
By Tracy Harrison, Chief Executive, Northern Housing Consortium (NHC)
Previous research found that decarbonising the North’s homes could create up to 77,000 new good, green jobs. The Northern Housing Consortium’s (NHC’s) latest piece of research ‘Warm Homes, Green Jobs: Meeting the Net Zero challenge in the North’ looks at how devolution could bring together housing providers, businesses and skills providers to create jobs and training opportunities in the communities they serve. However, for this to be a reality, it must be underpinned by longer term government funding for greener homes. Tracy Harrison explains more:
One of the biggest challenges our members face is improving the energy efficiency of the North’s social homes. As part of the UK’s commitment to achieving net zero by 2050, decarbonising our homes – a source of almost a quarter of our carbon emissions – will play a key role. This will be more difficult in the North. With almost a quarter of homes built before 1919, homes are less energy efficient, on average, than across the rest of England. To meet the government’s target of all rented homes achieving EPC Band C by 2030, more than a quarter of a million homes, in both the social and private rented sectors, will need to be retrofitted each year across the North. This is before we turn to the much harder challenge of fully decarbonising all homes, as most properties will need upgrading to some degree.
While this will be challenging and expensive to deliver, the potential rewards are huge. In addition to reducing energy bills for residents, making homes warmer and tackling fuel poverty, it also has the potential to create thousands of jobs and bring significant economic benefits. Over summer 2024, we interviewed 50 professionals to better understand what is needed to deliver net zero in our homes. We wanted to find out how existing funding for retrofit was being used, how different providers are approaching their journey to Net Zero, and what they need from government to both deliver more energy efficiency upgrades and deliver on the economic and employment potential presented by retrofit. Warm Homes, Green Jobs, covers all this and more, exploring how reforms to funding and skills policy can help ensure that social housing retrofit can help create new jobs, including for people living in social housing.
One of our key findings was that there is widespread scepticism amongst housing providers about whether a workforce currently exists that could deliver the level of change we need to see. This is largely because existing funding for this work has been too short in length – usually through programmes of just a couple of years. To really drive change and support the long-term expansion of operations and workforces, longer-term funding of five or ten years at least, is essential.
Short-term funding makes it almost impossible for housing providers to plan out their future investments in properties. Numerous housing providers told us that they wanted to begin planning their future workforce requirements and recruit new people to work in retrofit but were unable to do so until they had finalised a plan for their homes. Longer term funding would enable longer term planning. This would also help providers to expand their own employability programmes and recruit residents looking for work and apprenticeships.
The short-term nature of funding also means that the wider supply chain does not see a future pipeline of work long enough for them to deem it worthwhile to scale up their operations and take on new employees at scale. To increase the number of people working in this space, planned work needs to be at a scale great enough for it to become a no-brainer for companies to scale up and open new employment opportunities.
The scale needed to shift the dial and open up new employment opportunities can also be found when multiple housing providers work in partnership with one another locally. In the Liverpool City Region[2], six of the region’s largest housing providers are working in a consortia on an SHDF-funded retrofit programme. This has already created 91 jobs within housing providers’ organisations and across the supply chain.
As devolution expands in the future, areas should have greater control over funding for retrofit. This will enable them to align funding with the needs of homes in their area, and to coordinate support to aid the creation of new jobs and employability support programmes to help bring new entrants into the workforce.
There is potential to link new job opportunities to social housing communities. This will bring new people into the retrofit workforce by providing them with employability support and opportunities to learn new skills. Even though we are being held back from delivering on this agenda to the fullest, there are already some green shoots of good practice out there.
Partnerships like the Housing Employment Network North East (HENNE) and their ‘Green Start’ initiative show the way. HENNE is a collective of 12 affordable housing providers based in the North East, collectively managing over 195,000 homes. Their work helps to support tenants – especially those furthest from the labour market – to overcome barriers to employment, develop new skills and find job opportunities. In 2021, they launched their New Start programme which provided 200 work placements for residents. Building on this success, HENNE’s new Green Start initiative aims to support residents into new employment opportunities in low-carbon sectors, including retrofit, by offering paid placements with local employers, as well as pre-employment training and qualifications, guaranteed interviews and wider one-to-one employability support. The scheme has already received funding support from the North East Combined Authority, and will provide a minimum of 45 placements by March 2025.
Another example is from regeneration specialists RE:GEN Group and their RE:GEN Academy. Their work – primarily in social housing communities, including delivering government funded retrofit schemes – began in the North East, but is now expanding across the North. REGEN’s Academy works with their sub-contractors, local community groups and social landlord employability teams, based in the communities where they are delivering work. It links individuals who are unemployed to specific vacancies in construction and retrofit. Academy learners are supported through qualifications, a skills bootcamp, bespoke employment support, a guaranteed interview for a role and further support to find alternative positions if necessary. This means that people work on delivering energy efficiency improvements in their own community. Over the past 12 months, the Academy has supported 12 cohorts with a total of 121 learners. For two of these cohorts, 100% of learners progressed into secure employment. Fifteen Academy graduates are now in full time employment with RE:GEN, while 28 more are employed with supply chain partners.
Initiatives like this are making progress. But with longer term funding certainty, housing providers will be able to scale up this work so more people, in more communities, feel these benefits.
The experience and insights of social landlords working on schemes like the above could be used by Government to take forward this agenda. Unfortunately, this type of employability support has never really been seen as a key part of the skills landscape. With the establishment of Skills England, the government’s new skills oversight body, there is the opportunity to correct this. Skills England should view social landlords and their employability functions as key stakeholders to engage with and learn from, in addition to businesses, trade unions and training providers. This would allow the insights of social housing providers to inform the government’s work to ensure the skills system meets the needs of the economy and that the government can fulfil its ambition to “create opportunity for all.”
As we make progress towards net zero by 2050, the decarbonisation of social housing in the North presents an enormous opportunity to foster economic growth and create green jobs over the next 25 years, addressing the urgent need to reduce carbon emissions and tackle fuel poverty. The task ahead is ambitious, but with the right long-term support, the social housing sector is well-placed to lead the way on this critical work for the benefit of its residents and communities.
References
https://www.northern-consortium.org.uk/warm-homes-green-jobs/
https://www.unlocknetzero.co.uk/insight-comment/safe-warm-homes-and-good-green-jobs