Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 3:51 pm on 8 March 2022.
Following the International Women's Day theme, I want to try and explore how we're going to close the gender gap in relation to not having women in one section of the workforce and men in the other, because we need—. A bit more mixing up will benefit the whole community.
So, we know from the Well-being of Future Generations Commissioner for Wales's report, 'Homes Fit for the Future: The Retrofit Challenge', that we need over 4,000 people to be skilled in insulating people's homes—existing homes—and we also need nearly 3,000 retrofit energy assessors. How does the Government think that we can get a much better balanced workforce in these really important skills, rather than them all being male? Equally, the social care sector would benefit from having a much wider diversity of the workforce, both in terms of more men working in it, and also a range of different ethnic minorities to reflect the communities they're serving. So, I'd be very keen to understand how the proper shortage in social care and in childcare could be filled by training up many more people to work in this absolutely crucial area, which is never going to be outsourced to artificial algorithms—these are proper jobs of the future—as well as the most urgent jobs around retrofitting, which, obviously, with the price of energy going up, we need to get on with as quickly as we possibly can.