Written evidence submitted by the Engineering Construction Industry Training Board   (ECITB) to the Environmental Audit Committee

 

Executive Summary:

 

Evidence:

  1. The Engineering Construction Industry Training Board (ECITB) is a non-departmental public body (NDPB) sponsored by the Department for Education (DfE). The ECITB helps to drive productivity in the engineering construction industry by supporting employers to train and upskill their workforce to industry standards. There are more than 200 ECITB-approved courses nationally, which reflect the needs of industry and cover a range of craft, technical and managerial disciplines.
  2. The transition to net zero emissions is one of the biggest challenges and opportunities facing the engineering construction industry (ECI) – the sector responsible for designing, project managing, installing and maintaining much of the necessary infrastructure for energy and industrial decarbonisation. This industry covers sectors that are crucial for this agenda such as the oil and gas industry, power generation through conventional, nuclear, and renewable technologies, and the processing industries such as chemicals – all sectors that present deep decarbonisation challenges.
  3. As the statutory skills body, understanding the skills requirements to meet our Net Zero commitments by 2050 is a key strategic priority for the ECITB. We use our levy funds to strengthen the industry in the short, medium and long-term by investing in training, attracting and retaining talent, and supporting the transferability of skills between sectors and projects. The ECITB has already published a report, Towards Net Zero, looking at the implications of the transition for the ECI, and there are some positive findings. Many of the skills required to support net zero already exist in the industry. The ECITB recognises to importance of retaining and adapting the skills of our existing workforce alongside securing a continued pipeline of new entrants.
  4. The industrial sector accounts for 21% of UK emissions yet has received far less attention than transport and energy efficiency. Unlocking the full potential for the ECI and ensuring timely deployment of a skilled workforce and technologies required for net zero will require actions from the both industry and policy stakeholders in issues such as skills gaps, especially in the context of meeting the low-carbon cluster milestone in the short term.
  5. Whilst the country face economic disruption now, maintaining the pipeline of skills into the ECI is vital to the delivery of the Energy Transition. This focus has increased with the impact of COVID-19 and we are working closely with employers to understand their current and future skills requirements, particularly around hydrogen and Carbon Capture and Storage (CCUS) by conducting targeted industry engagement interviews. We also work closely with the Government and sit on the Green Jobs Taskforce, which is running until March, and will look at the skills requirements for a green recovery and at the need to attract the next generation of talent into engineering roles.
  6. Most technologies around net zero are expected to have low and medium disruption, so actions towards closing these gaps should be taken both in the short and long term. A variety of projects is expected to be commissioned in the 2020s, with front-end and detailed engineering design to be contracted within the next few years, whereas the demand for site-based construction skills will not materialise at scale until later in the decade. Uncertainty and tight timeframes can make recruiting and training of new talent difficult. To mitigate these impacts, the skills gaps could be covered by retraining the current workforce for the future, through accelerated learning programmes – given sufficient project certainty. For example, given the similarities between the oil and gas industry and CCS, current oil and gas personnel already share many of the skills required for CCS operations and could be retrained accordingly. Pipe fitters and designers, leak test technicians, and off-shore barge operators currently providing services for the oil and gas sector could all be retrained for the needs of building and operating CCS infrastructure.
  7. In the short term, active projects are and will continue to be study and front end design therefore the focus should be around training professional engineers in technical subjects via formal training and on the job mentoring. Where projects are awarded part of the scope of these projects should allow for not only current expertise to be deployed but also for people with no direct expertise but good transferable skills to be deployed onto the projects to grow the overall industry experience base. Current focus should also be on training for collaborative contracting strategies, leadership and financing where there may be differences in new net zero projects compared to traditional project work.
  8. The ambitious target to achieve net zero by 2050, with significant cluster decarbonisation milestones by 2030 and 2040, will require thousands of new entrants to join the industry, exacerbated by the aging workforce. There will therefore also have to be focus on recruiting and training new entrants to take on these green jobs. Some effort should be made to give new entrants the confidence to continue to take on jobs and roles in traditional industry during this period of transition in the knowledge that their skills will still be relevant to net zero projects of the future so that there is a pool of talent available when the government’s net zero projects come to fruition.
  9. Decarbonisation of industrial clusters will require multi-sector involvement, with a wide range of technologies deployed within a small geographic area and a tight timeframe. Collaboration between industry stakeholders will be key in delivering large decarbonisation projects. Industry players at all levels of the supply chain must be aware of the benefits of collaboration and have a proactive attitude to working with partners. Deep-dives into the types of technologies used in each cluster may help to reduce uncertainties, identify the type of work required in each area, and narrow down the expertise required from different partners.
  10. Green jobs can help tackle the expected rise in unemployment due to COVID-19 in a sustainable way. The ECITB has responded to the COVID-19 pandemic through a series of measures designed to help employers retain skilled young workers and allow essential training to take place. One of these initiatives, Train to Retain, supports the retention of essential skills in the industry by providing grants for professional development activities for apprentices, graduates and trainees. Part of the commitment of businesses using Train to Retain is that the young professionals enrolled on the scheme will develop their skills in decarbonisation or digitalisation, which are essential skills for the UK’s energy transition. The scheme will initially run for a period of 12 months until July 2021.
  11. As part of its efforts in this agenda, the ECITB is working with industry players to ensure industry retains its skilled workers that were and will be impacted by the phase out of aging assets and technologies. An example of this is the training and upskilling of EDF Energy Cottam coal-fired power station workers into other sectors. In recent years, the production of coal in the UK has steadily declined. With the anticipated phasing out of all coal power by 2025, the ECITB rolled out a re-skilling programme to enable transfer of existing coal-fired power station operatives to nuclear new build. The Government sees nuclear power as the most affordable large-scale, low-carbon energy source currently available in the UK and recognises its contribution to the diverse and balanced energy mix needed to supply enough electricity to meet the demands of homes and businesses. Therefore examples like Cottam illustrate well the need for industry and government to think strategically about the forces of disruption and innovation shaping our future, and how re-skilling people from other industries/sectors and occupation groups should be a priority. This is also a clear example of the benefits of investing in transferable skills that can be deployed in different sectors.
  12. A similar approach could be taken for some of the new green technologies expected to be deployed in the short term. The Oil and Gas sector has been hit particularly hard in the past year due to the simultaneous fall in oil price, and its workforce are ideally positioned for retraining into net zero roles due to the synergies with the work required for carbon capture and storage infrastructure and hydrogen. In addition, skills can be imported from oil and gas and other engineering industries to plug a shortage in the growing nuclear industry through professional conversion programs. These programmes could provide a quick and efficient way to upskill the current workforce tasks in the short term. Specific high integrity or confined spaces welding certification is an example of this kind of training.

