Following the launch of this desperately needed campaign at the end of March, we are publishing two articles by Ellen Robottom arguing that the campaign would be strengthened by the active involvement of trade unions,including but not confined to those with current and potential members in the sector, to push and organise for a fully climate conscious comprehensive public works approach that is also a vehicle for mass public education and mobilisation, carrying within it the possibility of being socially transformative as well as more technically proficient, effective and less damaging than the reliance on private sector micro companies we currently have.

In the forthcoming trade union year of action, the GJA argues that unions with organising potential in sectors that must expand to meet climate goals should be organising proactively to press for and mould those expansions, in engagement with government at all levels, and through helping shape campaigns like this.

A companion article is Vocational Education and Training for Retrofit by Linda Clarke.

Retrofit for the Future 1 – the case for union involvement and retrofit as public works

The Retrofit for the Future Campaign, launched at an online meeting on 19th March, is a collaboration between the Peace and Justice Project, Fuel Poverty Action, community and renters’ union ACORN, and health professionals’ campaign group Medact. Detailed demands are set out on the campaign website, but in a nutshell they address three key areas:

• A proper plan for developing a skilled workforce to carry out energy efficiency retrofits.
• Protection for private sector tenants against evictions or rent hikes after retrofit work on homes.
• Accountability to residents for the quality and effectiveness of work on their homes.

Climate campaigners and retrofit specialists have long pointed out the urgent need to address the UK’s leaky buildings (with homes currently contributing around 20% of territorial emissions), as well as the formidable task of building the needed skilled workforce, the inadequacy of training programmes that fail to equip trainees with a holistic understanding of the thermal dynamics of the building, and the dreadful health consequences of badly implemented retrofits resulting in cold bridges, damp and mould, too often with no redress for householders.

Furthermore, with the government increasingly leaning in to the rightwing framing of climate action as an unaffordable imposition on ordinary people, the case for a campaign that counters that by clearly articulating the synergies between climate action and good jobs, health, decent housing and lower energy bills becomes indisputable. However, as supporters we have some, hopefully constructive, points to make, relating both to the campaign demands and, connectedly, to the work of translating the common interest of workers, activists and communities into an effective campaign.

Judging from the stated affiliations of people joining the launch meeting, the campaign is currently speaking to a constituency rather different from the usual participants in what we might loosely call climate justice or labour movement forums. Hardly any mentioned a trade union affiliation, though many were involved with local housing, retrofit, anti-demolition or other grass-roots groups, whilst a few were retrofit professionals. On one hand this is positive inasmuch as it reflects a wealth of autonomous activity, albeit small-scale. On the other hand it points to a need for an expanded coalition, including both trade unions (or sections thereof), and campaign organisations working on other aspects of energy decarbonisation.

This is not just a matter of numbers. The crux of the campaign lies in the need for integrated planning of workforce training and development in tandem with implementation of retrofit schemes large enough to support apprenticeships or work experience placements to complement classroom-based learning. Job creation and training are indivisible sides of the same coin, whilst long-term planning is essential for the development of the supply chains that will potentially support thousands more jobs. The most efficient way – perhaps the only effective way – to achieve this is through a roll-out managed by local authorities, in partnership with training providers mainly in the FE and HE sectors, and linked with direct employment (rather than contracting out to the private sector) as the main delivery model.

This much is recognised in the campaign briefing, but the implication that this must be a campaign largely driven by trade unions (both at national policy level and locally) is yet to be properly explored. Whilst trade unions are generally in favour of insourcing of local authority functions, they are far more geared to defending incumbent jobs, pay and conditions than to demands concerning the development of new workforces; the construction workforce itself is highly fragmented, dominated by micro- and self-employed businesses and poorly unionised (12% density and falling according to this report). Workers in local authorities, colleges and universities are dealing with an array of attacks on jobs, pay and conditions, linked to funding cuts which can make additional demands seem utopian. 

On the positive side, this reveals scope for linking retrofit campaigns with wider trade union campaigns over council and education funding, where the interests of workers coincide with those of communities, service users or learners. Whilst trade union action on employment and training for retrofit is vital, this will be difficult to instigate or sustain outside the context of a wider social demand. The potential is not confined to education and local authority unions: for example, those whose members are health workers, school teachers or childcare workers have a similar though more indirect interest when the fall-outs from fuel poverty and cold, damp and mouldy housing are seen in children constantly sick with respiratory illnesses. These are workplace issues as well as concerns for the communities they serve and for society more widely.

In terms of workforce development, it is beyond time that unions took up the demand for unemployed workers to be offered meaningful (re-)training rather than being forced by the benefit system into low-paid and largely pointless work. This should sit alongside campaigns for planned transitions of workers from high emissions sectors with funded time off for re-training with retrofit as a one of the key destination sectors. The benefits system currently functions as a pivot ensuring the balance of power is always tipped in favour of the most exploitative employers, so unions (including but not limited to DWP  workers in PCS) have a stake in demanding the system be reconfigured as a tool for genuinely maintaining standards of living whilst training for socially meaningful work¹.

