Speeches by Jones.

“I do not think it is agile enough yet. That is what we need to do and that is the point of Skills England and the workforce plan. The scale and the pace of the skills demand for clean energy is relatively unprecedented. You talked about the 1970s gas transition in one of your earlier sessions, and you could look at som…”

“Definitely. Real-world experience is important. I know I keep talking about construction, but it is because I spend quite a lot of time on it. In the construction plan, part of that £620 million is to fund 60,000 placements. One of the challenges with construction training that you talked about in the previous session …”

“Again, the modular decisions on apprenticeships will sit with DfE but, of course, we are feeding into that. We want employers to be able to get the skills they need, and we want them to have the flexibility to be able to do that. You can, through the current apprenticeship system, design new apprenticeship schemes. The…”

“Yes. The apprenticeship levy sits with DfE, so the decisions will be made there, but we have obviously had lots of conversations. We have already seen it reformed to have shorter programmes, to have different criteria in terms of maths and English so that more people can go into it. What we are interested in, and we ar…”

“A lot of this will come out in the skills strategy, Skills England and the decisions that are made in other Departments, but there are things you could do. Just as an example, in the £625 million construction fund there is a pot for big schemes that could support a big project if an employer comes along with a big plan…”

“That is the reality, you are absolutely right. There is a £70,000 average for oil and gas, £50,000 average for offshore wind. There is a gap there. Nobody is going to make a decision other than to take the higher salary, you would think. Of course, we are working on that with trade unions and others. We are working on …”

“We know the North Sea is a declining basin, and we have lost 70,000 jobs over recent years. With the best will in the world, even if there was no climate change and we were not trying to make a transition, the number of jobs would decline over time just because the oil and gas in the basin is declining. We know we need…”

“They do not have to. I am not going to force them. You had some really interesting conversations about the definitions of clean energy, green jobs and all of this, which you might want to talk about a bit further down the line. The trade union view is that we need to be providing good jobs. If you look at the jobs in c…”

“The spending review. The workforce plan has to sit within the wider skills agenda. A lot of work, whether on FE college funding, apprenticeship levies or the funding that might be available for wider schemes, relies on that spending review. We want to get this done, and we will get it done because the opportunity of th…”

“Yes, for sure. You do not want organisations to have to feed into multiple different bits of Government. They will definitely be feeding into Skills England, they will have provided that information, they will be working with the Construction Leadership Council, they will be working with other bodies, so I do not want …”

“I saw that, and having met him several times, I felt I had let the side down by not talking enough about this. I do not think it is the end of the world at all. When it comes to construction, and I am the Construction Minister in DBT, there is an even bigger plethora of organisations, bodies, training providers and set…”

“The warm homes plan is fulfilling our mission to upgrade 5 million homes. Obviously you cannot do that without the people to do it. A lot of the funding mechanisms incentivise people either to make the choice to do whatever it is we are offering or to get the training so we have the right skilled roles. A lot of that f…”

“Yes, there is a lot of commonality between different sectors, if you look at what we will need for the eight industrial strategy sectors and construction on top of that. There is huge commonality, and we are trying to work out what that means, so the construction that we need for clean energy and then the construction …”

“There are lots of things we can do in terms of policy interventions that we will work on. We will be part of the warm homes plan, but what I am saying is that the Office for Clean Energy Jobs does not have millions of pounds to give out to different bodies to do different things. In the same way that people can now get…”

“The warm homes plan, which Miatta Fahnbulleh is leading on, is coming out. It will be looking at retrofit, all the upgrades to homes and how we incentivise the right things in the right areas. Lots of work going on in terms of heat pumps. There are lots of small businesses in this space, and we know there are all kinds…”

“The Office for Clean Energy Jobs is in DESNZ, and it is quite an agile group of 20 policy analysts and policy people. It is connected very strongly to Skills England in all its work. There are groups across Government that come together to look at skills across the board but also in the clean energy space. It is gather…”

“Yes, we are working closely with the Scottish Government on Grangemouth and, of course, there is a really big skills guarantee offer there. It is different from the other work that we are doing in the other pilots. We have worked very closely with them on making sure that people who are leaving Petroineos are getting o…”

“If you look at where the adverts for clean energy jobs are, they are quite good in being spread across the country. There are clusters in Scotland and the south but, as you say, the opportunities are there, so it is about making sure we deliver the skills in the areas that we need them. Some of the evidence you heard w…”

“People have different views, and that is always going to be the case. For the first time, Skills England is bringing together that workforce need and, in the green energy and clean power spaces, having a national idea of what we need and do not need, and then working with our mayors and our local authorities to deliver…”

“That is a question on every single topic not just this one. How do you work in a devolved system where you have people who have powers, a voice and authority? It has proved to be a system that works. A lot of our mayors are doing very good things, understanding their area better than central Government could, and there…”