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SCOTLAND’S economy can go green while driving a new “industrial revolution” with the help of a new Future Jobs Fund to help the unemployed and a publicly-owned ethical construction company.
Trade unionists are calling for wide-ranging reforms and sustained stimulus as part of the UK’s recovery from the coronavirus crisis, urging the Government to learn lessons from the first post-war Labour government.
A new report by the Trades Union Congress (TUC), which represents most UK unions, says concerns over soaring public debt are exaggerated and calls for austerity cuts misplaced.
But it highlights going green as part of a recovery to cut carbon emissions and create jobs, while including support for investment in clean industry and transport, making buildings net-zero, carbon capture and storage. The plan would seek to take better advantage of Scotland’s green energy revolution, which The Herald revealed was increasingly being placed in the hands of overseas firms.
In Scotland, the Scottish Trades Union Congress has revealed it wants to see a new Future Jobs Fund to back a construction and “deep” retrofit housing programme, to make existing homes more environmentally friendly, while creating “good quality” jobs and driving decarbonisation of heat, reducing emissions and fuel bills.
In 2009, in the wake of a financial crisis which resulted in the bailout of banks, the threat of high youth unemployment loomed, and the Government created the Future Jobs Fund, which paid employers a wage subsidy to take on young people.
The Scottish Government has set itself a legally binding target to cut greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2045, five years ahead of the date set for the UK as a whole. But experts say to manage this it is vital we cut the energy required for domestic space and hot-water heating to a minimum, and use only zero-carbon sources.
An upgrade to our existing housing stock to become energyefficient means improving the fabric of the buildings.
STUC deputy general secretary Dave Moxham said that capital investment should go into a “better regulated” construction sector with “serious consideration” given to the creation of a Scottish national construction company. He said: “Scotland’s housing stock, with a high proportion of tenement properties, is not the easiest to retrofit with energy-saving measures such as insulation and new heating systems. However, progress on deep retrofit has been identified as one of the key elements in achieving net zero.
“This crisis, and the need to plan better and create jobs, provides an ideal opportunity to establish a programme of deep retrofit, nationally co-ordinated and locally delivered.
“It is analogous to the massive effort in the early 1970s when the UK converted millions of gas boilers to be offshore gas compliant, creating thousands upon thousands of jobs and massively boosting the economy.
“Such a programme is best driven by state investment and delivered through nationally co-ordinated or a nationalised construction company. As well as providing a boost for jobs and apprenticeships it would have a serious and positive impact on fuel poverty.”
The Coalition for the Energy Efficiency of Buildings (CEEB) argues that such a retrofit programme would slash emissions, create jobs and could reboot a battered post-Covid economy.
The CEEB, which is backed by the UK Government and the City of London Corporation, argues that such an approach would support more than 150,000 skilled and semi-skilled construction jobs, provide a quick economic stimulus, and boost consumer spending through energy cost savings.
Moxham added: “A publiclyowned construction company could guarantee better and less precarious employment practices twinned with a co-ordinated approach to green construction and retrofitting.
“Undertaking such actions requires investment and increases Government indebtedness. However, the nature of such Government borrowing is that it is borrowing against its own future. Thus a green Future Jobs Fund would see a massive expansion in the training of and provision of good jobs for young people. Taken in conjunction with overall economic boost it would provide one of the most effective ways to borrow to invest.”
In 2010, a Scottish
Government report stated the offshore wind sector alone offered the potential for 28,000 direct jobs and a further 20,000 jobs in related industries, as well as £7.1 billion investment in Scotland by 2020.
But in February, it emerged that it had in fact created just 6% of the 28,000 direct jobs predicted. Official estimates stated that there were just 1,700 full-time jobs in the offshore wind sector in Scotland, a fraction of the numbers projected by 2020.
The Scottish Government’s low-carbon strategy, published in 2010, described the large-scale development of offshore wind as representing the “biggest opportunity for sustainable economic growth in Scotland for a generation” with Scotland having an estimated 25% of Europe’s offshore wind potential.
Moxham said there should be “much stricter conditionality” attached to contracts for renewable construction in Scotland to “ensure a radical improvement” in the number of local supply chain jobs in offshore and other renewables.
“It is essential that we offer meaningful and well-paid employment for those likely to suffer from the current and longer-term downturn in offshore oil and gas,” he said. His views come as the TUC called for the Government to form a National Recovery Council to help the economy heal from the impact of the coronavirus pandemic.
In a report entitled A Better Recovery, the trade unions’ body has called for the Government to ramp up social investment rather than introduce austerity measures, including an increase in the national minimum wage to £10 an hour, a public sector pay rise, a ban on zero hours contracts and a job guarantee scheme.
It said lessons can be learned from former prime minister Clement Attlee’s 1945 government, which inherited massive wartime debts but saw them slide rapidly as the economy recovered.
The Labour administration launched the NHS, a welfare safety net and mass housebuilding, nationalised industries, and sought to boost demand to maintain full employment on short-term crisis management and was wary about the rising costs of existing crisis measures.
TUC analysis showed that the decade of investment for growth between 1947 and 1957 that followed the Second World War achieved an average growth rate of 3.3%. But the decade of cuts between 2009 and 2019 that followed the bankers’ crisis achieved average growth of just 1.9%.
The National Recovery Council would be made up of representatives from government, unions and employers, with regional and devolved nation recovery panels also feeding into the planning and delivery of recovery strategies.
The report highlights going green as part of a recovery that would cut carbon emissions and create jobs