I have been thinking back in the last month about the strange atmosphere at the end of 2007 and early days of 2008. Lots of talk about "financial instruments" and other phrases that didn’t make a lot of sense (to me) at the time.

Business still seemed busy, but there were definitely some very worried people around. I went to a presentation at my then company’s US headquarters in January 2008, and still remember the presenter putting up a brilliant slide with a perfect cartoon depiction for the caption: “Change Is Coming…”.

I’ve been recycling it as a theme for discussion at our member networking meetings recently, based on the now seemingly universal assumption that a UK election is coming soon, along with an equally strong belief that the most likely outcome is for a change of government as a result.

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The first I can accept, but for the second, I remember a few cast iron election forecasts that didn’t happen, so I’ll hold my own counsel on any outcome for now.

It surprised me to hear that if a UK election happens this year, it will be one of seventy elections held around the world in 2024, so a busy year for potential change. And with that potential change comes possible opportunity, and challenge, which opened the conversation on what that might mean for our engineering and manufacturing industry.

Energy is a key plank for all the political parties of the UK, particularly around the opportunity that de-carbonisation brings, so the news last week of progress towards Sumitomo’s proposed subsea cable manufacturing facility in the Port of Nigg, alongside XLCC’s proposal for their cable manufacturing facility at Hunterston, is a welcome sign of progress for that.

It's an area where Labour have come out strongly, indeed the principal remaining element of its green strategy is a new publicly-owned energy company - Great British Energy - to be based in Scotland, delivering new clean energy opportunities and more pertinently, financial support to build it in the UK.

When Great British Energy was initially announced it also came with a pledge to address one of the key challenges for offshore wind – the time it takes for planning and consenting, universally held up as a barrier to both the pace of change and the appetite to invest in it. That’s one pledge that will need to stay if there is to be any chance of being close to their ambitious aim of 100% clean energy by 2030.

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A more challenging aspect of Labour’s Green Prosperity Fund which encompasses this is the plan to fund this with a "proper" windfall tax on oil and gas companies’ profit.

There are always choices for corporations as to where they choose to operate, so taxation which hastens changes to those choices would always be one to watch.  Cash to invest is not lying around waiting for good causes, so solutions to fund are critical, but at the same time we seek a manageable energy transition, not a cliff edge gradient.

The opportunity to change the apprenticeship levy is an interesting consideration, given that the current levy structure achieves perfect unity in that no-one in the industry likes it.

The CIPD reported that since its introduction in 2017, in England the number of apprentices starting in small businesses has plummeted, with apprenticeship starts in SMEs falling by 49% from 2016/17 to 2020/21. Businesses in England tell us that the mechanism to access their levy funds is overly bureaucratic, perhaps best illustrated by a freedom of information request in 2022 which showed that since May 2019, more than £3.3 billion of unused apprenticeship levy has been returned to the Treasury because of its "use it or lose it" rule.

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Skills are devolved in Scotland and the treatment of the levy is quite different, and here our dissatisfaction is that the levy comes through the block grant, after which it can be spent as the Scottish Government chooses. We’d estimate that less than a third of the apprenticeship levy returned to Scotland through the block grant is actually spent funding apprenticeship places. 

For whoever comes next to lead the UK – and for what the devolved nations do with the receipts from it – listening to the changes industry recommends for the apprenticeship levy is a great opportunity for a really positive development.

Whilst the focus here has been on the potential far-reaching changes that the UK election could bring, closer to home the impact resulting from the dissolution of the Bute House agreement between the SNP and Scottish Greens is another change that opens the door of opportunity to consider some different paths.

A Scottish election may be two years away, but we now have a minority government with no need to go looking for challenges. It’s a perfect time to listen to the asks of industry and consider some of the less business-friendly policies which would help deliver social and economic growth.

Paul Sheerin is chief executive of Scottish Engineering.