 

Recommendations:             

  1. The ECITB is already developing training offerings for energy transition as well as identifying existing training which is applicable to the challenges presented by net zero projects. The post-Covid economic recovery provides a clear opportunity to accelerate the shift to clean energy and the ECITB would welcome policy certainty to enable a pipeline of green projects that would attract investments not only in the short but also in the medium and long term. Industry needs that kind of certainty in order to develop the resources needed to go green. 
  2. The ECITB welcomes the Energy White Paper emphasis on renewable energy alongside a new approach to carbon pricing to drive adoption of CCUS and hydrogen. Nuclear will also play an important role in the energy mix and it is also encouraging to see the Government formally entering into negotiations on the Sizewell C project.
  3. Supporting a strong supply chain in the UK with a skilled workforce will be essential to delivering net zero. We now need to see more detail around the employment and training opportunities for the 220,000 workers required for the transition. Parts of industry are facing significant skills outflows over the next two years, notably oil and gas where a fifth of the workforce could exit the industry for good – and yet many of these workers have the skills and expertise needed. The North Sea Transition Deal presents an opportunity for Government to help industry retain and mobilise the existing engineering skills base for decarbonisation projects, as well as attract the next generation of talent to the energy sector.
  4. According to a recent report from Atkins, the rate of construction of UK clean energy projects is only 43% of the required build rate needed to hit the 2050 net zero target. Under the Industrial Clusters Mission, one industrial cluster will need to reach net zero by 2040; the remaining five will need to do so by 2050. In addition, the UK’s entire nuclear power fleet will also need to be replaced with new nuclear plants, but only one is currently being built. Thirty years may seem like a long way off, but the size of the task dictates that greater action is needed now. The Government’s ambition to ‘build back greener’ must now translate into concrete action to fast-track decarbonisation across other parts of industry.
  5. Harnessing the opportunities of the energy transition whilst tackling the challenges brought by the COVID crisis will also require close collaboration between industry and the government on skills and retraining. The ECITB believes future actions to combine these agendas should focus on identifying and closing skills gaps and minimising skills shortages.
  6. The past few months have been a challenging time for the sector, but the ECITB has gone above and beyond to support our workforce. We have sought to help the ECI to navigate unprecedented rates of change and we would like to see a closer collaboration between government departments if we are to be successful in the task to retain key skills, reskill and upskill the UK workforce to support a recovery with sustainable growth.
  7. The ECITB would encourage the government to look at ways to make building expertise and knowledge in net zero project within UK industry high on the agenda when awarding funding for projects. This should aim to ensure that the industry is driven to up skill and re skill people, re allocate/second people and invest in skills for the future rather than simply deploying existing skills and retaining the knowledge in one place.
  8. The ECITB welcomed the Committee on Climate Change’s 2020 Progress Report to Parliament and echoes the report’s recommendations to government around the need to invest in climate-resilient low-carbon infrastructure, job creation in low-carbon and climate-resilient industries, training and reskilling of the workforce. If we are to build a resilient recovery, these actions must be at the forefront of the government’s work. 
  9. The ECITB would be happy to provide further information about the impact of COVID-19 on the engineering construction industry workforce and skills sector. We would also be happy to give oral evidence to the Committee and provide more details and case studies if required.

 

January 2021