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North East landlords launch green skills programme for residents
A group of social landlords in the North East of England has launched a skills scheme to train residents for career-starter roles in the green and low-carbon sector.
Green Start is an initiative to be used by members of the Housing Employment Network North East (HENNE), including Your Homes Newcastle, Karbon Homes, Bernicia, North Tyneside Council and Tyne Housing.
The six-month paid placement scheme is aimed at upskilling residents who have struggled with the traditional recruitment project.
Businesses taking part in the scheme receive wrap-around, one-to-one support and funding to help with salary and training costs.
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Your Homes Newcastle is the contract lead for the project, which is modelled on a previous, more general employment scheme.
Stuart Clarke, senior manager for employability at Your Homes Newcastle, said: “We along with other housing partners within the HENNE partnership delivered a programme that set up the model for Green Start.
“It was a placement programme where we would work with employees and work with our tenants to provide subsidised placements in career-starter roles.
“The idea would be that tenants of ours who are struggling with traditional recruitment processes, we would make the recruitment process a little bit kinder, work with employers to give people an opportunity on a six-month placement to go in, develop skills and experiences, with the ambition of them being retained at the end of that contract and sustaining their employment.”
Mr Clarke said the New Start project, which launched in 2021, worked “really well”, with more three-quarters of the tenants who took part in the programme ending up in more permanent employment.
The Green Start programme came about as a result of funding from the North East Combined Authority targeted at building green skills and filling employment gaps in the region.
This week marks the start of a short pre-employment course, which will give interested candidates an opportunity to do some upskilling and find out more about the jobs that are available.
There are five courses planned across the different local authority areas, including Newcastle, North Tyneside and Northumberland.
At the end of the courses, the people who complete them will get a guaranteed interview for the placements.
Mr Clarke said employers are being lined up who “not just operate within the sector”, but “have bought into what we’re doing and why we’re doing it”.
“They’ve got a social conscience and social value that they’re really genuinely interested in employing local people,” he said.
The programme will fund a minimum of 30 placements, but is expected to provide more than that.
A separate New Start scheme is also running alongside Green Start, with a total of 60 placements.
The new scheme comes as the boss of L&Q warned last month that a lack of engineers and scaffolders is holding back housing associations’ fire safety remediation efforts.
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