NZ mining giant heads to Britain for recruits

State-owned miner Solid Energy is offering unemployed British miners jobs because it doesn't have time to train New Zealanders.

"We are looking for experienced miners," Solid Energy chief operating officer Barry Bragg told the BBC.

"We can't afford to wait 18 months to two years to train people. So we are better off coming to the UK and making some jobs offers".

Solid Energy this week started advertising in Britain - apparently to take advantage of the decision by UK Coal to close its Ellington Colliery in Northumberland.

Solid Energy is due to visit Northumberland in the next few weeks and take about 25 miners from the 150 responses it has received.

"It takes about 18 months to train a person to work underground and since we have a large pool of experienced miners in the UK we are looking to bring some of them over to New Zealand," Mr Bragg said.

There had been an "unexpected boom" in the mining industry in New Zealand, he said.

"A lot of projects are under way and we need to get them running." The Yorkshire Evening Post newspaper reported that the Solid Energy recruitment drive was offering a fresh start Down Under to those "who have been cast aside by the British mining industry."

"While Yorkshire pits close, a job for life in the industry is still a possibility, albeit 12,000 miles away."

The newspaper quoted Solid Energy chief executive Don Elder as saying that known global oil and gas reserves would be largely exhausted within 20 to 50 years, but abundant and accessible coal reserves would last more than 200 years.

Mechanisation and the company's downturn in the 1990s, when it laid off miners, had reduced the local mine workforce, a Solid Energy spokeswoman said.

"As a result there hasn't been a stream of people coming through who have got the training."

Chris Kitchen, National Union of Miners secretary at Kellingley Colliery in Yorkshire - where another 180 workers are about to be made redundant - said he could see emigration to New Zealand attracting some of the miners.

Mr Kitchen said the offer would be attractive to "somebody who's looking for a fresh start and young enough to try a new way of life".

"But in real terms that will only be a small number," he said.

When the UK nationalised the industry in 1947, there were almost 1000 pits employing a million miners. There are now only a few thousand miners in a handful of pits.

- NZPA