Nearly a million young people in Britain are not in education, employment or training. Heathrow has decided that’s a construction problem, and has attached 5,000 apprenticeships, traineeships and entry-level places to its third-runway expansion programme.
A council, then a pipeline
Alongside the pledge, the airport launched an Infrastructure Skills Council to work out how major UK projects can actually absorb NEET young people rather than talking about it in a press release. The council pulls in contractors, employers, trade unions, colleges and training providers to map routes into construction, engineering and the rest of the infrastructure trades. Lord Blunkett, the former education secretary, co-chairs it with Robert Halfon, once skills and apprenticeships minister and now an executive director at Make UK.
Four regional meetings around the UK come first, then recommendations aimed at Heathrow, the wider infrastructure sector and government.
Alan Milburn, the government’s youth employment adviser, backed the initiative and framed the stakes bluntly. “Nearly one million young people in Britain are not in education, employment or training. Unless we act, we risk a lost generation of young people.” Blunkett called it “a watershed moment, with a pipeline of projects that could transform the lives of our young people.”
What’s committed and what isn’t
The 5,000 places and the 108,000 jobs Heathrow says the expansion could support nationally are both company projections, contingent on a runway that isn’t consented and isn’t funded. Neither figure is independently verified. The NEET number is a government statistic quoted by an adviser rather than sourced to a named ONS release in the announcement. The council has published no recommendations and carries no stated budget.
That’s the standard shape of a UK infrastructure skills pledge, and it’s why the industry has learned to wait for the second announcement.
Why the structure is the interesting part
What separates this from the usual is that the skills body is being built before the programme, not bolted on after the first labour shortage. UK megaprojects have a pattern: the skills strategy arrives at peak workforce, by which point the training lead time is longer than the remaining schedule. HS2 is still working through the consequences of similar timing on a job that’s been running for a decade.
The other structural point is that the council is looking across projects rather than down one. A trainee who starts on a runway and finishes on a retrofit is more use to the industry than one who is trained, employed and then released when a single programme demobilises. The UK has plenty of the second kind of work coming: deep retrofit alone, including jobs like the James Riley Point EnerPHit retrofit in Newham, needs a trained workforce that currently doesn’t exist at scale.
Whether any of this survives a planning inquiry is a separate question.