The struggle for climate action is crucially a struggle to reclaim work as activity that serves our communities and challenges the false alignment of workers’ interests with those of the fossil corporates who drive climate destruction whilst profiting at our expense. The trade union movement should lead a campaign for decent homes and energy justice as a right, with a mass retrofit programme therefore as a programme of public works, free at the point of delivery, paid for from progressive taxation of the affluent and the wealthy and delivered by directly employed (public sector) labour.

This is an ambitious demand, more akin to a public service like the NHS rather than a publicly-owned for-profit company like “Great British Energy”. It is telling that no participant in the retrofit campaign launch day advocated a free roll-out; perhaps because in the current political context it simply seems too ambitious and unrealistic. Nevertheless, such a programme would be the most efficient and equitable, and if we don’t make the most radical demands we will never shift the window of what is deemed reasonable and realistic. What is not realistic is to treat mass retrofit as just a “nice-to-have”; whatever approach we advocate, the starting point must be an understanding that it is an indispensable element of a sustainable energy system, and that is indisputably a collective public good.

¹This is in no way intended as endorsing the government’s deeply harmful and vicious plans for pressuring more disabled and sick people into work; our assertion is not that “work” in itself is necessarily beneficial, but that when we work it matters what kind of work we do and under what conditions).

Further reading on retrofit:

Climate Jobs: Building a Workforce for the Climate Emergency https://www.cacctu.org.uk/climatejobs – Chapter 3 on Buildings.

Technical companion to Climate Jobs Chapter 3 https://www.cacctu.org.uk/sites/data/files/sites/data/files/Docs/climate_jobs_buildings.pdf contains a model for building the workforce over a ten year period, and additional sections on non-residential buildings, materials and ventilation

Linda Clarke’s submission to the ESNEZ inquiry on building the workforce for net zero, focusing on  training requirements https://greenerjobsalliance.co.uk/vocational-education-and-training-vet-for-retrofit/

Retrofit for the Future 2 – buildings as part of the energy system, the wider coalition we need, and the TU year of climate activity.

In the context of a popular, media-stoked perception that climate action is just for people who are privileged enough not to have day-to-day worries about how to pay the rent and put food on the table, it is sometimes argued that campaigns for measures such as retrofit should avoid talking about climate change, and simply focus on more immediately tangible benefits. Similarly, some advocate that discussions of industrial transitions should not talk about “climate jobs”, but only or mainly about “future proofing” our jobs against the transitions that are, or soon will be, happening.

I think this is a mistake: it capitulates to the narrative that posits climate action as being opposed to working class interests and obscures the nature of climate change as the ultimate horrific outcome of the same exploitative system of production which keeps our energy bills unaffordable, and our jobs low paid and precarious. By failing to confront the immense threat posed by climate chaos to working class people, we undermine the possibility of organising proactively, at the necessary scale, to protect ourselves and fight for a better way of doing things.

This is why, in terms of campaigning for a mass public retrofit programme, we should constantly and very explicitly highlight the fact that this is not this not just “good” for the climate, alongside all its other benefits, but is actually an indispensable part of any programme to minimise greenhouse gas emissions.

In 2022, the power sector (i.e. electricity, i.e. electricity generation) was responsible for 14% of the UK’s total GHG emissions, whilst buildings accounted for 20% (and surface transport 28%). This is not, of course, an argument for deprioritising the roll-out of renewably produced electricity; rather, it is an argument for a holistic view of an energy system in which the role of buildings in generating, storing and – most importantly – reducing usage of energy is crucial for the UK’s capacity to get to 100% renewables including (alongside other zero carbon storage techniques) eliminating the need for gas as a dispatchable energy store for back-up.

The technical details are beyond the scope of this piece, but the key point here is that campaigns for mass retrofit (alongside cheap or free public transport) must run alongside – and be treated with the same degree of determination as – campaigns to end oil and gas extraction. Indeed, the two must be linked and integrated, both for technological reasons and also in order to build a greater consensus across the labour movement about the kinds of jobs that are required and that we need urgently to fight for. Our allies in the retrofit campaign must also include those organisations fighting against new oil and gas extraction, gas-fired power stations and CCS, wood biomass and nuclear energy.

It is no accident that the government’s flagship climate policy concerns decarbonisation of electricity generation. Their model requires the transfer of £billions of public money to fossil fuel companies for carbon capture-based projects, with the inevitable increase in dependency on high-emitting imported liquified natural gas presenting an open goal to those who argue that extraction in the North Sea should continue. Demands to treat energy efficiency and sustainable transport as public goods, whilst highly redistributive, highly beneficial for public health and a huge source of good jobs everywhere, are hardly calculated to delight private investors. This is why a coalition of all climate justice, trade union, health and housing and anti-poverty campaigners is needed to apply the necessary pressure.

This autumn sees the beginning of the Year of Trade Union Climate Activity, endorsed by the TUC, “including engagement with community and climate justice groups”. This opportunity must not pass us by; the Retrofit for the Future campaign must connect with this, with the unions taking part and with their existing allies in the climate movement, and the argument must be made to take this up as a unifying demand across sectors and across radical and progressive movements.