Industry body says government ensure adequate training to meet its ’Green Deal’ targets

CITB ConstructionSkills has called on the government to ensure that adequate skills and training is put in place to help the industry meet the huge demand for domestic energy-efficient refurbishments.

Last week Chris Huhne, secretary of state for the Department of Energy and Climate Change, announced plans for a new ‘Green Deal’ to create almost 250,000 jobs by improving insulation and air-tightness across 26 million homes in the UK.

The ‘Green Deal’ will see energy companies providing loans to homeowners so they may make improvements to their homes to reduce carbon emissions in the form of wasted energy.

These loans will be repaid back to energy companies through the savings homeowners make in their energy bills through the new energy-efficiency measures they install.

Mark Farrar, chief executive of CITB-ConstructionSkills, said the announcement on the ‘Green Deal’ is great news for thousands of small and medium-sized construction businesses across the UK.

He said: “However, it is vital that these companies are ready and equipped with the most up to date knowledge and skills across their workforce to be able to retrofit houses with the latest energy-efficiency technologies if we want to both meet government’s exacting carbon reduction targets and bring the greatest economic benefit to the industry.”

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