Warm Homes must be all about jobs

If we’re honest, the vast majority of us have no real idea what goes on in the box in our homes or gardens that heats our homes. Regardless of whether it’s a gas boiler, electric boiler, or heat pump, if it breaks, we’re in the hands of this second emergency service of skilled heating workers. So it’s particularly shocking that these workers are very often not on decent pay and secure contracts.

Especially because we know that times are changing. Climate change is already meaning colder winters and hotter summers, as well as increases in frequency and severity of storms and floods.

We need a versatile, secure, well-trained, sizable workforce capable of insulating us from harsh winters and climate chaos more than ever.

So, we’ve welcomed the government’s Warm Homes Plan. It’s the biggest programme of home upgrades ever, making up to five million homes warmer, more efficient and cheaper to run. And it’s directly targeted at the huge numbers of families in fuel poverty—10% of households in the North East.

And we’ve especially welcomed its support for 180,000 new jobs. It’s a promise of tens of thousands more engineers, plumbers, joiners, welders, and insulation installers which we can benefit from here.

But there’s jobs and there’s jobs.

So we at the TUC have this week partnered with the government to create a Warm Homes Plan Workforce Taskforce, bringing together unions, industry and government at all levels to make sure this £15bn investment creates good, secure jobs.

These should be jobs that support a family and that people can build a life on. Jobs with strong rights, job stability, good pay, and trade union representation.

Jobs that offer a stable future for our young people without asking them to leave their hometown or get a degree.

And those already in this changing sector must be brought along—helped to adjust their roles gradually while staying with the same employer. This must be about building more sustainable jobs, not forcing workers to plunge into a brave new world.

Tory governments were happy with race-to-the-bottom pay and employment terms, with those keeping us safe and warm living on precarious contracts with no support from a trade union.

And incredibly, Reform have promised to abandon all clean energy investment, keeping you cold, scrapping 240,000 high-quality jobs upgrading our homes, and pushing the world into climate extremes.

Meanwhile the TUC is working with the government because we believe in jobs and want a better, more prosperous, more sustainable world.