Green Jobs

KEY MESSAGES for GREEN JOBS

As we recover from the Pandemic, and start to panic about the Climate Emergency, there are huge opportunities for Green Jobs
The Government needs to support Green Jobs – cost and policies
Main need for retrofitting jobs is insulation and heat pumps
GLA has Green New Deal to boost jobs
Haringey has limited levers to increase Green Jobs

Haringey Council’s proposed actions are in the ‘pink stripes’ below

The cabinet member in Haringey responsible for Business Engagement, Community Wealth building, Local Economic Growth, SME Business Development and Town Centre and High Streets Strategy is Cllr Ruth Gordon at ruth.gordon@haringey.gov.uk.

For Adult Learning, Training and Skills it is Cllr Julie Davies at julie.davies@haringey.gov.uk . For 16-19 year old education it is Cllr Zena Brabazon at zena.brabazon@haringey.gov.uk.

These are supported by the Business team, see here and the Jobs and Training team, see here.

Global Economy – Global Pandemic

It is widely understood that, as millions of people lose their jobs in the Covid pandemic, quick actions to retrain and re-employ them in green sectors are obvious and crucial parts of the recovery. There is loud concern about the downturn in hospitality, tourism and aviation with pressure and lobbying to get these back to ‘normal’, even at risk of further Covid transmission. Voices to boost jobs in clean power, clean transport, green environment are less in evidence.

UK100 estimates that 455,000 ‘white van’ jobs could be created across the UK’s property and construction sectors if the government increases funding for retrofit projects and green skills. How many for Haringey? How to train and employ Haringey people in the Green Recovery?

The Green New Deal - click

The Green New Deal group was formed in 2007 in the UK, consisting of eminent climate, business and political thinkers with the benefit of good local green jobs as one of its basic messages. The group helped with the formation of the Sunrise Movement in the US and inspired the Labour Green New Deal and other likeminded groups. The Green New Deal movement can be illustrated as:

UK Economy – UK Jobs

The New Economics Foundation (NEF) BUILDING A GREEN STIMULUS FOR COVID-19 A RECOVERY PLAN FOR A GREENER, FAIRER FUTURE July 2020. (p11) shows how the new green jobs can be spread across the UK, particularly areas of high deprivation.

New Economics Foundation’s Green Stimulus for housing models a radical scenario where around 9m UK homes receive whole-house retrofit measures. This is not only necessary but is also feasible ….. 117,811 new direct jobs in year one, rising to a peak of 382,885, in year four. This is an average of 294,527 new jobs between 2020-2023/24, a 22% increase in total construction employment and a 162% increase in the renovation, maintenance and improvement sector. This rises to an average of 515,157 when factoring in indirect jobs.

A recent study undertaken by RetrofitWorks , reported by BHesco, said that to bring the UK’s housing stock up to a minimum standard an additional 223.387 people would be needed in energy efficiency and retrofit trades (e.g. carpenters, electricians, plumbers, window fitters, roofers, etc).

The Local Government Association (LGA) outlined how the UK could create almost 700,000 new green jobs within a decade, and a further 488,000 through to 2050.

The NEF report (p5) breaks down the types of jobs and skills that could be created to boost both the economy and Covid recovery.

Thousands of Heat Network jobs - click

Installing heat pumps is the sector that most needs skilled tradespeople urgently to reduce carbon/energy/heat waste, yet finding these tradespeople today is really difficult, and heat pumps require both plumbing and electrical skills – currently strongly demarcated. Hence rapid training to install heat pumps is vital for a Green Recovery.

According to the Committee on Climate Change in their 2020 progress report to Parliament from 2025, “all new build homes will need to be built with low-carbon heating. The UK’s 29m existing residential dwellings, and all commercial and public buildings, will need to switch away from fossil fuelled boilers towards low-carbon heating sources.” (P54)

Table 1.1. Medium-term milestones to be on track to Net Zero emissions by 2050 (p57) includes“Targeted deployment of heat pumps must scale up to be able to replace the majority of current gas boiler demand by the early 2030s (around ~1.5m installations a year)”

And also “Review professional standards and skills across the building, heat and ventilation supply trades with a nationwide training programme to upskill the existing workforce”

The reason for this is that the least efficient Ground Source Heat Pump has 88% fewer emissions than natural gas, and 100% fewer where renewable electricity is used to run it, as illustrated by this table in Decarbonising Heating Interseasonal Heat Transfer (ICAX) comparing emissions from gas heating with different heating technologies, (taking BEIS carbon intensity figures for 2020 – whilst noting that the electricity to power heat pumps is rapidly becoming less carbon intense)

Professional careers – Guru systems reports in the Heat Networks skills review that, as well as the need for 20-35,000 direct jobs in heat networks by 2050, there will need to be thousands of professionals such as engineers and data scientists.

