Speeches by Jones.

“In terms of the reports and the information that we will be putting into the public domain, yes, that is a good question. I am sure we will be doing regular updates. I am very happy to come to the Committee at any point to talk about progress. I do not know whether we have thought yet about regular reporting.”

“There is a lot of planning going on now, and I think everybody will get to the point where they say, quite rightly, we need the delivery. We are through the passport, through the regional pilots that we are running, through lots of other interventions, doing things already but, yes, it is no doubt the case that the spe…”

“It is a challenging landscape. I am confident we can significantly improve it. Just having Skills England, having a workforce plan for clean energy, having the interventions that are very clearly based around skills will make a big difference. I am absolutely sure of that. It is Government doing what they should be doi…”

“The challenges there are different because the training is quite easy—you just need a week’s training and you can do it. The challenge there is that if Bosch or somebody else gives you an incentive to put gas boilers into people’s homes and you are retiring in five years’ time, why would you want to change? The challen…”

“Yes, we are working with them on the next iteration. We want to expand it so that it can cover different sectors.”

“From your previous role, you probably know more about this than I do. We have gone through a process with the passport, and we are testing it at the moment. We have a structure that 380 people have used—they have logged on and interacted with the passport system. What is complicated is not just the front end but how yo…”

“We are coming from quite a low base in terms of funding across the board, and we are not going to fix it overnight. There are clearly challenges with colleges. How much you can pay people to train, for example, is one of the big challenges we have. The facilities they have are another. Clearly there is a good argument.…”

“We know some things more anecdotally than other things. Some things are based on evidence from employers rather than statistics, but for the workforce plan we will ensure we get the best data that we possibly can within the time that we are going to be doing this.”

“That is a very good question. We are working with DWP on what more we can do to try to flip it so that local jobcentres are working to get people into a career rather than any job—a switch to focusing on getting people into a job that they will keep, that will be a career, that will be good for them. We are working wit…”

“We will be positively promoting it to all different kinds of sectors—people from ethnic minorities are also very low in numbers. I have talked to quite a lot of construction leaders about how they are looking to do this. I do not think there will be a big, “Here is £10 million, we are going to use it to try to encourag…”

“That is a good question, and it is not just the construction industry. The energy industry more widely is very male dominated at all levels as well. There are a few projects, mostly run by industry themselves, to try to encourage more women into the workforce across all the different sectors. In construction, the Const…”

“The clean power alliance that Ed Miliband is setting up with David Lammy is looking at all these issues across different countries. Somewhere between 15 and 20 countries have said they want to be involved in this alliance. It is looking at supply chains. So how do we increase supply chains in our own country, and how d…”

“There are specific examples in some of the procurement requirements around some of the big Government construction contracts, which we have probably talked about before. If you ask people to reduce their carbon footprint in a big construction project, what tends to happen is that they use more modern methods of constru…”

“You are the expert, so I should ask you this question. Modern methods of construction, new technology and AI could all change the nature of the jobs that people will be doing in the future. Of course, new technology in repairs and in doing all kinds of things, whether in floating offshore wind, solar or every other sec…”

“We are already importing a lot from China, and that was the case before we got into government. We are trying to encourage manufacturing here in the UK, and we have a number of provisions to try to do that. For example, we have just announced £300 million that will be spent in the wind sector to encourage supply chains…”

“At the moment you have people like welders and engineers coming in from other countries, and we do not have enough training courses and training provision for those. Through the spending review I would hope we get to a point where we are able to fund more of those here. There is also a role for communications in trying…”

“The migration White Paper has said that skilled jobs basically have to come in at a degree level. If a person wants to come in at a lower-level job, they can do it in one of the industrial sector groups, but there has to be a workforce plan. We have to prove that we are doing all these things. We have to prove that we …”

“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…”