Recommendation 17

The Department recognises the need to upskill the private sector to have the capacity and capability to provide goods and services that will contribute to the government’s net zero goals.63 We have recently reported that while the failure of the Green Homes Grant Voucher Scheme was largely down to design and timetable it was also hampered by a lack of workers with the necessary skills.64 The Department agreed that the private-sector workforce does not currently have the necessary skills in sufficient quantities; however, it is confident that the commitments in the Strategy will motivate individuals to seek training and allow government to, for example, hit its target of installing 600,000 heat pumps a year by 2028.65 The Department told us that the industry is also confident that it can retrain heating engineers as heat pump engineers, and the Heat Pump Association runs 55 Local Government Association, para 2.11 56 Q 17 57 C&AG’s Report, Local government and net zero in England, Session 2021–22, HC 304, 16 July 2021, para 17 58 Q 17 59 Energy Systems Catapult, page 4 60 Q 17 61 Q 18 62 Q 18 63 Q 69 64 Committee of Public Accounts, Green Homes Grant Voucher Scheme, Twenty-seventh Report of Session 2021–22, HC 635, 1 December 2021 65 Qq 68–69 Achieving Net Zero: Follow up 15 a course aimed at training those with transferrable skills in less than a week.66 However, NAPIT told us that short courses do not go far enough to create a workforce confident in installing clean-heat measures.67 NAPIT also flagged to us a paper by the Institute of Public Policy Research warning of possible workforce shortages as more than one in three construction workers are over 50 years old, and the proportion of workers aged below 30 has declined over the last five years.68