Protection from more frequent heat waves – The electricity to run air conditioning around the world will inevitably increase, as heat waves increase. But Drawdown says that “When paired with renewable energy sources and building structures designed for efficiency, heat pumps could eliminate almost all emissions from heating and cooling.” And an innovative heat/cooling solution includes Ground Source Heat Pumps that store heat from air conditioning in the ground (rather than the air) for use in the winter.

ICAX achieves this with Interseasonal Heat Transfer™ – a complementary integration of well tried technologies and patented innovation.

UK initiatives – the Heat Network Industry Council – The Heat Networks Industry Council has been established by the Association for Decentralised Energy (ADE) who provide the Secretariat. It “brings together leaders of the heat networks industry to support Government in achieving its vision of achieving a sustainable industry. The Council’s offer to Government identifies measures it can take to
• Create jobs and investment (focusing on the investment that could be unlocked by the sector, and the number and quality of jobs that will be created as a result)
• Cut costs (to both those looking to invest in heat networks and customers supplied by a heat network)
• Set out the industry’s commitment to decarbonisation
• Create more liveable, smarter cities (including how it can support grid balancing services and flexibility and improve air quality)
• Drive excellence in customer service and standards

Bean Beanland of the Heat Pump Federation, listed the Barriers to upskilling & recruiting apprentices in the heat pump sector at an Ashden Awards talk.
• Future market visibility
• Lack of understanding amongst school leavers
• Average age of fossil fuel technicians and engineers
• Quality of existing training
• Lack of consumer demand, general low awareness of low carbon technologies amongst homeowners
• ncumbents campaign
• Fear & doubt – the disruption debate

It is also the case that the cost of gaining PAS2030 or PAS 2035 accreditation, needed for all official schemes is very high for sole traders.

Government initiatives - Haringey opportunities

A Plan for Jobs – In July 2020 the Government published A Plan for Jobs laying out their intentions to protect “jobs in the hard-hit hospitality and accommodation sectors”, jobs to “get the property market moving” The plan did promise to “increase and bring forward infrastructure investment, and to make homes greener, warmer and cheaper to heat” and the schemes to do these, including Green Homes Grants (GHG) and Public Sector Decarbonisation Scheme (PSDS) would require massive retraining and re-employment.

However GHG and PSDS were launched with no means to fulfill the increased demand with increased tradespeople. Indeed the “High quality traineeships for young people”, work academy placements and apprenticeship schemes made no reference to preference for these being in green sectors. The announcements for funding for schools and colleges to improve the condition of their buildings and estates in 2020-21 will cause competition for the same tradespeople (whilst EU workers can no longer boost our workforce)

The Green Jobs Challenge – also in July 2020 the Department for farming and Rural Affairs (Defra) announced, the Green Jobs Challenge for improving the natural environment, including planting trees, restoring habitats, clearing waterways, and creating green space for people and wildlife could potentially be similar to the original Roosevelt New Deal and give young people a new start in life.

Ten Point Plan for a Green Industrial Revolution – the Plan for Jobs was followed in November 2020 by a Ten Point Plan to mobilise £12 billion of government investment, and potentially three times as much from the private sector, to create and support up to 250,000 green jobs

The main issue with these schemes is that they do nothing to train up the people thrown out of hospitality and aviation etc to deliver Retrofit. The Green Homes Grant aims the £3bn at the companies who were set up already for Green Deal and Eco work and are now turning customers away in droves. It is quite complicated, expensive and time consuming for tradespeople to get the right accreditations and be on the Trustmark list – so no contribution whatsoever to a green recovery.

Bhesco (Brighton and Hove) summarised the shortfalls of the Ten Point Plan in a blog

“There are several absolutely crucial oversights that will undermine the whole initiative. The plan is not nearly ambitious enough to realistically avert global heating of greater than 1.5 degrees (for starters, setting a net zero goal of 2050 is twenty years too late, as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has stated in various reports). The Ten Point plan proposed is costly for energy customers and UK taxpayers, impacting people in fuel poverty very badly by embedding a high cost for electricity from nuclear power for decades. Particularly by omitting support for solar, little interest in local onshore wind and support for eye wateringly expensive nuclear. (just keeping our nuclear infrastructure safe costs the taxpayer £3 billion per year. )” Bhesco suggests that:

• grants should be made available to train new, accredited installers, creating hundreds of thousands of jobs.
• €12 billion is provided to the fossil fuel industry compared to €8.3 billion provided to renewables
• Enterprise Investment Scheme (EIS) should be expanded to once again include community energy groups instead of only to commercial enterprises.

