Ben Holgate meets Angus Horner, the director of the ever-expanding Harwell campus

Angus Horner has witnessed an explosion in the number of organisations based at the Harwell campus over the past 18 months from about 40 to 60.

The director of the Harwell Science & Innovation Campus Partnership said: “The rate of growth is exceptional.”

He attributes this partly to the UK Government’s decision to make Harwell the hub for the county’s space industry, as well as the cross-fertilisation of companies from different industries located there.

Harwell’s expansion reflects South Oxfordshire being officially rated the top local authority in Britain outside London for high-skilled jobs.

According to a report by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) issued last week, South Oxfordshire is the fourth best local authority in the UK for employing people in the professional, scientific and technical industries, with 20.7 per cent of total employees in the district working in those sectors. The top three local authorities are all in the capital.

The ONS report, called Annual Estimates of Employees from the Business Register and Employment Survey 2014, also reveals a spike in job creation across Oxfordshire of five per cent in 2014 after four years of anaemic jobs growth, and a significant drop in public sector jobs.

Mr Horner said Harwell’s growth was evident in two new buildings opening over the past summer: the European Space Agency’s new headquarters for space applications and telecommunications, which alone will house about 200 staff, and a second building that is occupied by RAL Space.

Harwell now hosts about 5,000 people who work for more than 200 organisations. Even though Harwell commenced life decades ago as an atomic research facility, Mr Horner said more than half the people there now worked in the private sector.

He also stressed that the companies on site were a mix of large corporations, such as Lockheed Martin and Airbus, and small to medium sized enterprises (SMEs).

Harwell’s largest industries in terms of employment are space and health care, followed by big data and supercomputing, advanced engineering, and energy and the environment.

Mr Horner said South Oxfordshire has developed as a hub for high-skilled and high-tech industries for a range of reasons, including the intellectual capital at both the University of Oxford and Oxford Brookes University, as well as the proximity to London and Heathrow Airport, which acts as a gateway to the world.

“A lot of it is an accident of history,” he said.

The nearby science and business centre Milton Park has experienced similar growth. James Dipple, chief executive of MEPC Limited, which owns and manages the site, said the centre now accommodated about 7,500 staff, about 1,000 more than two years ago, who worked for about 225 companies. Most of that jobs growth came from the professional, scientific research and technological companies, he said.

Mr Dipple said: “We’ve seen a lot of growth here in the past two or three years.”

He said other factors that encouraged growth in high-skilled jobs in the area include a pool of well-qualified and technically competent labour, Didcot railway station (to which Milton Park provides a shuttle bus), and new housing stock that is cheaper than housing in Oxford.

Oxfordshire’s total number of employees grew five per cent year-on-year to 341,500 in 2014, whereas in the previous four years growth was either flat or a mere one per cent. Employees in the city of Oxford jumped nine per cent last year.

The ONS report also reveals the changing mix of employment across the county.

Between 2010, when the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government came to power and began implementing austerity measures, and 2014, public sector employees fell by 14 per cent, or 8,500, to 52,200 in Oxfordshire.

Over the same period, private sector employees increased by 12 per cent, or 31,900, to 289,300.

The public sector has shrunk from representing 19 per cent of total employees in Oxfordshire to 15 per cent over those four years.

Paul Maidment, director of analysis at Oxford Analytica, a leading international firm of geopolitical risk analysts based in Oxford, said: “What you’re losing is the jobs in the middle, traditionally semi-skilled or skilled manufacturing jobs.”

Mr Maidment said employment in Oxfordshire, reflecting a trend across the UK, was moving towards high-skilled jobs that require “relatively high-level education”, as well as low-wage service jobs.