Celtic Freeport’s £8bn Jobs Plan

FTZ News: The Celtic Freeport released its five-year plan in mid-June 2026, promising more than £8 billion in investment and 11,500 jobs over 25 years across Port Talbot and Milford Haven. The numbers look bold on paper. Whether they land in the towns that need them most is another question.

The Scale of the Promise

The Freeport, operational since November 2024, links two of Wales’s industrial ports under a package of tax reliefs, simplified customs and planning powers. Partners include Associated British Ports, the Port of Milford Haven, Neath Port Talbot Council, Pembrokeshire County Council, RWE and Dragon LNG. The strategy sets a nearer-term target of delivering a £25 million seed-capital programme by the end of the 2028-29 financial year. Priority sectors are floating offshore wind in the Celtic Sea, green hydrogen, sustainable aviation fuel, carbon capture and advanced manufacturing.

Over a quarter-century the Freeport claims it can generate the £8 billion and 11,500 jobs. That works out at fewer than 500 jobs a year on average. Many of those roles will be specialised. The plan itself notes that grid delays, planning hurdles and high upfront infrastructure costs remain serious obstacles.

Port Talbot’s Unfinished Transition

Port Talbot’s steelworks still cast a long shadow. Tata closed its last blast furnaces in 2024. The electric-arc furnace, supported by £500 million of public money, is meant to preserve roughly 5,000 of the previous 8,000 jobs and cut site emissions by about 90 percent once it runs on clean power. The Freeport is presented as the next stage of that shift. Yet the communities around the works have already lived through repeated rounds of contraction. Male unemployment and long-term sickness rates remain high in parts of Neath Port Talbot. A project that talks of high-quality green jobs has to show it can reach the people who lost the old ones.

Hydrogen and Wind on the Horizon

Concrete projects are beginning to appear. A 20-megawatt green hydrogen plant at Milford Haven reached final investment decision in early 2026 and is expected to produce around 2,000 tonnes of low-carbon hydrogen a year once it starts operating near 2028. Planning work continues on marshalling yards, jetty upgrades and land remediation to serve floating offshore wind. The Celtic Sea could eventually host several gigawatts of capacity. Early Crown Estate assessments suggested the first commercial floating wind farms might support more than 5,000 jobs and £1.4 billion a year in wider economic activity during construction phases.

These numbers matter, but they sit years away. Grid connections remain slow and expensive. Without reliable clean power, both the steel transition and the new energy industries lose much of their climate value.

Who Benefits and Who Waits

Freeports were sold as a post-Brexit tool for levelling up. In south-west Wales they are now asked to carry the weight of a just transition as well. Tax incentives and retained business rates are real advantages for companies that locate inside the designated sites. Long-term rate retention is projected, in optimistic scenarios, to approach a billion pounds. Those revenues only appear after private capital arrives and developments start generating rates. If projects stall, the public side of the bargain weakens.

Local skills pipelines will decide whether the jobs stay local. The Freeport’s own plan talks of laying foundations for a “thriving skills market.” That work is still early. Without deliberate training and supply-chain programmes, specialised roles risk being filled by workers from outside the region while existing communities watch the construction traffic pass through.

The Reality Check

Two years after the Freeport opened, the five-year plan moves the language from vision to delivery. Seed-capital projects are meant to start moving this year. Hydrogen plants have reached investment decisions. Port studies are under way. That is more concrete than many earlier freeport announcements. Still, the gap between a 25-year projection of £8 billion and 11,500 jobs and the daily experience of towns shaped by industrial loss remains wide.

The risk is not that nothing happens. Some investment will come. Some jobs will be created. The deeper risk is that benefits concentrate among a narrower group of skilled workers and large energy firms while the broader communities of Port Talbot and the Haven continue to face the familiar pattern of partial recovery and persistent deprivation. Ambition is not the problem. Delivery, local access and honest tracking of who actually gains will decide whether this Freeport becomes more than another set of hopeful numbers./.