A time and a place

What is the 'state of the sector’ for place-based green skills development? We can but offer a few thoughts.

Earlier this week, The Green Edge was honoured to present at a City Region/Combined Authorities Green Skills Network meeting hosted by Ashden. We were asked for our views on the state of the sector for place-based green skills development, and to highlight what we regard as some of the current best practice. This post is a long form version of our presentation.

Image: Reddit

As we touched on in our post last week, according to pretty much all the sources we follow, green jobs are growing - gradually. But we feel they could suddenly take off, depending on a range of tipping point events that might - or might not - happen.

The most recent estimates by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) from the Census 2021 data of the size of the UK's Low Carbon and Renewable Energy Economy (LCREE) state that LCREE turnover and employment estimates are both at their highest level since the first comparable figures were generated in 2015. Between 2020 and 2021, LCREE turnover increased by over 30% and employment increased by over 16%. Energy efficiency, manufacturing and construction are the sectors seeing particular growth in turnover, or employment, or both.

In terms of numbers and projections of people in either green or greening jobs across Britain, estimates tend to vary. The most recent ONS survey of job holders estimated that something approaching 30% of the workforce - that’s around 8 million people - say their job is ‘greening’ in some way. Meanwhile, a piece of work that we hold in high regard is a report on Skills and Net Zero published in May of this year by an Expert Advisory Group working on behalf of the Climate Change Committee, which stated:

While job estimates vary, increasing activity as a result of Net Zero could support from 135,000 to close to 725,000 new jobs by 2030.

Source: CCC.

To see how estimates like this might translate into ‘no regret’ green skill decisions, we look forward to the Green Jobs Delivery Group’s Net Zero Workforce Plan, due in the first half of 2024. We further hope that the political events due in 2024 don’t delay the execution of these actions.

In terms of place-based green skills development, we anticipate that Mission Zero Coalition’s new report The Future is Local (September 2023) will have a strong influence. As we tend to do with these types of reports – including Chris Skidmore’s Net Zero review earlier this year – we looked for the parts particularly related to skills, starting with a word search on the word ‘skills’ itself. Here we found 19 mentions (in a 60-odd page report) and we read what we might regard as confirmation of a couple of the big things we’ve observed concerning the ‘state of the sector’ through our own Green Edge conversations: that the Mayoral Combined Authorities (MCAs) tend to be leading the charge with their powers over skills development, along with other things like transport and environmental planning, to invest in skills for the future, which includes green skills; but that for many local authorities stretched budgets and the fixation on centrally-controlled short-term competitive funding is a real barrier to building workforce and skills.

Perhaps we can flavour the above with a few observations of our own. In July, for example, we posted on the growth so far of Green Skills Further Education academies around the country. We observed that while Sadiq Khan and others have tipped in £44 million to the Mayor Academies Programme (MAP), which among other things has supported the development of five green skill hubs across London, one of our local FE colleges here in Portsmouth has faced a much more guerilla-type fund raising task to build its Net Zero Training Hub – including a 24-hour turnround to write a proposal for some of Portsmouth City Council’s Community Renewal Fund (CRF) Programme allocation a year or two back. Incidentally, we posted on the Portsmouth Net Zero Training Hub itself in June, and it’s interesting to compare that with a post we made in April about the Black Mountains College in Wales and the support it’s had from the Devolved Administration through legislation like the Well-being of Future Generations Act and the new curriculum for Wales.

We’ve also seen some of the effects of problems that are called out in the UK100 Powers in Place handbook (May 2023), that describes how Local Authorities are hamstrung by, among other things, central policies and strategies that don’t support local delivery, conflicting remits of public agencies, and funding streams that are focused on competitions and are rarely long-term. Competitions for funding are widely criticised, of course, and we’ve heard many times about local authorities that are missing out on funding simply because they don’t have the talented people with the bandwidth to spend their lives writing proposals. And we find it fascinating to learn about eminent higher education establishments who are gearing new programmes towards the sort of interdisciplinary skills that are increasingly needed in areas like policy and proposal writing: examples we’ve seen recently include the University of St Andrews new Data for Justice master’s programme and the curriculum on offer from the London Interdisciplinary School (LIS).

Incidentally, we found another example of this local hamstringing recently in our own backyard here in Portsmouth: as we wrote in our post on Repair Cafés last week, Portsmouth City Council – in our opinion a pretty forward-looking authority – would love to help out, but lack of funding for anything other than recycling means that the more virtuous circles of the Circular Economy simply don’t get a look in and rely on the dedication of volunteer networks to give Britain even a chance of not becoming the world’s highest per capita producer of e-waste.

Going back to the Future is Local report, the five recommendation themes all make logical sense: a Local Net Zero Charter and a Net Zero Delivery Framework; speeding up the Local Area Energy Plans; simplifying and enhancing the Net Zero funding and financing landscape; and making an urgent review of the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF).

