Speeches by Jones.

“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…”

“I think there are things you can do to incentivise the behaviours you want to see. For example, central Government are putting in £625 million to develop 10 technical excellence colleges on construction around the country. We are putting in the funding, we are working with local organisations and we will make sure that…”

“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…”

“There are lots of complexities in the training system, and part of the reason for having a workforce plan is to identify those and to work out how to fix them. I know you talked a lot about construction in previous sessions, but the Government have made an announcement on the construction sector and how we are putting …”

“The overall picture of the White Paper is putting into practice what we talked about in opposition, which is that there has not been a join-up between an industrial strategy, the Department for Work and Pensions, a migration advisory strategy and Skills England in the past. What we have seen over recent years is a quad…”

“I do not have a lucky date, but everything is aligning around the spending review time because, obviously, there are a lot of decisions in terms of what we can and cannot do. There is also the industrial strategy but, of course, we have had the migration strategy this week saying that if we want to have some of the ski…”

“Yes, we do. We are working on it now, and it is exciting.”

“There is obviously training for people to deliver heat pumps. If you are an existing gas fitter, the training is less than a week and you can then be trained to install. I do not know if you are talking about people training from scratch or a slightly different system, but my understanding of heat pumps is that there i…”

“Public confidence from employers, do you mean?”

“Full scope, yes.”

“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.”