Looking for a green heart
Kwasi Kwarteng’s ‘mini-budget’ is taking a lot of stick. We’re not going to add to that, but we did look for the Growth Plan’s green heart.
The Green Edge read last Friday’s Growth Plan with close interest, looking for some assurance that Net Zero is not being compromised in the kerfuffle. We found a little, but not too much.
Understandably, conservation groups aren’t happy with the announcements of potentially loosely-regulated Investment Zones and planning reforms to accelerate infrastructure delivery, including reviews of habitats and species regulation. Also, the expected announcement of the end to the pause on fracking will have inevitable backlash – the BEIS public attitudes tracker in June 22 reported that only 17% of respondents gave ‘full support’ to fracking, while 45% were ‘totally opposed’. But in our opinion, the most significant statement in the Growth Plan is the announcement that Chris Skidmore MP has been asked to make an independent 3-month review into how to ‘deliver our net zero commitment while maximising economic growth and investment, supporting energy security, and minimising the costs borne by businesses and consumers’. The Green Edge will watch this review closely and if we get a chance to sit in on any of the promised round tables, we will.
Image: HM Gov
In our opinion, Chris Skidmore is a good choice to lead this review. Since being first elected in 2010, he’s become one of the leading voices in the Tory green movement. He set up the Conservative Party Net Zero Support Group and is a keen supporter of reinstating the Department of Energy and Climate Change, abolished by Theresa May in 2016. His terms of reference give a hint of what may come:
The government is committed to reaching net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 [but] given this changed economic context, the government will review its approach to net zero to ensure it is pursuing the most economically efficient path to meeting its climate change commitments’.
Source: HM Gov
Hmmm.
How far can Mr Skidmore get into the detail in 3 months? We shall see. But, as we’ve said many times in this publication, it’s the detail that’s important. Green growth can take many forms. For example, we need between 600,000 and 900,000 heat pumps to be installed each year to crack the domestic decarbonisation challenge. Those heat pumps need to be made and fitted economically and at scale – Octopus Energy, for example, talks about ‘affordable heat pump solutions for the masses’. This is a huge opportunity for growth, but still has some way to go. Current heat pump designs need improving to reduce the additional retrofit work currently associated with them, such as the need to fit larger radiators and make expensive changes to pipe work.
So, while the evidence points to a Growth Plan without an expansively green heart, green growth is not being ignored. After all, when the new Chancellor of the Exchequer was incumbent in his previous role as Secretary of State for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy, he wrote that green growth ‘will support 190,000 jobs by 2025, and 440,000 jobs by 2030, and leverage up to £90 billion of private investment by 2030’1. We trust he’s not going back on that now.
But big green national policies will only work with strong, well supported local roots. And while a freeze in Corporation Tax will be welcome to all businesses, especially the smaller ones (we know, we run a small business ourselves), without a coordinated effort being made right now in some of the immediate proximity Net Zero activities, we’re worried that the ball is going to be dropped big time:
…a large part of the move to Low Carbon is likely to impact on small scale SMEs. New technologies in motor vehicles and domestic retrofitting will largely be done by small operators and few have yet invested in the technology or training to make the transition.
There is some evidence that some SME owners may consider retirement and leaving the market rather than making that investment.
This week, we were handed a pre-release copy of a Ashden entitled ‘Retrofit: Solving the Skills Crisis’. It is Ashden’s opinion – and we agree – that:
We will not be able to tackle the energy crisis and climate emergency without decarbonising our homes at scale – starting now. To do this we need a retrofit skills revolution.
Thousands of people need to be trained in retrofitting techniques such as installing high quality wall, floor and roof insulation and installing smart renewable energy systems. Yet, at present, there is no detailed national skills plan to make our homes fit for the future. Current forecasts show that we will fall far short of training the estimated 400,000 retrofit professionals required to achieve this.
Source: Ashden
The Ashden brief describes the charity’s work with local authorities, and presents a set of local retrofit training case studies in places like Portsmouth, Stockport and Greater Manchester. It also includes links to more national retrofit training resources like People Powered Retrofit and FutureProof Training from the Green Register of Construction Professionals.
So, we see a lot going on in pockets, but we get the sense that this all needs to be tied together into a proper national retrofit training initiative. And, we believe, this is where the Local Skills Improvement Plans (LSIPs) could - and should - come in. Over the past couple of weeks we’ve found ourselves writing a lot about LSIPs, for which we make no apology – LSIPs are important. Now that the LSIP rubber has hit the road and the DfE has made awards to Employer Representative Bodies (ERBs) for 38 LSIPs to be produced across England by mid-2023, we hope that the good work done in some of the LSIP trailblazers is put to good use.
But one of the things we did find lacking in most of the trailblazers was recognition of the criticality of building retrofit skills as a coordinated effort across every local area – because, after all, every local area is going to need them. The trailblazer that we feel gave this most attention was the one done in Cumbria, which found in its employer survey the need for retrofit was not highlighted and concluded:
…it is likely that this is due to the business opportunity not yet being realised by employers. As employers face increasing demand for these skills, they in turn will demand relevant provision. There is an emerging need, e.g. to retrain gas heating engineers/ plumbers and to attract new talent. The Association of Colleges has expressed concern about not being able to recruit to lecturers who can train people (skills in demand, wages poor).
Source: Cumbria LSIP Trailblazer
While the Cumbria trailblazer acknowledges that retrofit is still in the ‘early-adopter’ stage, it does point to national activity through The Retrofit Academy. The Green Edge hopes that the need to further build and consolidate this national activity is picked up in all the LSIPs going forward. Perhaps Chris Skidmore’s top-down review will observe enough of the bottom-up activity to encourage the middle-out LSIPs currently under development to adopt national retrofit (and other, like EV infrastructure) training as a shared focus, alongside the local focuses we’ve reproduced in the map below.
Image: BMI. Click to download as pdf.
As a final note, we ask where does the Green Jobs Delivery Group fit into all this? Who knows? The silence is beginning to deafen us. Can anyone shed any light on what this Group is doing?
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Foreword to the Net Zero Strategy, HM Government, Oct 2021.