The future of green jobs with Billy Knowles of the Youth Environmental Service

HortWeek Podcast

The Youth Environmental Service, which is backed by the National Heritage Lottery Fund, has won backing for a 'national service' for the environment.

Dubbed a "green jobs guarantee" for a post-secondary school-age young people. Programme director Billy Knowles explains:

"The Youth Environmental Service is an organisation that we set up with the idea that what would happen if every young person had the opportunity to do a year of paid environmental work.

"It's a great way to give something back, it's a great way to develop skills, and it's a great way to build connections to all of the other young people who are also worrying about the same problems [climate change, nature degradation and biodiversity collapse].

After more than two and half years of campaigning, delegates at a Royal Parks Guild Annual Discovery Day voted 48-6 in favour of the idea of a green jobs guarantee.

Knowles acknowledged some do not like the idea of national service because they think it would be mandatory, but he said it would be volunteer-based and would pay living wage for a year's work. The first pilot New To Nature pilot helped 97 young people into work and a new pilot will focus on the North West.

One of horticulture's key challenges, Billy says, is improving access and diversity:

"Sometimes we aren't sensitive enough to the variety of different needs and challenges there might be. A great example of this is physical access. If you're a young person who's grown up living in a city, and you might come from a sort of socioeconomically disadvantaged background, parents haven't got a huge amount of money to spend there, you might not have your access to your own form of transport, you might be used to taking public transport. How are you then going to go out and work in a sort of fairly rural role and an opportunity that would be fantastic otherwise, but you just can't physically get to?"

The scheme aims to create "10,000 paid opportunities per year for young people working across nature, net zero and circular economy organisations and the Labour Party has already shown support for the plan. But Billy says "neither party has any real clear idea on how they're going to do that. What we offer is the answer to that question, how you create those green jobs and you start building that workforce.

"The policy isn't to fund every single one of the 10,000 jobs, it's to fund a small number and to create the framework around which other organisations are able to create their own.

"We're not building something that we want to last for two years, we want this to last for 50 years, and so what we need to do is have a really strong base and a strong foundation from which we can do that. And we need champions within parliament. We need champions within the civil service who can help us make that happen."

Find out more at www.youthenvironmentalservice.co.uk.

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