CIC presses Chancellor on green recovery and supply chain vulnerability

The Treasury must unlock the power of the construction industry to lead us through the climate emergency and deliver growth across the country, CIC has advised the Chancellor of the Exchequer.

In a letter to the Chancellor, Rt. Hon Rishi Sunak MP ahead of the 2021 Autumn Budget and Spending Review, CIC also voiced concerns that a combination of industry vulnerability to recent inflation in material prices, an exodus of skilled workers and the fuel crisis risked undermining the great work the sector had done in sustaining employment and growth over the last 18 months.

CIC’s submission focused on green skills, building safety, ‘levelling up’ and housebuilding. It urged government to lead from the front by assessing all bids for government projects against the requirements to deliver safe buildings that are sustainable ahead of prioritising the lowest capital cost.

The letter highlighted a number of actions the Treasury could take to meet its objectives. These include:

• Working with industry to deliver a National Retrofit Strategy – supported by a VAT cut for retrofitting and refurbishment work - that could not only contribute to our legally binding carbon targets but also create new jobs and take many people out of fuel poverty.
• Better defining what is meant by green jobs and recognise the importance of funding enabling skills, such as leadership and management, data and information proficiency, and digital and modelling skills in order to meet shared objectives on decarbonisation and building safety.
• Allocating funding and other incentives to draw in Building Control Professionals to support the new building safety regime and ensure that the cost pressures of the Building Safety Programme would not make it harder for both housing associations and council landlords to lever their own cash to deliver new housing.

CIC is a unifying voice for professionals in all sectors of the built environment. Its overarching objectives within the construction sector are to promote quality, support the development of skills and talent, meet the challenges of climate change, embrace diversity and encourage a healthy and safe environment.

The organisation has been proactive in coordinating the efforts of built environment professionals to meet Net Zero through 'Carbon Zero: the professional institutions’ climate action plan’ and it is playing a central role in helping to raise competence standards in the building industry in the wake of the Grenfell Tower fire.

The Chancellor will present the Autumn Budget on 27 October and the conclusions of the 2021 Spending Review will also be announced on this date.

The letter to the Chancellor can be read in full here.