Opportunities for providing new ‘green jobs’

The global market for environmental goods and services is already worth £3 trillion, and is projected to grow to £4.3 trillion in 2015.  The Government sees this as an opportunity and has stated its intention to become a leader in the production of low-carbon goods and services such as offshore wind engineering, low-carbon vehicles, CCS, and financial and consulting services.

The Government strategy to achieve this is based around what they have called a new industrial activism (i.e. policies to support development of low-carbon industry).

The credit crunch, however, poses a risk to progress in developing new green sectors, and to meeting carbon budgets, because it is restricting finance available for required low-carbon investments.

Fuel poverty

Energy costs in future are projected to rise and as a result of moving to low-carbon fuel generation, these will increase further. However, offsetting this will be improvements to energy efficiency, which will reduce energy requirements.

Our analysis suggests that by 2022 these two effects will broadly balance so that some bills will increase, whilst others fall, and the overall level of fuel poverty will be similar to today (i.e. 4-5 million households). A household  is considered to be ‘fuel poor’ if it must spend more than 10% of its income on heating / electricity costs to maintain an adequate level of warmth.

In the Committee’s December 2008 report it advised that Government takes action to address potential impacts for fuel poverty, through a range of possible measures. Analysis for our 2009 Progress Report shows that rising block tariffs (where energy prices increase for high energy users) are not an effective instrument for tackling fuel poverty.

Targeted energy efficiency improvements, income transfers and social tariffs have an important role to play.