Support place-based and inclusive supply chain, employment and skills strategies for housing-energy retrofit

Rachel Macrorie, Hadi Arbabi, Will Eadson, Richard Hanna, Kaylen Camacho McCluskey, Kate Simpson & Faye Wade

To achieve the recommendation stated in the chapter title, we propose the following:

• Member States should empower municipalities with resources and training to develop Building Renovation Plans supported by One-Stop Shops focused on inclusive local supply chain development, employment and skills priorities, as well as serving housing retrofit consumers.
• Municipalities should use procurement frameworks and Direct Labour Organisations to ensure a pipeline of retrofit work and support training for good quality employment.
• Member States should implement licensing or minimum competency standards for housing retrofit professionals, ensuring certification schemes encompass a wider range of skills.
• Retrofit is an opportunity to enable new groups to enter the construction sector. Municipalities should co-create partnerships alongside employees, and support unionisation, to promote training and work opportunities for women and minorities.
• Developing inclusive pathways to a skilled housing-energy retrofit workforce is a socio-technical problem, requiring insights from social, policy, building and engineering disciplines, because retrofit interweaves human and technical practices and processes.

The European Union’s (EU) building stock is responsible for 36% of its greenhouse gas emissions (EEA, 2023), partly due to poor energy efficiency: a third was built before the introduction of thermal insulation regulations in the 1970s (European Commission, 2020). Most of these buildings will still be in use in 2050. Energy retrofitting residential buildings, which includes improving building fabric and moving to zero carbon heating, cooling, ventilation and electricity services, is therefore essential. However, across the EU, retrofits achieving at least 60% energy reduction are performed in only 1.2% of the building stock per year (European Commission, 2020). To address this, the revised Energy Performance of Buildings Directive (EPBD) requires Member States to create national targets for reducing energy use in domestic buildings and establish Building Renovation Plans to attain a zero-emission building stock by 2050 (European Union, 2024). However, a ‘retrofit revolution’ will not be achieved unless significant supply-side challenges, including labour and skills shortages, are addressed (European Commission, 2021).

EU supply chains for building energy retrofits are fragmented, typified by micro-enterprises, and insufficient workers with the requisite skills and competences to perform high-quality renovations (Renovate Europe & E3G, 2022). Instead, low skills, low demand for training, and low quality predominate in building trades where profit margins are small (Killip, 2020). The construction sector has an inadequate supply of vocational education and training (VET) and, where available, such training can lack quality and accessibility (European Construction Sector Observatory, 2020). However, it is unhelpful to focus on skills training without considering policies that shape how the VET system functions (Stroud et al., 2024).

In addition, there is a need to tackle acute diversity and inclusion challenges within the sector. Women, minority ethnic groups, and people with disabilities are hugely under-represented in the construction and retrofitting workforce, which is ageing and struggles to attract younger generations (CEDEFOP, 2023). For example, just 10% of the EU construction sector is classed as female (European Commission, Directorate-General for Internal Market, Industry, Entrepreneurship and SMEs, 2023), while in the United Kingdom (UK), only 6% are categorised as Black or minority ethnic groups and 6% are people with disabilities (CITB, 2024). Consequently, construction cultures remain male-dominated and characterised by masculine values, narratives and norms (Clegg et al., 2023). This, coupled with poor job security, challenging working conditions and health and safety concerns, can make construction careers unappealing to historically under-represented groups (European Construction Sector Observatory, 2020). A greatly expanded, more diverse and competent labour force is required to meet EPBD objectives (Renovate Europe & E3G, 2022).

This chapter therefore focuses on developing inclusive pathways to a skilled retrofit workforce. This is fundamentally a socio-technical problem: understanding the nature of the challenge and producing recommendations for change requires insights from social, policy, building, and engineering disciplines, because retrofit interweaves human and technical inputs and processes. Further, retrofitting at scale requires knowledge of interlinked social and technical systems across varied systems of provision, distinct geographies, and built environments. As such the chapter draws together academic and industry literature with insights from a workshop with academics and practitioners from the UK and EU. Participants included representatives from municipalities, not-for-profit cooperatives, charities, standards bodies, and tradespeople. The workshop structure was developed using interdisciplinary perspectives spanning Civil and Structural Engineering, Construction Management, Human Geography and Sociology. It was designed to explore multiple aspects of supply chain development including: funding and delivery models, multi-actor partnerships, and geographical scales for intervention. Workshop materials including summary notes and participant expertise are available open access (Macrorie et al., 2024).

The chapter is structured according to two themes emerging from the workshop: (1) supply-side coordination through place-based organisations, networks and One-Stop Shops (OSS) ; and (2) ensuring quality through workforce regulation and training. Both themes focus on how different approaches can be used to support inclusivity in skills provision and employment outcomes. Using these themes, the chapter develops policy recommendations for (re)training programmes and initiatives to enable the growth of a diverse, skilled building retrofit workforce.