FMJ Facilities Management magazine providing industry-specific intelligence to FM and property professionals
The Building Engineering Services Association (BESA) has praised the government for launching an energy efficiency taskforce charged with driving investment in improving the performance of buildings.
Co-chaired by the Chief Executive of Nat West, Alison Rose, and Energy Security and Net Zero Minister Lord Callanan, the taskforce will devise a plan to cut energy consumption in domestic, commercial, and industrial buildings by 15 per cent by 2030 compared with 2021 levels.
The government is putting a total of £12.6 billion behind the plan this decade – £6.6 billion allocated during this Parliament and the rest from 2025. Chancellor Jeremy Hunt believes energy efficiency could be worth £1 trillion to UK businesses between now and 2030, and emphasised its importance to energy security, economic growth, and the delivery of net zero.
Rose said: “Addressing the climate crisis is a team sport and building vital partnerships between the public and private sector is the key to tackling this challenge at pace. Improving energy efficiency will not only drive a lower carbon environment, but also deliver greater economic security through lower bills for people, families, and businesses.”
BESA said that energy efficiency measures could be rapidly scaled up through a national programme of building retrofits, which would put the built environment at the heart of economic growth and the government’s net zero targets.
However, it urged the taskforce to make training and recruitment a key focus for investment to address the ‘green skills gap’ that could undermine the strategy.
BESA’s Technical Director Graeme Fox said: “The building engineering sector will be pivotal to delivering energy efficiency improvements, but we need help to develop a skilled workforce capable of keeping pace with government targets. For example, the target is for 600,000 heat pump installations a year by 2028 which is about 10 times what we are doing now. We need lots more people, but those people need to have the right skills so there needs to be a huge jump in spending on training and recruitment.”
A recent Energy Systems Catapult report found that just two per cent of workers in the heating industry were female and only five per cent were from an ethnic background. It said this lack of diversity was undermining efforts to decarbonise heating and hot water in buildings.
Fox continued: “The building services industry has a lot of work to do to make its workforce more representative of the population we serve and attract vital new skills and approaches to problem solving. The energy efficiency taskforce could really help by making it part of their strategic plan to ensure a flow of investment into promoting the sector and underpinning green training programmes.”
FMJ in conjunction with Grundon Waste Management is pleased to launch the 2023 waste management and recycling survey which examines the ways in which FMs approach their waste management responsibilities.
In this, the sixth year for the annual appraisal, we know there is a greater opportunity than ever for FMs to reappraise their waste and recycling operations and help their organisations meet the growing pressure to achieve ESG goals.
We want to learn how FMs have adapted to the legislative, economic and societal changes of the past year and how they plan to meet the latest waste and recycling targets.
In this survey we’ve posed a series of questions which include insights into FMs’ waste management strategy and targets, how they’re moving towards zero waste targets, and the importance of not just meeting compliance targets but also ESG goals.
The results of the 2023 survey will be published in FMJ magazine and form the basis of a white paper co-written by FMJ and the experts at Grundon on how to approach waste and recycling strategies.
To take part click here.
