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Upturn leads to skills shortages The speed of the economic recovery is already revealing cracks in the building services labour market, according to the Building Engineering Services Association (BESA). During a webinar hosted by the Association, recruitment experts warned that without significant investment in upskilling existing workers and adding to the sector’s headcount the industry would struggle to keep pace as the industry bounces back from the pandemic. They said demand for skilled labour was surging because the engineering and construction sectors were accelerating faster than expected. “If we don’t do something dramatic about upskilling over the next three to five years we will not have a workforce capable of taking on the work created by the economic recovery,” said BESA’s director of training and skills Helen Yeulet. She cited a study carried out by the consultancy McKinsey in 2017, which showed that 14 per cent of the workforce would need to be completely reskilled and 40 per cent at least partially. “And that was long before we had a pandemic,” said Yeulet.
PROBE BY NATIONAL AUDIT OFFICE
Failure of GHG to be investigated The National Audit Office is to investigate the reasons why the English £2bn Green Homes Grant scheme was suddenly abandoned by the government after just six months. This high-level auditing exercise will consider in particular how the scheme was designed, and whether it could ever have met the objectives set for it by Chancellor Sunak last July, of assisting 600,000 households and ensuring employment for 100,000 people. Another objective is to look at who precisely did benefit from the scheme, and which energy-saving items were actually installed under it. Just £191m has been spent. While householders made 113,700 applications, only 55 per cent of these were ever approved by the scheme administrators. In the end, just 52,000 homes were improved only 8 per cent of the Chancellor’s declared target. Around 43 per cent of these were low-income households, where “double” grants of up to £10,000 were available.
Of the measures installed, 81 per cent were insulation, of which 27 per cent were for loft insulation, and 18 per cent for cavity wall insulation. Just 19 per cent were for low-carbon heating. There is little evidence of any installations of “secondary measures” like thermostatic radiator valves or double glazing.
CO2 emissions set to soar in 2021 Global energy-related carbon dioxide emissions are on course to surge by 1.5bn tonnes in 2021 – the secondlargest increase in history – reversing most of last year’s decline caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, a new report from the International Energy Agency shows. This would be the biggest annual rise in emissions since 2010, during the carbonintensive recovery from the global financial crisis. The IEA’s Global Energy Review 2021 estimates that CO2 emissions will increase by almost 5 per cent this year to 33bn tonnes, based on the latest national data from around the world as well as real-time analysis of economic growth trends and new energy projects that are set to come online. The key driver is coal demand, which is set to grow by 4.5 per cent, surpassing its 2019 level and approaching its all-time peak from 2014, with the electricity sector accounting for three-quarters of this increase.
New energy efficiency labels for electrically powered products The Government is to introduce a new “right to repair” law to come into force this September. Covering many electrically powered products, the new rules are estimated to reduce by 1.5m tonnes the amount of electrical waste reckoned to occur
in the UK each year. This is in line with changes being made in each of the 27 remaining European Union countries. New energy labels have also been introduced for simplified energy efficiency labelling for products, with ratings running on a scale from A to
Proportionately the region with the highest uptake was the north west, with the lowest the other side of the Pennines, in the north east. The NAO team are also set to examine in detail the procurement of the contract for the scheme’s IT platform, and its management. ”The Green Homes Grant was a good initiative, poorly implemented”, concluded the House of Commons Environmental Audit Committee chair Philip Dunne (left) a Conservative MP. “This government’s green credentials risk being undermined. Simply abandoning a critically important decarbonisation scheme when cracks appear sets a poor example in the year we aim to show climate leadership. “Cutting emissions starts at home. The homes we live in contribute a huge amount of the UK’s greenhouse gas emissions, so undertaking effective retrofits and stemming those emissions is key to reaching net zero by 2050.”
G instead of up to A+++: These will cover the same 34 different product categories as before, ranging from domestic washing machines and cookers to commercial refrigeration Previously, many products now qualify for a classification that had fallen victim to confusing grade inflation, being frequently classed as A+, A++ or A+++. Overall efficiency standards have already increased enormously during this century, owing largely to these energy efficiency standards introduced by the EU. The simplified system is based on a newly calibrated A-G scale. A far higher standard will be applied for each grade, so that very few appliances will immediately make it into the top A group. These new ratings will apply in Great Britain, while EU rules will continue to apply in Northern Ireland. The think tank Green Alliance has long pushed for a right to repair. Its spokeswoman Libby Peake told BBC News: “This is good news – but it’s exactly what the government said it would do on leaving the EU. The big test is whether the UK will continue to keep track with future EU standards.”
06 | ENERGY IN BUILDINGS & INDUSTRY | MAY 2021
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