By: Aparna Sreevalsan
A HIGH-POWERED committee of MPs has criticised the Government for a lack of a strategy towards creating thousands of green jobs for the future. It also argues that there is lack of diversity in the sector and that there are opportunities to tackle this within the push for more green jobs across the board. Currently only 3.1 per cent of professionals are from an ethnic minority background and just nine per cent of women are engineers.
In a landmark report on Monday (25), the Environment Audit Committee (EAC) said there was a lack of focus on the government’s part and there was no clear plan of how to create new jobs, improve Diversity and tackle the government’s own commitments to a net zero carbon level. The report says, “there is no generally-accepted standard definition of a ‘green job’, nor a single way to quantify them, how the vacancies are planning to be filled, and how to produce comprehensive skills”.
Last November, the Government announced its ambition to ‘create 2 million green jobs’ by 2030, allocating £3bn ‘to support 140,000 green jobs’ through the Treasury’s Plan for Jobs, and the £40m Green Recovery Challenge Fund for jobs in nature recovery. The inquiry by the committee was launched following this announcement.
Environment Audit Committee’s ‘Green Jobs’ report says the work carried out by the Green Jobs Taskforce provides a good foundation, but a detailed action plan is needed to deliver these ambitions by the time. It also calls for proper monitoring and evaluating the impact of its policies against the ambitions. “The Government must include a ‘definition’ and ‘metric’ for ‘green jobs’,” said the committee’s report. The Net Zero Strategy claims to support 440,000 jobs and delaying in clarifying the information regarding green jobs would actually result in a failure to prepare for the future.
According to the report, the lack of clarity was also evident in a Green Homes Grant voucher scheme. Green Homes Grant voucher scheme was introduced in July 2020 as part of the Government’s ‘green recovery’ from the pandemic. This scheme offered homeowners the opportunity to apply for up to £5,000 funding (households having income £10,000 or below) to install energy efficiency improvements and low carbon heat measures in their homes. It has failed to achieve green job ambitions by not setting out a retrofit skills strategy as millions of homes need to be retrofitted to meet decarbonisation under this scheme.
The committee also suggests ensuring training for the current and future workforce according to the upcoming job opportunities. Environment Sustainability must be included in all National Curriculum and A-Level courses, and a module on sustainability in every apprenticeship and T-Level course (courses which follow GCSEs and are equivalent to 3 A-Levels. They were launched in Sept 2020 and are collaborated with employers and businesses. This will help students to prepare for work, further training, or study).
Conservative MP and Environment Audit Committee chair Philip Dunne, said, “the workforce of the future is being undermined by a lack of evidence-based Government policies on how jobs will be filled in green sectors”.
The committee welcomed the Government’s commitment to increase Diversity & Inclusion in the green workforce but said it should not remain just words and sentiments. To improve Diversity & Inclusion in the green workforce, the Government has to be able to measure and monitor it.
The committee is expecting the Government to set out how it will measure the progress towards its targets by the end of 2021.
Other main suggestions put forward by Environment Audit Committee.
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