Memorandum submitted by the Commission
for Architecture and the Built Environment (CABE)
CABE is the government's statutory advisor on
architecture, urban design and public space, sponsored by the
Department for Communities and Local Government and the Department
for Culture Media and Sport.
The global environmental crisis we face is,
in large part, a planning and design crisis. It is a consequence
of how things are made, resources are used, land is developed,
buildings are constructed, services are supplied and places are
connected. So tackling climate change involves thinking hard about
the design of towns and cities and how we live in them, and developing
the knowledge, skills and jobs to respond, adapt and innovate.
The UK's environmental industries can be a world leader in helping
to reduce greenhouse gases without hampering economic growth.
KEY RECOMMENDATIONS
— The definition of "Environmental
Industries" should include the built environment and green
space sectors in recognition of the contribution they make to
meeting the Carbon Reduction Commitment as stipulated in the Climate
Change Act 2008.
Government has made commitments to delivering
a low and zero carbon built environment. In addition, the Planning
Act 2008 imposes a statutory duty on local authorities to
deliver good design and sustainability, which has a direct impact
on skills for both the built environment and green space sectors.
— Skills in the built environment trades
and professions need to be supported in order to ensure that the
carbon reduction commitments outlined in the Heat and Energy Strategy
and Low and Zero Carbon Building strategies are delivered.
In particular training for architects, builders,
and engineers to take a "whole house" approach to retrofitting
existing properties with low and zero carbon technologies, as
well as efficiency measures.
— Green infrastructure is vital to mitigating
and adapting to climate change through providing a natural systems
approach to alleviating the urban heat island effect, reducing
flood risk and other important functions.
The green space sector is facing a chronic shortage
of people with the skills to deliver the well designed and maintained
green infrastructure. The sector must be supported to provide
further skills development and routes to entry into the industry.
— Financial instruments promoting uptake
of low/zero carbon and efficiency technologies should be explored
and implemented, these could include the reduction of VAT to 5%
on all refurbishment costs and/or council tax rebates to property
owners. This would create further certainty in the market for
the development of these new technologies.
THE BUILT
ENVIRONMENT AND
GREEN SPACE
SECTORS: ENVIRONMENTAL
INDUSTRIES
It is important that the built environment and
green space sectors are included in definitions of environmental
industries in any low carbon economic strategy, as they are critical
to delivering carbon reductions and adapting to the impacts of
climate change. The construction and use of our homes and other
buildings produces approximately 45% of the UK's carbon emissions.
Around 75% of the current building stock will still be standing
in 2050. Progress on energy efficiency—the cheapest way
to reduce carbon emissions—has been slow but the UK government
is now moving fast to catch up with other northern European countries.
The Heat and Energy Strategy recently published
by the Department for Climate Change and Energy (DECC) has set
a target for a near zero carbon built environment by 2080. If
this is to be achieved then we must create the skills base and
industry certainty to support this objective.
CABE is committed to working with Government
to find environmentally and economically viable solutions to creating
a low or zero carbon built environment. This is one of the reasons
why we have created www.sustainablecities.org.uk an online resource
for local authority leaders to gain access to expert advice and
guidance on creating a more sustainable built environment.
The built environment offer exciting new opportunities
for energy efficiency, generation and distribution. The delivery
of community energy systems can only be led from a wider town
planning and masterplanning level and local authorities are therefore
well placed to lead on thermal masterplanning. There are a number
of northern European examples of such approaches including Hammarby
SjÃstad, and Copenhagen, and all have been initiated and
led by the local planning authorities. Individual site scale developments
are normally too small to make these systems financially viable.
Green infrastructure ranges from parks to play
spaces, from cemeteries to allotments. As well as being vital
in creating healthy, cohesive and sustainable communities, providing
recreational space and contact with nature, this green infrastructure
encourages more sustainable travel, acts as a carbon sink, and
can reduce energy use by buildings for heating and cooling. Green
spaces help to manage the effects of extreme weather conditions
caused by climate change.
