Net zero push risks exodus of jobs to China, warns JCB heir

Yahoo

21-05-2025

Ed Miliband's race to embrace net zero is fuelling an exodus of jobs to China, the heir to the JCB empire has warned.
Jo Bamford, the owner of Wrightbus and son of JCB founder Lord Bamford, said the Energy Secretary's desire to decarbonise the grid was flawed because it is too reliant on importing green energy equipment from the Far East.
Instead, he urged the Government to become a leader in hydrogen to safeguard jobs.
He told The Telegraph: 'If you just electrify everything without thinking about what the implications are, then you'll lose a lot of jobs to China.
'You need to electrify a lot of stuff. Certain things are great for it, like cars – fantastic. But anything that's big and heavy ... Yes, you can electrify them, but it's probably not the best use of the electrification process.
'So I'm not anti-electrification. But I'm saying that most of the manufacturing jobs in that area have been taken by China already.'
The entrepreneur said Britain's experience from the oil and gas industry made it well-suited to tackle the challenges of hydrogen and called on Mr Miliband to pump more investment into the sector.
He said: 'We're highlighting that we [the UK] can be experts in the world of hydrogen. The Government really needs to understand that foundation industries – cement plants, glass, brewing, – they all need a gas of some form or another. It's difficult to to electrify them.
'I can make hydrogen between midnight and six o'clock in the morning quite cheaply. And you can deliver it today in London.'
Mr Bamford is a leading figure in the consortium proposing the £6.5bn HySpeed project, which aims to develop hydrogen-producing hubs in the UK that would pump the carbon-free gas throughout the country.
Hydrogen has been suggested as a green 'superfuel' that its supporters claim could one day be used in power plants, buses, aircraft and cars.
But critics argue that hydrogen, which requires a lot of power to produce through electrolysis, should be focused only on industries that are most difficult to decarbonise, rather than heating or mass transport.
This is also partly because it is less energy-efficient to burn than natural gas and more difficult to contain due to its 'leaky' nature.
But Mr Bamford dismissed the concerns of academic 'commentators', who he said had little experience of building real-world things. He argued that hydrogen could create jobs in the UK and reduce the risk of relying entirely on electrified solutions.
HySpeed is seeking support for about 1 gigawatt hour of hydrogen production per year through a contract for difference (CfD), the type of subsidy awarded to wind farms to guarantee a set price for their output.
His company, Wrightbus, also sells hydrogen buses as well as battery-powered buses.
Mr Bamford warned that focusing on electrification only would decimate traditional UK industries that will struggle to eliminate fossil fuels from their processes.
Official figures this week revealed that production from energy-intensive industries had plunged by a third in just three years due to sky-high power and gas costs, taking output to the lowest level since records began in 1990.
Mr Bamford said: 'If you don't figure out a way to give the industry a gas and allow them to make their process, then of course they're going to leave.
'And when a cement plant goes, you can import that from anywhere else in the world. When a glass factory goes, you can import that from anywhere else in the world. But these are foundation industries, not in capital cities but up and down the country, that provide long-term jobs.
'We can't electrify them, even if we tried. So hydrogen is going to have to be the solution.
'Electrification doesn't give you long-term jobs, and it doesn't give you a lot of the things in the supply chain. When a factory makes stuff and is incubated, that's there for the next 50 years. It's very difficult to pick it up.'
He also warned that focusing exclusively on electric solutions would begin to cause 'grid issues'.
'How do you put in another bus depot, or how do you put in a data centre?' Mr Bamford said.
'At the moment, we have three motorways, in effect. We move energy through the electricity networks, we move it through the gas networks, and we pick up oil and gas and move it around in trucks.
'But if your strategy is to take the most congested network and make it 10 times more congested and get rid of the other two motorway networks, that's going to fall over.'