GRJ0044

PCS response to the Environmental Audit Committee Inquiry into Green Jobs

1. Introduction and general comments

1.1 PCS is the largest civil service trade union with over 180,000 members working in the civil service, public sector and on privatised, commercial contracts across the UK. Our members work in all areas of government administration including policy development, monitoring and regulatory bodies such as the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, DWP and HMRC, education, communities and local government, justice, defence and transport sectors. We also have members in aviation, public bodies e.g. museums and galleries as well as many other non-civil service members on outsourced contracts working across the Government estate.

1.2  PCS is responding to this inquiry as we have been campaigning on climate change issues, including supporting the One Million Climate Jobs campaign arising out of the 2007/08 financial crash, and arguing for the need for a Just Transition for workers for many years. Before addressing some of  the specific questions of the consultation, we set out some of our key aims as a union around this agenda:

1. The PCS National Executive Committee declared a climate emergency on behalf of members on 25th June 2019.  This is not a symbolic gesture but part of a strategy to frame our climate work as integral to our industrial aims and ensure the Government as an employer is getting its ‘own house in order’ to address climate and environmental challenges.
2. Climate justice is central to our policy and industrial objectives.  This means addressing climate change and wider environmental degradation within a framework of economic, social environmental and political justice including for the global south.
3. Creation of a National Climate Service.  A central demand of the one million climate jobs campaign, we believe that jobs created need to be ones that lower greenhouse gas emissions, supported by a civil service that is coordinating its activities towards this.
4. Public ownership: this includes energy democracy - public ownership and democratic control of the energy system - from generation to supply; transport including aviation; mail, and water.
5. A whole economy and all workers approach for a Just and Transformative Transition.  This means addressing inherent inequalities of the current system, recognising all workers (organised and unorganised) as part of the transition and factors around race, gender and disability.
6. No return to austerity, including ‘eco-austerity’ as part of the Covid recovery. If the UK is to ever have the capacity and skills required to create green jobs, it will need a strong public sector to support it.  The low carbon transition and Covid recovery, cannot be another corporate welfare package that bails out the private sector or a privileged few at the cost of workers and communities, which in turn will ultimately mean our wider climate, environmental and social goals. 

2. Responses to specific questions

Note responses are written to address across a range of the questions.

2.1 Our approach to the questions are job estimates (Q1), workforce skills and capacity (Q2), and what needs to be done (Q3), is addressed in terms of the economic restructuring that needs to take place to reach net zero carbon targets, and as such, will impact across the whole economy. In that respect, clearly there is sufficient workforce (currently and in the future) to meet capacity of the transition but workers are not necessarily in the areas where needed, a problem which is exacerbated by the gendered, racialized, and ableist nature of work, skills and pay.

The concept of who are ‘valued’ or ‘essential’ workers is something which has been acutely highlighted throughout the period of the pandemic from highly skilled medical professionals, transport workers, retail and food producers, educators, care workers, waste and sanitation workers, manufacturing workers enabling repurposed plant for PPE/ventilator production, to civil servants who have been administering government schemes to support workers and families on top of the ongoing benefits system.

There will of course be others here not mentioned who form the bedrock of the economy and the social fabric of paid and unpaid, skilled and lesser skilled workers. As such, addressing the jobs needed to the transition to net zero and to meet other environmental (and social) goals needs to be seen across the whole economy.  We also learnt from Covid that jobs can be repurposed quickly as the ventilator challenge showed when based on clear objectives and collective action.  This was not perfect with design and contracting issues but provides a strong example of what needs to be got right to meet the net zero and environmental challenges.

The other is how workers and communities are supported through these processes. Deindustrialisation, including its social failure, is now well documented and probably does not require specific analysis for this inquiry.  However that is not to discount that the a) lessons need to be learned, and b) the process of economic restructuring that took place during that period of the 1980’s and 1990’s particularly need to be understood.

Two elements of this transition were the move to a service or ‘FIRE’ based economy, and the second so called ‘dash for gas’ in the move away from coal to exploiting North Sea oil and gas resources. These were led by deliberate government policy and interventions.

It has also led to consequences that now see 80% of work in the service sector, jobs offshored in manufacturing for example, and the rise in precarious/informalised work. Training provision has greatly diminished either on the job or via publicly supported further education. These points are borne out by the Governments’ own Employer Skills Survey[1] and other reports around training provision.[2]  The so called ‘Skills Gap’ has been a persistent problem in the UK and topic of government reports, and it may do well to review the impact of policy to address what Government described in July 2015 as the long standing, and intractability of the UKs skill’s weaknesses.[3]

Whilst there has been a welcome move to a more industrial strategy based focus in recent years, there is still an element of big infrastructure projects that lack connection across the piece. And within this, a contradiction of aims and skewing of priorities.  For example, Government announced investment of £27.4 billion in a roads building programme to support 64,000 jobs[4], compared to £3billion to support 100,000 jobs in retrofit/green homes.[5]

2.2  To ensure skills and capacity are developed, there first needs to be a coherent plan, which links into the zero carbon pathways that have been set out by the Committee on Climate Change for example.  Whilst we do not support all the CCC solutions such as CCUS or nuclear, it’s clear that a framework – or the social fabric of transition – cannot be developed until there is consensus on this plan.  Under a proactive labour market and economic restructuring, it would be possible to then identify what the UNFCC categorise as jobs that will be created, substituted, eliminated, transformed or redefined as a result of climate change policies.[6]

2.3  The first priority is a national level industrial strategy for all sectors to map the transition to a zero carbon economy at a national, regional and local (municipal/rural) scale. The lack of an integrated approach for example across energy, construction/building, transport, agriculture and land use, public services (including health and social care), education, carbon intensive industries such as steel and cement manufacture and so on, leads to a focus as noted above on ‘flagship’ projects that fail to build the architecture around which the rest of the – zero carbon - economy fits. 