In our opinion, the Local Area Energy Plans (LAEPs) are worth a special mention here. They’ll provide a growth platform as they plan out the local routes to net zero, together with the technologies and investment required. The Energy Systems Catapult has done a lot of work here around an evidence-based whole systems approach to building LAEPs and authorities like Peterborough, Greater Manchester and Bridgend are put forward as case studies where they’ve commissioned the Catapult to support their LAEP developments. As an example, Greater Manchester is aiming for Net Zero by 2038 and its LAEP makes clear statements around the numbers of houses that will need to be on heat networks, have heat pumps installed, how many EVs will replace gasoline and diesel vehicles, and so on.

Policy and plans are all very fine, but in our view, where sustainability initiatives - place-based and otherwise - have worked well so far, it’s been largely due to the more ‘traditional’ qualities of leadership; clarity of purpose; alignment between local authorities, businesses, and educators; the ability to leverage resources, both private and public; the inclusion and engagement of stakeholders, including community groups; patience, including long-term planning and deployment of patient capital; and pooling of local expertise, including local universities.

Image: Engineers Without Borders

But there’s another factor. In our work on The Green Edge we see many ‘green’ skills frameworks, like the one above for the engineering community. And it’s when these qualities are deployed that true success can be found. Like the systems thinking and creative collaboration we see in potential coalitions around the right to repair which involve such circular economy advocates as Suez, the Restart Project and the Design Council. Coalitions like this often work well and we can envisage many sustainability programmes in the future drawing on the schemes of delegation, combining what can be done through local actors with what can be provided – and funded – centrally.

We hope to find some other good examples in an upcoming Green Skills in Education and Employment POSTNote, which is due shortly and will hopefully point towards those skills that the ‘market’ will provide, versus those that will need some form of state intervention through grants or subsidies.

Continuing with state-supported green skills development, thus far we’ve observed a fragmented – perhaps even sparse – take up in green skills bootcamps. As we reported in our aforementioned post on the FE Green Skills academies, as of the latest update we saw, not too many seem to have put their names down for Green Skills Bootcamps. Admittedly, we have no details on the drivers for those colleges that are going for it, or how well they’re doing, but in the public data at least, we did observe New College Durham as looking to be pretty much on the green bootcamp ball.

Green Skills Bootcamps (March 2023 data). Image: TGE.

Certainly, it seems that ‘green’ bootcamp supply doesn’t match potential demand; as an example, we see as many as 60 other non-bootcamp training centres for retrofitting and heat pumps across the country, many of which involve the heat pump manufacturers themselves. Anyway, it will be interesting to see how the Local Skills Improvement Plans (LSIPs) might change this picture. Certainly, we anticipate positive effects from having groups of FE colleges as nominated delivery partners for the LSIPs and we’ll be watching for the extent to which FE training crystallises around the sector and technology focus areas for each LSIP area.

LSIP sector and technology focus areas. Image: TGE with data from DfE, Sep 2022. Callouts shaded green show LSIPs with explicitly ‘green’ focus areas.

From our viewpoint, we do see some of the LSIPs delivering clarity on what their areas need regarding green skills. North Tyne, Tees Valley, Sussex, Surrey, and Cumbria are worth a mention. It’s not clear to us, though, how the LSIPs will be pooled for wider use through the DfE’s Unit for Future Skills. Also, it remains to be seen how the LSIPs will marry with the national Net Zero Workforce Plan we mentioned earlier. There are bound to be compromises, or even conflicts, but they will need to be rapidly resolved. And we haven’t seen the LSIPs and LAEPs being brought together yet, but we’re sure somebody, somewhere, will be looking at that pretty soon. Good places to look for this might be Manchester, London and Birmingham, perhaps followed by Liverpool and Tees Valley.

At some stage, we feel that some of the key technologies could even self-organise from local to national levels and drive policy as a kind of catch-up operation. In retrofitting, for example, we’ve seen various plans to create franchise-type models for local retrofitting hubs building into national networks, similar to the way we reported the other week on the networking of the Repair Cafés. This would be by no means unprecented – a fundamental case for a place-based approach comes from a UKRI piece of work, Accelerating Net Zero Delivery (March 2022), which shows the huge financial advantage of going local rather than relying on central policy implementation alone.

Overall, our view is this: local place-based approaches are vital for the delivery of the transition to Net Zero and devolution needs to make this happen. Place-based plans need to bring together local businesses, local education and training providers, and local communities on paths that are open and transparent.

We remain optimistic. The signs are bright that this will happen. But Westminster and Whitehall still need a bit of a kick to properly let go of what they seemingly still regard as ‘theirs’.