Key departments are absent from the Government’s Green Jobs Delivery Group

Key government departments are not currently represented in the Green Jobs Delivery Group, the government has admitted. 

This statement comes in response to a recent report published by the Environmental Audit Committee.

The Green Jobs Group launched in November 2020 and forms part of the Government’s Ten Point Plan for a Green Industrial Revolution.

It was convened by ministers from the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) and Department for Education (DfE), and is made up of members from industry, trade unions, and the skills sector. 

Despite a lack of representation, the government has expressed commitment to ensure that the right skills and wider employment support are in place to support people into green jobs.

However, despite these positive moves, the Government does not plan to embed environmental sustainability across all primary and secondary school courses and in A Levels. It stated that sustainability elements of apprenticeships and T-Levels will only be covered where occupationally relevant.

The Environmental Audit Committee has expressed concern that the Government’s Green Jobs Delivery Group has failed to include ministers from HM Treasury and the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, despite the departments’ important roles in supporting the UK’s net-zero goals.

The Committee has therefore written to the Government today querying this, and how the group will achieve its objectives to support green jobs in sectors across the economy.

Environmental Audit Committee Chairman, Rt Hon Philip Dunne MP, said: ‘The Government’s general commitment to ensure the right skills are in place for the green transition is welcome, as is the work being done by the Department for Work and Pensions to ensure how green goals can be incorporated into labour market interventions.

‘When we published our report in October, we expressed concern that the Government’s grand ambitions to deliver two million green jobs lacked policy detail. This is sadly borne out in the response. Government departments lack a central coordination function to deliver green jobs policies. The national curriculum is not embedding environmental sustainability nor even restoring the teaching of nature into schools as we had recommended. The Government’s response to our report is therefore disappointing.

‘This Government’s current piecemeal approach to green jobs does not give the confidence boost to those industrial sectors that will require, and need to develop, the green skills of the future.’

Photo by Madalyn Cox