Aberdeen is facing a cliff edge. The UK’s current energy policy is badly hurting the city – a place that relies on the energy sector to a huge degree.
It isn’t just oil and gas jobs that are at stake, but employment across all areas of the local economy in the north-east of Scotland. A scenario put out by the Robert Gordon University’s Energy Transition Institute envisaged job losses from the North Sea oil and gas workforce of 400 people every fortnight, between now and the end of the decade. And that’s just the job losses in the energy sector. The true number of the newly unemployed could be much higher. Particularly in a city like Aberdeen.
I discovered all this while researching a paper for the Jobs Foundation, culminating in a report called ‘Cliff Edge: Jobs in Aberdeen, the Epicentre of the UK’s Energy Transition’. The desk research was mind-boggling enough, but my eyes were truly opened by all the people I spoke to in Aberdeen.
Bob Keiller CBE is a well-known figure in the city. He was CEO of Wood Group, a multinational oil-and-gas-services company headquartered in Aberdeen. After leaving Wood, Bob founded Our Union Street – a non-profit organisation that seeks to help the local business community. He is outspoken about the areas where things have gone wrong for the city.
‘If you compare and contrast what is going on now with the upside of having a vibrant oil and gas sector in the city, you can quickly see that oil and gas had a positive impact on almost every supply sector. Whether it’s retail, whether it’s selling cars, whether it’s selling houses, whether it’s filling places in schools, whether it’s charitable donations, all of those things have come from having a vibrant oil and gas sector where you’ve got lots of high quality, highly paid jobs.’
Bob is quietly hopeful about the transition to renewables, as many in Aberdeen are. Yet, like most of his community, he is also realistic. ‘Just hoping that it will happen, and it will magically transform from a caterpillar into a butterfly because it happens to be here, I think is wishful thinking.’
The UK’s Labour government is taking a huge gamble with people’s lives in Aberdeen. Right now, there is a systemic wind-down of domestic oil and gas production, which is predicated on the idea that the renewables sector will magically flourish as a result.
It is a strategy that is already creating real problems in people’s lives. I spoke with Donna Hutchison, CEO of Aberdeen Cyrenians, which has been helping the city’s homeless and vulnerable for over 50 years.
‘There’s an uptick in people looking for help, but not yet for those that have lost their jobs. We will see a lag, probably six months… We’d like to avoid it happening, but we know how people see seeking help as a stigma… They won’t until the last second and when they are facing a crisis.’
Donna then laid out a terrifying, possible near future for the city:
‘I think you’ll see a lot of people in what are well-paid jobs – say, £80,000 to £100,000 salaries – put out of work. They would have always picked up another sales job or another marketing and communications job in the past. But now, there aren’t those jobs to pick up. So I think we’re going to have a swathe of people who have maybe never gone through this sort of situation before. People who will have an assumption, “I’m going to get something”.’
Donna believes a lot of these people will be searching in vain. ‘You will start to see the, “Oh shit, this is not coming, what am I going to do now?”… We will get some of those people through the door next year.’
The saddest part is that the solution to all this is relatively straightforward: end the windfall tax on energy companies and let them drill in the North Sea again. These two changes alone might well alleviate a large chunk of the problem. The companies I spoke to prior to the 2025 Autumn budget were hopeful of getting something on taxation, possibly even something on drilling. In the end, they got nothing.
Without some drastic change in energy policy soon, Aberdeen could be facing the same fate as so many coal-mining towns did in the last quarter of the 20th century. Joblessness, reliance on benefits over the course of multiple generations, a loss of pride and purpose.
I truly hope this will not end up being Aberdeen’s fate. Looking at the facts, however, I struggle not to fear for the worst.
Nick Tyrone is a journalist, author and think-tanker. His latest novel, The Patient, is out now.