2.4  This architecture requires a more systemic approach which needs to be public sector led rather than left to the vagaries of market forces, and as such, addresses social need and social growth over private profits. The short-sighted shareholder model of UK capitalism is a clear impediment to long-term planning and skills development. 

2.5  There needs to be a forum to bring together different competing interests that can work through on a basis of collective action without a hierarchy of power to arrive at solutions including trade unions. Academic institutions also need to be involved, many of whom are doing detailed work around some of these areas e.g. University of Westminster/PROBE on ‘green’ construction including vocational education and training standards.  Workers also need a direct input as those with the best knowledge of their sectors.

2.6  Government needs to have coherent and consistent policy that is developed cross party, with trade unions, education sectors and other representative bodies. The disasters of the solar and feed-in tariff/energy policy reverses have to be avoided[7] if we are to avoid “risks” to the public and private sectors (Q5). Albeit returning the energy system to full public ownership which could manage the energy transition would be the best way to mitigate risk for workers and provide the social benefits of transition in affordable energy, coupled with a mass retrofit and insulation programme for homes run out by local authorities.

2.7  Additional interventions in aid of a just transition are important. The current welfare system is insufficient to provide for the current workforce who may have cause to rely on it. There needs to be a wholesale review and end of the universal credit system. Packages such as the stimulus/Job Retention programmes should be reconfigured into a Just transition package that supports workers to transition into new jobs with full social support to protect livelihoods and pensions whilst workers are waiting for a) new jobs to be created or current jobs repurposed, and b) in training/re-skilling programmes to undertake new roles.

2.8  The Armed Forces Covenant[8] provides support for service personnel to move into civilian life. Whilst this is not the whole picture, for workers to have confidence to transition into green jobs, they need a social covenant that will protect them. This should be enshrined within legislation such as the US Senator Bernie Sanders attempted to do in the US Congress in 2015 by way of the Clean Energy Workers Act:

A bill to provide benefits and services to workers who have lost their jobs or have experienced a reduction in wages or hours due to the transition to clean energy, to amend the National Labor Relations Act to establish an efficient system to enable employees to form, join, or assist labor organizations, and for other purposes.[9]

The creation of a Just Transition Commission is a priority at national and regional levels. Part of their task should be to consult trade unions on a Just Transition Bill.  Sectoral level collective bargaining needs to be reinstated to end the ‘race to the bottom’ on wages, terms and conditions, putting workers in competition against each other, including within the same workplace. 

2.9  Economic diversification and leaving a legacy for future workers not just today’s is instrumental in a) not locking in high carbon jobs now through short sighted ‘shovel ready’ projects such as roads building, and ensuring that regions are seen as diverse noting the inequality that exists within different regions (Q7 and Q11). Therefore it is important to avoid high levels of economic dependency on one sector within a region such as happens now in aerospace or nuclear.  In establishing green jobs, it is also important to look at identifying current job shortages such as PCS, Green New Deal UK and the Greenhouse Think Tank did in its 2020 report on a Green New Deal for Gatwick. [10]

2.10          Likewise this needs to be accompanied by the civil service and local authority level architecture both of which require significant government investment after years of underfunding. The Regional Development Agency model disbanded by the Coalition Government should be revisited taking account of today’s challenges and as a replacement to the Local Enterprise Partnerships which are largely remote from local processes.

2.11          Specifically, PCS advocates for the creation of a National Climate Service, akin to the NHS, that would ensure cohesion across all parts of government (national, devolved, local) working toward the climate and nature objectives, and which could be reproduced at regional levels.

2.12            The economy will restructure to meet the imperatives of climate change mitigation and adaptation. How quickly it will do this will depend on how much is left to market forces or direct state intervention including public ownership and control of key sectors of the economy. The government as an employer has a key role to play in this as we set out in our publication in 2017: Just Transition and Energy Democracy: a civil service trade union perspective.[11] In this PCS advocates a Ministry for Climate Jobs, Skills and Social Protection as critical to reforming the DWP for a ‘green’ economy. This reformed department would be rooted in local communities to not only deliver the welfare system but have a proactive labour market intervention role to support workers through a Just Transition linking with employers and education facilities/training collages whilst workers livelihoods and pensions remain protected. One aim may be to develop a transition profile for each sector to enable a skills match into new work, with transition support around training and so on. 

2.13          The role of job centres and drive to recruit additional thousands of job centre coaches in response to the jobs crisis emphasises the need to have well resourced local agencies working together as part of the transition to a low carbon economy. These should be seen as valuable green jobs – as others in the public sector – that support this transition and be given the skills themselves to meet the huge challenge ahead.

2.14          In a final comment, we have seen how years of austerity and cuts particularly to public services have decimated our public institutions and ability to respond to crises whether the pandemic, climate or financial. If the UK is to ever have the capacity and skills required to create green jobs, it will need a strong public sector to support it.  The low carbon transition and Covid recovery, cannot be another corporate welfare package that bails out the private sector at the cost of workers and communities, which will ultimately mean our wider climate, environmental and social goals. 

January 2021