Increasing tree cover by 10% can reduce the
surface temperature of a city by between three and four degrees
centigrade. The prediction of hotter, drier summers means that
it is vital to protect existing trees and prioritise the planting
of new ones. Larger tree canopies contribute hugely to the shading
and cooling of streets and buildings.
It is not only heat that is a dangerous effect
of climate change. Flooding too is a serious concern. The most
economically damaging aspect of climate change to date has been
extreme wet weather. The UK summer floods in 2007 caused
13 deaths, flooded 48,000 homes and 7,300 businesses,
cost £3 billion and for a time left several urban areas
without drinking water or power. Although the potential impacts
of extreme weather are inherently uncertain, they can be substantially
reduced.
One of the best ways to mitigate the impact
of flood risk is by restoring flood plains. These spaces can be
used for recreation and wildlife habitats. Creating green corridors
along rivers on the flood plains, with storm water lakes for fishing
and boating, picnic sites, trees, and cover for wildlife, are
an efficient, environmentally sound approach to flood prevention.
The Milton Keynes flood plains forest involves the restoration
of a site adjacent to the River Nene to create a new landscape
with much greater flood storage capacity.
Green assets, whether on or around buildings,
must be managed at a strategic level in order to provide the best
results. For developers and building owners it is important to
recognise the benefits of using ecological processes to achieve
a more economically and environmentally sustainable built environment.
THE JOBS
AND SKILLS
CHALLENGES
Proponents of the Green New Deal argue that
massive public investments and fiscal incentives can lay the foundations
for the private sector to develop new industries and create millions
of jobs in the short term, and protect the environment in the
medium term.
The Homes and Communities Agency Academy's Mind
the Skills Gap (2007) report assessed the gaps in supply and
demand of the skills required to deliver sustainable communities.
The study concluded that there weren't enough people with the
right skills in the right places to deliver the government's ambitious
agenda for creating sustainable communities across England.
The report analysed skills gaps by occupation.
Landscape architects, urban designers, and architects were considered
together as being concerned with the design and management of
buildings and the public realm. Labour shortages were forecast
to increase significantly up to 2012 for urban design and
landscape architecture as a reflection of the growing demand for
design skills and the lack of increase in supply. This was, of
course, before the credit crunch and the redundancies which have
followed. An action plan to support skills development and address
labour shortages in key occupations is currently being produced
by the HCA Academy in partnership with key built environment and
green space organisations.
Future skills development and training will
need to be driven by technological advances, and ever tougher
carbon/energy efficiency standards, and issues around place-making
and community cohesion. There is evidence of some difficulty or
resistance among education providers to get up to date experience
and knowledge, and develop their work quickly enough, to keep
pace with change. Students need to be prepared for the challenges
they will face. As they move into professional life, they will
find themselves in roles that involve delivering a step-change
in the design quality and management of our towns and cities.
Achieving tougher environmental standards will
form an important aspect of professional life. Practitioners are
already expected to play a proactive role in achieving government
objectives for reducing carbon emissions from the built environment,
through the zero carbon homes programme (Building a greener future:
policy statement, CLG, July 2007) and programmes relating to new
non domestic buildings and existing homes and buildings, including
historic environments (Climate change and the historic environment,
English Heritage, 2008). The skills and learning gained at undergraduate
and postgraduate level needs to provide a sound foundation to
meet these challenges and proactive approaches to life-long learning.
More effort and investment is needed to meet this challenge.
BUILT ENVIRONMENT
SKILLS
The built environment sector will have an important
role in laying the foundations for the emergence and mass roll-out
of a set of resilient low carbon interventions—mitigations,
adaptations and innovations—rich in new jobs and based upon
independent sources of energy supply. However this requires an
investment in the skills in the sector to ensure the right workforce
is in place to deliver.
There are two main skills shortages within the
built environment sector that we are primarily concerned with
in the context of delivering a low carbon built environment: planning
and implementation.
The CLG Planning matters inquiry (HC 517-I,
July 2008) concluded that England's planning system underpins
the country's economic growth and development, but there is a
significant risk that that major Government targets for housebuilding
and regeneration will be missed because the system is unable to
manage the volume or variety of tasks required between now and
2020. Lord Stern's report on Climate Change also pointed to the
strategic importance of planning in coordinating a response to
climate change adaptation and mitigation.
