Clyde Maritime Alliance Launches to Drive Growth, Skills and Investment

Bringing together leading maritime, engineering, education and public-sector organisations, the Clyde Maritime Alliance (CMA) has been created to unlock the full economic potential of the River Clyde’s maritime sector, promoting business growth and workforce resilience while helping to position the Clyde as a leading maritime cluster for investment and innovation in Scotland and the UK. The CMA will focus on the shared priorities that will underpin long-term growth, including skills, workforce development, investment, infrastructure and supply chain opportunity, helping the Clyde build on its industrial strengths and create high-quality local jobs for years to come.

Founding members include major maritime employers and operators across the Clyde, including BAE Systems, Babcock International Group, Dales Marine Services, Ferguson Marine (Port Glasgow), JFD Limited (part of James Fisher & Sons), Malin Group and Peel Ports Clydeport.  They are working alongside key regional partners, including Glasgow City Region, Skills Development Scotland and Glasgow Chamber of Commerce to set out a shared ambition for the sector on the River Clyde through a Memorandum of Understanding, with Scottish Enterprise and the UK Government providing seed funding for the Alliance. 

The CMA follows a process that began when businesses operating on the Clyde identified a shared opportunity: to work together so the region has the people, skills and capacity needed to deliver current commitments, secure investment and grow its role as one of the UK’s most important maritime centres and respond to Government priorities, including the Clyde Mission, with a shared industry voice. To build a clear, data-led understanding of the opportunity, the businesses worked with RAND Group to carry out a Clyde Maritime Skills Study.

The study underlines the scale of the Clyde’s maritime strengths. Five of the region’s largest maritime employers, Babcock Marine, BAE Systems, Dales Marine Services, Ferguson Marine and Malin Group, together employ nearly 8,000 people, close to the number of skilled workers recorded when RAND last benchmarked the workforce across Scotland’s shipyards in 2003. This makes the Clyde’s maritime workforce one of the largest concentrations of specialist maritime and marine engineering skills anywhere in the UK, spanning structural trades, systems engineering, architecture and outfitting. With major programmes already underway and further opportunities ahead, the CMA has been created to help ensure that this expertise is retained, developed and positioned to support future growth across the sector, maximising the economic benefit to the Clyde and Glasgow City Region.

Building on this evidence base, maritime employers worked alongside Skills Development Scotland, Glasgow City Region, local authorities and colleges to develop the Clyde Maritime Skills Programme, a coordinated response designed to address current and future workforce requirements across the sector.  Supported by £2 million of Scottish Government Economic Intervention funding, the programme enabled partners to test new approaches to skills development, workforce planning and collaborative delivery. The success of this partnership approach demonstrated the value of sustained industry collaboration and provided the foundation for the creation of the CMA, ensuring businesses can continue to work together to address skills challenges, maximise economic opportunities and support the significant pipeline of maritime activity planned for the Clyde.

The CMA’s initial priorities include skills and workforce development, inward investment promotion, collaborative funding bids and the development and delivery of major strategic opportunities that have the potential to transform the Clyde maritime economy. Central to this will be advancing the Scottish Maritime Technology Park and Inchgreen projects, while bringing together industry, skills and public sector partners to unlock investment, secure further funding and maximise the economic benefits these developments can deliver for the region. It plans to establish a small secretariat team to coordinate this work and support partners in developing funding bids and delivering these projects.

Stuart Patrick, Chair of the Clyde Maritime Alliance commented:

This is an important step forward in how we enable industry on the River Clyde to deliver economic benefit to the region. Forming the Clyde Maritime Alliance is a clear signal of intent: that we are ready to work together to deliver growth and opportunity for the Clyde and the businesses, people and communities who depend on it.

The River Clyde has a proud maritime heritage, and the businesses within this Alliance are the custodians of that legacy today, building, maintaining and supporting vessels that matter to Scotland and the UK. But this is about more than protecting what we have. It's about looking forward: securing the skills pipeline that will allow the Clyde to win and deliver the next generation of work, invest in innovation, and ensure maritime engineering continues to thrive here for decades to come. This Alliance gives us a single, collective voice to do that, for our businesses, and for the economic future of the whole region.