The Green Jobs Taskforce

The Green Jobs Taskforce, to be chaired by Energy Minister Kwasi Kwarteng and Skills Minister Gillian Keegan, forms part of the government’s ambitious plan to build back greener and achieve net zero emissions by 2050.

Its aim will be to focus on the immediate and longer-term challenges of delivering skilled workers for the UK’s transition to net zero including:

Ensuring we have the immediate skills needed for building back greener, such as in offshore wind and home retrofitting.
Developing a long-term plan that charts out the skills needed to help deliver a net zero economy.
Ensuring good quality green jobs and a diverse workforce.
Supporting workers in high carbon transitioning sectors, like oil and gas, to retrain in new green technologies.

Businesses represented by the Taskforce’s membership include Orsted, Nissan, BP, Barratt Developments and Tata Steel. Representatives from the Construction Industry Training Board, Retrofit Works, National Grid, the East London Institute of Technology, the TYC, Newcastle College Energy Academy, the Tees Valley LEP, Prospect, WWF and Repowering have also been selected.

London Initiatives - Haringey opportunities - click
The London Recovery Programme –

The London Recovery Programme – The pan-London Recovery Board, co-chaired by the Mayor of London, launched the London Recovery Programme in November 2020.

To action these policies the Mayor announced in Nov 2020 £10m for a Green New Deal to secure thousands of green jobs, supporting the London Recovery Board’s ambition to double the size of the green economy in London to £100 billion by 2030. It consists of:
- Green Foundations
  Supporting growth of new and existing businesses in the green economy. Projects will create job opportunities and develop skills for Londoners to exploit the opportunities that the transition to a low carbon circular economy represents.
- Better Futures
  Tailored support to SMEs to improve the success rate and speed of low-carbon enterprises supporting London’s transition. By expanding the existing Better Futures programme, funding will provide additional and enhanced, tailored business and technical development, with a proactive focus on under-represented groups in the Cleantech sector whilst supporting internships to access the sector.
The announcement also promised that the next round of Solar Together, that group buys solar installations for homeowners, would include up to £60,000 to support installers to boost their training and employment opportunities and grow the supply chain.

The chart below is from the Local Government Inform (LG Inform) with estimates of the number ofgreen jobs per local authority

Haringey Climate Emergency – Haringey Jobs

Local Government Inform (LG Inform) estimates the number of green jobs per local authority

Com3 - To support the development of a skills programme, new jobs and careers in the carbon reduction sector
Haringey’s Employment and Skills Recovery Plan

Haringey has published the Employment and Skills Recovery Plan following a series of workshops attended by: Bridge Renewal Trust, Selby Centre, CONEL, Haringey 6th Form College, DWP, Haringey Adult Learning, Haringey Works (the council’s job brokerage team), North Middlesex University Hospital, Whittington Hospital and Ada. The plan details the actions and outcomes to support residents into work and training and is part of Haringey’s Good Economy Recovery Plan.

References:
1. College of Haringey, Enfield and North East London (CONEL) https://www.conel.ac.uk/
2. Haringey Works at https://www.haringey.gov.uk/jobs-and-training/haringey-works provides free employment and skills support exclusively for our borough’s residents. “If you have recently become unemployed due to COVID-19 then Haringey Works can help….. We have jobs available in the Health and Social Care sector, NHS, supermarkets, Metropolitan Police, some local councils, logistics companies and cleaning companies and more.”
3. Haringey Construction Partnership at https://www.haringey.gov.uk/jobs-and-training/haringey-works/haringey-construction-partnership “Are you looking for a job in the construction industry and live in Haringey?” Haringey Council, Job Centre Plus, The College of Haringey, Enfield and North East London and developers working in the borough have come together to form the Haringey Construction Partnership.
4. (p5) of CCAP says that “The Haringey Innovation Hub was awarded £100k by Climate KIC (EU’s Knowledge and Innovation Centre)…. This initiative has since grown to a London-wide Better Futures initiative, a low carbon business incubator hub with the aim to support 100 businesses over the period 2017-2020” – which may refer to the Better Futures part of the pan London Green Recovery Programme.

H3 – provide technical advice to householders - smart retrofit academies

T3 and W6 - Jobs in green transport between homes and businesses