Select committee: Environmental Audit Committee
Conclusion 9
Third Report - Green Jobs
Published 25 Oct 2021
Paragraph 54
Environmental Audit Committee Green Jobs All items in this report Report on parliament.uk ↗ Inquiry on parliament.uk ↗
Conclusion (the committee's words)
We first recommended that the Government pilot a National Nature Service in our report ‘Growing back better: putting nature and net zero at the heart of the economic recovery’. The Government’s response did not engage directly with this proposal. A National Nature Service would build valuable capacity in the nature sector while providing people with wider employment skills, helping to deliver a green recovery. An established national scheme, rather than one-off funding, would help capacity in the longer term and could have wider reach.
From: Environmental Audit Committee, Third Report - Green Jobs (HC 75), paragraph 54, 25 October 2021
Government response
The government responded to the whole report on 20 January 2022 (deadline 25 December 2021).
Summary written by Accountability Index from the government's response. It is not the government's own words.The government welcomes the Committee's focus on green jobs and skills, points to its Net Zero Strategy and a new Green Jobs Delivery Group, and in places declines to set out the requested plans, costings or measures.
- A Green Jobs Delivery Group will include ministers from BEIS, Defra, DfE, DWP and DfT alongside an industry co-chair, with further detail "in the new year".
- On indicative costings for green jobs actions, it says further allocations depend on ongoing policy development, so "it is not possible to set these out to the Committee at this point".
- On a module on environmental sustainability in every apprenticeship and T Level, it says "we do not believe that a generic sustainability module across every occupational standard is appropriate". Sustainability elements are included "where occupationally relevant".
- On the Careers Strategy, it says it "currently do[es] not plan to update" it, as it has been superseded by the Skills for Jobs white paper.