Partnership set to accelerate green skills and jobs for upgrading Birmingham housing

Birmingham City Council has announced a three-year partnership with The Retrofit Academy, to accelerate the development of the green workforce and infrastructure needed to upgrade social housing in the region, at scale.

This skills boost for the city follows the receipt of £24.8m from the government’s Social Housing Decarbonisation Fund (SHDF) to make energy efficiency upgrades to 2,047 social homes in the region, in addition to a share of the Home Upgrade Grant (HUG).

The partnership is set to accelerate a competent retrofit workforce by assessing the city’s current skills gap and delivering a training infrastructure that will increase the number of qualified retrofitters required in Birmingham.

The joint venture will also see The Retrofit Academy identify local training providers and provide the knowledge, support and expertise to deliver the courses and establish the career pathways for those looking to join the green workforce in the West Midlands.

Birmingham City Council and The Retrofit Academy will also work with organisations involved in retrofit projects and their supply chains to create a like-minded network that can deliver large-scale high-quality retrofit across the city.

This green progress for the city comes as Birmingham City Council continues work towards targets to make efficiency upgrades that reduce carbon emissions and energy bills for the 60,000 social homes that need it most. With funding creating massive demand for green roles to be filled, West Midlands residents will be able to train and qualify as Retrofit Assessors, Advisors and Coordinators and fulfil roles created by SHDF and HUG programmes in the region.

David Pierpoint, Chief Executive at The Retrofit Academy commented: “Across the UK, SHDF and HUG programmes have created a raft of demand for quality retrofit specialists, but there remains work to be done to train enough people and create a developed network to facilitate this change at scale. This cannot happen without collaboration between all stakeholders working towards a common goal of creating a competent and capable workforce that is needed to retrofit millions of homes in the UK.

“The new partnership with Birmingham City Council is a great example of putting this into practice. Our joint objective is to create a network of like-minded organisations who work together to decarbonise homes in Birmingham and the wider West Midlands, whilst also creating jobs and career opportunities for local people.”

“We are committed to partnerships like this one with Birmingham City Council to demonstrate how collaborating on developing a retrofit workforce will result in the success of large-scale, high quality retrofit delivery.”

The Retrofit Academy is working with Bloom Procurement, a delivery partner of specialist professional services of Birmingham City Council, to facilitate this robust supply chain.

For more information about The Retrofit Academy, click here to visit the website.

IMAGE CREDIT: iStock/erreperdomo