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In the recent past, Cornwall’s natural advantages - granite bedrock, deep waters, windblown coasts, clear sunny skies - have played a vital psychological role in providing escape to burnt-out urbanites from upcountry. These advantages have tended to be thought of in terms of a pre-modern or post-industrial green idyll. But these exact same attributes lend themselves to an alternative future based on minerals and metals, marine and defence, offshore wind and solar, and space and satellites - one that has a strategic part in powering and protecting these islands in a more dangerous and unpredictable world.
So far, this potential has been pitched solely in terms of the green transition, with our rural and coastal peripherality a source of strength and power. But this strategic location as a gateway to the world - jampacked with critical infrastructure from ports to undersea cables - also renders Cornwall ideally placed to lean into the geopolitically driven policy shifts of recent weeks that have seen sustainability rehoused within an expansive concept of security as the focus of reindustrialisation.
Windy, rocky, wavy, sunny Cornwall needs to seize the moment and sell its distinctive industries and infrastructure as part of a future where control over physical and material resources and products will define our political economy. But embracing this status as a breadbasket for the critical goods and commodities of the twenty-first century will require a comprehensive reckoning with fundamental questions of economic design – and the future of work is at their centre.
Reindustrialisation promises to put into the hands of workers greater pay, prestige and bargaining power as a corollary of the skills, productivity and strategic importance associated with critical sectors and infrastructure.
In the ruins of a long and protracted process of deindustrialisation – one that began before most of the rest of the country and the world had got going - these opportunities are badly needed by workers in what are some of the poorest areas in the UK and Europe. But there is no guarantee that these gains will fall into the laps of workers without a fight. For the benefits of this future to be felt by Cornish people and communities, several blockers will have to be addressed.
As demonstrated in a previous Spotlight Report using the results of the Institute for the Future of Work’s Disruption Index, Cornwall struggles to satisfy the skills needs of some of its most cutting-edge companies owing to an absence of the right training and apprenticeship routes, as well as other challenges like transport.
Whilst the flexible provision outlined by Skills England provides a promising path forward, the current state of play obstructs adaptation to the challenges and opportunities of digital transformation, including in those emerging industries that are either born digital (like offshore wind or space technology) or reborn digital (like the revived mining sector).
Owing to its popularity as a retirement destination, Cornwall is on the receiving end of a demographic imbalance that, through its effects on housing and communities, constrains the supply of young skilled labour to physically or technologically demanding sectors of future economic importance.
Economic inactivity, including young people not in employment, education or training, is significant in Cornwall. The ‘Get Britain Working’ agenda needs to reconnect people of all ages with the labour market in ways that can fill some of the gaps. More broadly, there is a need to stem the consequences of an ageing society by reshaping places around young working families in the form of access to housing and childcare.
The attraction of Cornwall to visitors and retirees - and those wealthy enough to exit the labour market - also means that job opportunities are weighted towards sectors that service their needs for care, leisure and pleasure. Increases in the living wage and national insurance contributions - and coming reforms in the Employment Rights Bill - may change matters, but the highly contingent markets for low-margin in-person services in which these sectors operate limit the capacity of companies to upgrade pay and conditions in line with productivity gains.
As outlined in a new Good Work Monitor Spotlight Report for the Institute for the Future of Work, dialling up standards in these sectors should be a major component of a collective effort to situate Cornwall as a site of ‘Good Work’.
Ultimately, in order to realise Cornwall’s strategic contribution to UK security and sustainability, it will be necessary to design for alternative paths of development. Many of the industries that promise future growth and productivity will unfold in phases of exploration, construction, extraction, and maintenance etc. that require inputs of skilled labour that in many cases translate across sectors. In line with the data-led approach advocated across the government agenda on skills and industrial strategy, this represents an opportunity to plan and prioritise locally.
Indeed, the scale of the challenge confronting our way of life, from defence to climate crisis, necessitates a contemporary equivalent of the industrial workforce planning that underpinned rearmament in the thirties. Using qualitative and quantitative foresight to forecast, model and meet future demand for skilled labour by (re)training workers and moving them across key branches of industry will require social partnership across departments and sectors.
The possibility of such a modern ‘Ministry of Labour’ can be glimpsed in the government’s reforms to the DWP, which will integrate Jobcentre Plus and the National Careers Service into a place-based promoter of work and skills rather than welfare and benefits. The ambition here should be to do what similar bodies do in countries like Sweden and Germany, enabling local workers to adapt to industrial transformations by reskilling or redeploying to where they are required.
The government’s cookie-cutter approach to devolution poses a risk to Cornwall’s capability in these domains. The devolution agenda is tending to allocate support for jobs and growth according to the mayoral status of economic geographies. As seen in the ‘Invest 2035’ Modern Industrial Strategy Green Paper – already outpaced by the unravelling global picture – city regions are particularly privileged in this economic imaginary, despite rural and coastal areas holding all the cards when it comes to the country’s security and sustainability needs.
The templates for devolution make for an ill fit when imposed on Cornwall’s size and shape (at the end of a peninsula and lacking a major city) and cultural and historical specificity (based on a polity defined by the Cornish national minority people). But denying Cornwall a bespoke devolution deal on this basis runs up against the fact that nowhere else in these islands can lay claim to such a combination of strategic assets and resources necessary to the country’s security and sustainability.
Cornwall is crying out for the place-specific support and investment that can populate these sectors within the skilled infrastructural workers of the future on which Britain’s industrial base will be rebuilt. This is no longer a case made from a position of peripherality – but a bold offer of raw materials for the new economy being born. It is in the interests of the centre to accept.
Dr Frederick Harry Pitts
