Leading from the Front

Why Councils are key to equipping communities with the skills for a greener future.

With huge growth in demand for green jobs and lots of young people wanting them, local authorities are well-placed to take the lead in skilling up our future workforce. Luke McCarthy, Green Economy Lead for Surrey County Council, explains more in this week’s special guest post.

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The race to reach Net Zero by 2050 (or sooner) is on.

While there is increasing agreement of the need to go green through investment, innovation and technological advances, one area of particular focus is ensuring we have the enough people with the right skills to undertake the range of jobs required to power this green transition.

Homes and buildings will need low carbon heating and energy efficiency measures, transport emissions need to be reduced and renewable power needs to be harnessed and made accessible.

All will require human - as well as artificial – intelligence to drive it forward.

But who is best placed to take the leadership role in making this happen? Big business and central government may historically have been expected to take the lead.

But, from experience, we have found that it is actually Local Authorities who are best placed, combining strategic oversight, direct business engagement and close links with communities to deliver real change in this area. Local Authorities are uniquely positioned to do this for access to all types of skills provision and this leadership role is something which we are already doing at Surrey County Council, an Upper Tier Authority in the South East.

Home to 1.2 million residents and a thriving regional economy, there is real buy in from communities, business community and our 11 district and borough partners to achieving net zero status while growing the economy sustainably.

This means a key part of our work is to ensure our future workforce is appropriately skilled to deliver a green transition. Our approach has been focused on three main areas: strategic leadership, green careers and construction skills.

Strategic leadership

A key priority within our strategic leadership has been identifying priority sectors where there are existing or future green skills gaps.

Most existing research did not have the right level of detail, so we commissioned a new study to map the current and projected future demand for green skills.

The most eye-catching finding from this was the expected annual growth rate of 8% in green jobs – this is around double the rate of growth of digital jobs in the 2010s and has helped make the economic case for investment in green skills provision.

Our leadership role extended to working with partners to prioritise securing additional funding for green skills development.

We were successful in securing £2.7 million from the Department for Education’s Skills Bootcamp funding for 2024-25, of which over one third is for green skills. This will fund around 250 Surrey residents to train in green construction and electrical roles, as well as general sustainability. We also secured around £400,000 from the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero’s Retrofit Skills Pilot, which will train around 400 additional residents in retrofit roles.

Green careers

We have recognised there is a need for greater information around green careers, particularly for young people leaving Surrey’s schools, colleges and universities. The rapid projected growth in green jobs highlighted above is matched by increasing evidence that young people (especially) want a job which has a positive environmental impact. So we should be pushing at an open door to support more young people find and secure green jobs! Our approach here included developing a film covering some of the key roles and sectors for green jobs, green careers web pages with key information about green jobs and training, and a series of resources to make it easier for teachers to deliver good quality green careers session to their students. The film and teacher resources have so far been distributed to over 1000 schools in Surrey and beyond (via our production partner The WOW Show).

Image: Surrey CC / The WOW Show

Green construction and retrofit

A third plank of our approach has been a sectoral focus on green construction and, especially, retrofit, reflecting around 50% of Surrey’s greenhouse gas emissions being from domestic and residential buildings combined.

The first step was to better understand the immediate and future demand for key retrofit including quantitative analysis of the retrofit measures required on Surrey’s housing stock, and qualitative insights from key retrofit businesses to better understand their current skills gaps.

We then worked with key colleges and training providers to ensure there was suitable training to meet identified skills gaps. This includes how they might collaborate to scale up existing provision, including on teacher CPD and business development, and identifying potential new retrofit courses from the many which are rapidly becoming available.

We’ve secured short term funding for around 600 Surrey residents to receive training covering skills required for a variety of retrofit roles, as well as some professional development for staff at colleges/training providers to support future scale up.

Lessons learned

Below are five observations from Surrey County Council’s work on green skills on potential priorities for others working to prepare for and capture the potential of a net zero future:

1. Upper tier local authorities are well-placed to take the strategic leadership around green skills, due to the size of the area they cover, their relationships with local businesses and education institutions. This is reinforced by the increasing role they are being given for economic development with the transition of LEP powers.

2. There is a pressing need to ensure that there is greater knowledge of the green growth sectors and priority roles for a green transition in different regions across the country. This requires enough detail to inform skills provision by colleges, universities and other training providers.

3. Ensure that there is sufficient funding available to meet the projected growth in demand for green jobs at the scale required across the country to ensure there is not a ‘postcode lottery’ of green skills provision. This needs to be on a long term basis to allow colleges/training providers to plan for the required investments in facilities and staff development. Investment in green skills needs to be a requirement of both capital and revenue funding from central government education funding, as well as skills programmes being included as part of other government-funded programmes (e.g. funding for retrofit of social housing could include greater provision to build local skills).

4. There need to be greater opportunities for learning from existing best practice around green skills. At present, staff at councils, colleges, training providers and others are tackling similar challenges in their respective vacuums, with little opportunity to learn from others.

5. There is an urgent need to put green jobs and careers at the heart of local approaches to careers, recognising both the growth in demand for green jobs and large number of young people wanting these. This includes Careers Hubs including green jobs within their strategic plans, making dedicated funding available for this, and creating and/or sharing existing high quality green careers resources materials across Hubs.

It is critical that we have enough people with the right green skills to capture the potential of the transition to a green economy. There is much work to do by businesses, education institutions and both national and local government, with collaboration and learning from others key to enabling this transition to take place at the pace required to achieve our 2050 net zero targets.