The partnership will assess the city’s current skills gap and delivering a training infrastructure that will increase the number of qualified retrofitters in Birmingham.
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 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.
Supporting retrofit projects
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.
The Council continues work towards targeted reductions in carbon emissions and energy bills for 60,000 high priority social homes through efficiency upgrades. The funding will significantly increase the number of available green roles, enabling West Midlands residents to train as Retrofit Assessors, Advisors and Coordinators to fulfil roles created by the SHDF and HUG programmes in the region.
Like-minded organisations
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.”