Speeches by Jones.

“Again, all these things are subject to decisions in the spending review—I am so sorry—in terms of what can be done. Ceramics UK has a long list of things it would like to be done. We are working through all of them and seeing what we can do with the art of the possible.”

“Yes. It is not uncommon to be talking about ceramics in quite a lot of the meetings I attend, so I am glad we have talked about it here as well. We have some very good campaigners on this front, MPs in particular, but, yes, this is a particular challenge. Because they are gas-intensive, they do not get the support that…”

“It is five years away. Is it the biggest thing that people raise with us? Yes, it is. Are we working, through the spending review, on things that we could possibly do in this space? Yes, we are.”

“Do I think electricity prices are very high? Yes, of course they are. There is a range of things we can do about that, and the push to clean power by 2030 is the biggest intervention.”

“Yes, you need both. In my automotive role in DBT, we are working on the consumer demand signals we can put out to encourage people to buy. It is the same with heat pumps. At the moment you can get £7,500 off, but we know the cost is higher than that. That is prohibitive for a lot of people. I know Miatta is looking at …”

“You had some interesting evidence in previous sessions on this and on the need for training to be delivered in the places where it is needed for the employers that are growing or expanding, or for whatever schemes it might be. Clearly, training and understanding what is needed is best done at a local level. There are l…”

“Well, £43 billion of investment in clean energy has been promised since last July. This is a confident, growing sector that is doing good things. There are some examples of great practice around skills, but across all sectors we know that the level of funding that employers put into skills is lower than it needs to be,…”

“Yes. I cannot give you that answer. Michael Shanks was in Scotland yesterday announcing 1,000 jobs in floating offshore wind. Overall, the number of jobs is increasing significantly, but we will see where they are all going to end up. Through things like the clean industry bonus, we are trying to make sure as many jobs…”

“Yes, when I heard that it did seem quite extraordinary.”

“That is oil and gas versus offshore wind. It speaks to the challenge that some of the training is global and some of it is local, and we just have to—”

“Do I have a good example of good practice? I do not know if I have a particular one. I can let you know if I think of one.”

“Yes, one element of the work we have done on construction is funding the 60,000 placements, because I think that is really important to making sure people are trained properly and to making sure they understand what the job is. They are then more likely to want to go and do it in the future. There are a lot of differen…”

“It would be part of the warm homes plan that Miatta is bringing in just after the spending review.”

“Obviously we have the LSIP model for skills provision. With retrofit and the powers they have, I do not know whether Hugo has anything.”

“It has a role to play. On the clean industry bonus, what I did not say is that we are looking at whether we can put skills as part of the criteria for later iterations. The Office for Clean Energy Jobs is working on that with the team who are doing the clean industry bonus. On the Procurement Act, you can put criteria …”

“Yes, procurement has an important role to play here. The procurement rules already say that you can use skills as a requirement. In the new procurement rules that we have brought in since coming into government, you can look at the quality of jobs as well as skills, so that is good. The clean industry bonus, which is f…”

“The GB Energy headquarters is in Aberdeen, but that is not a few hundred, I can write to tell you what the number is. I cannot tell you exactly how many jobs are going to be in Aberdeen over a certain period of time, but I get the point you are making.”

“I could not tell you, I think it is a few hundred, but I could write to you. Obviously, the work that GB Energy does is much more significant in the number of jobs that it creates because it invests in doing things.”

“I could not give you that exact number. I know that we are interested and investing in Aberdeen. Great British Energy is based there, and jobs will come from that. For Scotland more widely, there is understandably huge interest—whether it is Grangemouth and the challenges we have there, or whether it is the transition …”

“Yes, I do. It depends what definition you use, green jobs or clean energy jobs, but there are currently 640,000 green jobs. That is everything from renewables to electric vehicles to nature jobs. In terms of clean energy jobs, there are currently 270,000 people working in those roles. That number increased by 27% in tw…”