Wider economic well-being and delivery of the
Government's environmental priorities could well be hindered simply
because the system cannot cope. Two linked and chronic problems
need to be urgently addressed to prevent this. There is a drastic
shortage of planning officers, estimated to affect 46% of local
authority posts by 2012. There is also a significant and growing
skills gap among those planners who remain within the system.
These problems have been recognised for more
than a decade, but in spite of continued pressure for change,
planning departments remain short of staff and likely to be so
for the foreseeable future. The CLG committee concluded that government
needs both to raise the general status of planning within local
government structures and to provide means by which planners can
widen and improve their skills to obtain the greatest benefit
from developments for the localities they serve.
The independent report for the Department for
Communities and Local Government (CLG) on The credit crunch
and regeneration: impact and implications (January 2009) examines
economic and financial impacts on the regeneration sector. The
report notes concerns that if regeneration activity is halted
now, a generation of skills and capacity which has been built
upon during the last decade may be lost.
CABE and RIBA recently produced a briefing,
Skills for Low Carbon Building. In the briefing we suggested
that by developing their low carbon skills rapidly, practising
architects and built environment professionals may gain competitive
advantage from niche specialisation in low carbon design. Alternatively,
simply having a stronger skills base and deeper knowledge of climate
change and low carbon design issues will bring opportunities to
build wider ranging relationships with clients and stakeholders
who have an active interest in environmental issues.
The message emerging from CLG and CABE is that,
despite pressures of reduced planning fee income and development
activity, now is a time to retain planning and design skills,
to focus on strategy and plan making, and to ensure the conditions
are in place to expedite sound development decisions when the
upturn occurs.
GREEN SPACE
SKILLS
The successful planning, design and management
of parks and the wider network of green infrastructure draws upon
the skills of people working in a broad range of specialist occupations,
from landscape architects to horticulturalists. The green space
sector also requires management expertise, including skills such
as advocacy and community engagement, in order to instil the public
with motivation and confidence to use and enjoy green spaces and
influence local authority decision making.
As we have seen above green infrastructure is
vital in both mitigating and adapting to climate change, and so
is likely to become an even more important sector in future. There
are not enough people with the right skills to fill existing jobs,
and at the same time green space departments are chronically under-funded
and under-staffed.
We know from the research and consultancy that
have informed our Skills to Grow strategy that there is
some fantastically innovative and exciting work going on in the
sector. There is, however, no single organisation that represents
the full range of occupations that play a role in delivering high
quality green space.
Local government is the principle employer for
the sector, but green spaces management within local authorities
is facing serious skills problems. CABE surveyed 54 green
space managing departments in a range of local authorities. The
findings highlight a number of common problems.
— 68% of authorities said a lack of skills
in horticulture was affecting overall service delivery.
— 40% of departments said "lack of
capacity to deliver" was the reason for not providing apprenticeships—however
we also know from the survey that volunteering contributed an
average of over 420 days per authority per year, or the equivalent
of an extra two staff in person days. This demonstrates that there
is significant interest in the sector and potential for growth.
People employed in the green space sector often
have lower pay and status in comparison with other sectors. This
is a key driver for the decline in green space skills which leads
to poorer quality green spaces and low public expectations. In
brief the issues facing the sector are:
— Problems with recruitment and retention
of staff.
— Lack of workforce diversity.
— The existing range of skills is too narrow.
— The shortage of green space management
and leadership skills.
— Lack of co-ordinated working across the
sector.
Our Skills to Grow strategy outlines
ways of meeting these challenges through an action plan. Already,
in response to our strategy, the Government has committed to a
£1 million "Green Apprentices" scheme. This
will help with the costs of training and employing 60 new
apprenticeships in deprived urban authorities across the country.
Similarly the Government has committed investment
in developing new parks and green spaces. CABE is now seeking
to ensure that we have the necessary people with the right skills
to implement these ambitions.
4 June 2009
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