Scorecard: Skills
Labour
- Green show homes, grant funding and a Skills Strategy to spread new skills across the supply chain
A Retrofit Consortium will be created by Government to encourage existing employers to invest in skills and trial new training programmes and qualifications.
Labour plan to create a network of green show homes to test different energy efficiency retrofit combinations, using the learning to provide guidance and training across the supply chain to improve skills. Grant funding will be provided and new national occupational standards developed to encourage development of new skills across the supply chain.
In April 2009 Government launched a competition called Retrofit for the Future , through which the Technology Strategy Board made available £10million to enable building and renovation companies to retrofit and refurbish social housing to reduce carbon emissions.
Alongside accreditation for people who provide advice on home energy saving, Labour will provide a system of standards for the people who install measures and the products they use. There will be a new accreditation framework that will offer consumers confidence in the quality of workmanship they receive when measures are installed. Minimum quality standards and consumer protection schemes will form key parts of this.
Conservative
- Kite-mark scheme for installers
No mention of a nationwide programme to upgrade skills, nor to work on occupational standards or continuing professional development in this area.
Liberal Democrat
- Approved accreditation scheme
- Work placement scheme
Work placement scheme planned for up to 800,000 places for young people to gain skills, qualifications and work experience. However, no specifics on how this will relate to skills needed in the low carbon retrofit sector.
No mention of a nationwide programme to upgrade skills, nor to work on occupational standards or continuing professional development in this area.
This multi-manifesto analysis explicitly does not recommend or endorse any one political housing policy over another. All the Great British Refurb campaign partners are politically neutral.
The GBR campaign ran from 2009 to 2012 and ended with the passing of the green deal legislation.
Here are our successes
The campaign was set up three years ago with the ultimate aim of making it easier for owners to eco-refurb their homes. And to a massive extent we achieved just that. The Green Deal, which is a government policy which will enables all of us to refurb our homes with no upfront costs is a game changer and we are proud to have been a catalyst and indeed on occasion cattle prod to that happening. So now when the landscape of home refurb is changing dramatically, it is time for us to take a back seat too and let the politicking end and the real world Great British Refurb commence.
