowing costs, and a depleted workforce could turn this stasis into a full-fledged collapse in the next 10-20 years. 

It is worth considering a sector that could have benefited most from the government’s plans for Net-Zero; mining. The government’s Net Zero plans, though largely wasteful, could have been an opportunity to stimulate wider British industry. The immense number of inputs needed to build solar panels, wind turbines, and electric vehicles is going to demand a greater expansion in mineral extraction than anything in human history. 

Although it is not what it once was, British mining continues to be a multi-billion pound industry. Minerals like salt, silica sand, potash, polyhalite, gypsum, and limestone contribute £3 billion to the economy annually, more than the steel industry or solar photovoltaics. Britain has a much smaller metals mining business that collapsed between 2017 and 2021 due to the ceasing of tungsten mining at Hemerdon, the third-largest Tungsten resource in the world. There is a worthwhile opportunity to extract lithium in Cornwall.

Perhaps the biggest opportunity in domestic metals is the mining of gold in Northern Wales. The Royal family has been using Welsh gold since 1923. After ceasing in 1998, in recent years there’s been new investment. The area is bedeviled by poverty and lacks human capital, so some old-fashioned gold prospecting could be something to welcome. Unfortunately in 2021, Natural Resources Wales blocked the mining company Alba Mineral Resources from dewatering an old shaft at the promising Clogau mine, despite it already leaking water into the surrounding ecosystem to no apparent ill effect.

While burdensome vetoes hamper this industry, a further problem is the acute shortages of qualified personnel. Currently, the UK has only one major mining education institution — the Camborne mining school at Exeter. According to a 2022 report by the UK mining education forum, of the 1,237 mining engineers registered with the British engineering council, 80% are over the age of 50, with 39% over the age of 66. The country has a shortfall of 51 mining graduates each year. How can getting 100 additional graduates— let alone 51 — be hard? More broadly there are reported to be 2,000 open positions in the UK mining industry.

What is the purpose of pushing every child into higher education if not to avoid such manageable shortfalls? These problems are endemic across the manufacturing sector. The average engineer is 54. The shortfall is well analyzed by Engineering UK below. As can be seen, demand is driven not be expected expansion, but by so many people retiring.

Projected expansion and replacement demand in the engineering sector for the period 2014 to 2024, by major occupational group and qualification level. More can be read here.

The UK government has bet large on returning Britain to the top table of nuclear energy producers. But the age of the average nuclear industry employee is over 50. A 2015 paper envisioned increasing the workforce to 98,000. As of 2021, the figure is less than 65,000, with a greater proportion involved in decommissioning and waste management as opposed to building or running new plants. Loss of expertise has contributed to Britain’s liability to build a reactor since 1995. This failure in turn reduces new intakes. 

The standard solution to these shortfalls is more overseas workers, without much acknowledgment that this strategy has been in place since 1997. Britain is not at the top of the global labour arbitrage system. It cannot hope to counter industrial decline by importing engineers who cannot get into the U.S. or Germany. Targeted recruitment abroad is worthwhile, but the great surge in complaints over labour shortages has stemmed primarily from businesses involved in accommodation and food services, social care, and retail. Current immigration policy is not tailored to bringing in 50 additional mining engineers, but to help owners of mid-tier retail brands like Lord Wolfson. 

The shortages, whether they be 2,000 for mining or 84,000 for manufacturing, are largely manageable with the domestic workforce given the employment rate. There would need to be reform at the educational level beyond the boilerplate of ‘skills’.