Army of loft insulators to cut gas bills and tackle climate change

Gordon Brown announces large numbers of draught-proofers to provide jobs, aid poor, and help environment
Nicholas Watt, Ian Traynor and agencies
guardian.co.uk,
Wednesday October 15 2008 17.56 BST

Loft insulation. Photograph: Graham Turner
An army of loft insulators and draught-proofers is to be released on to the streets of Britain as Gordon Brown combines his fight against climate change with the need to provide jobs in an economic downturn.
In an echo of the New Deal, launched by the US president Franklin Roosevelt during the Great Depression of the 1930s, the prime minister said that a new employment scheme would train thousands of loft insulators.
Speaking in Brussels at the EU summit, Brown expressed his concern about the sharp rise in unemployment announced today. But he said he had a plan.
"We are expanding in a very radical way our insulation and draught-proofing central-heating provision for the elderly and other people in our country. We are training large numbers of additional people to do that work in insulation. That will be one of the employment programmes that will grow.
"So I just give you one example of how we can combine to meet the challenges of climate change and cut people's gas and electricity bills and create the opportunities for work and training for that work."
Brown expressed his concern about people losing their jobs. "Every person who loses their job and the redundancies that are taking place in our country concerns me," he said.
"We have over the last 10 years created 3 million jobs extra. Therefore we want to maintain employment levels as high as possible.
"We will do whatever we can to ensure that people can stay in their jobs, we will do whatever we can so that people who lose their jobs can get new skills for the next job. We will do whatever we can to create opportunities."
Chris Grayling, the shadow work and pensions secretary, said that Brown's remarks demonstrated that he had "nothing substantial to offer"."For all the hype surrounding Gordon Brown in the past few days, these comments show just how out of touch he is with what is going on in the real economy. He promised that he had ended boom and bust - but today's unemployment figures show what an absurd claim that was.
"Now as people are paying the price for that failure, he has nothing substantial to offer them. If training people to lag roofs is the best suggestion he can make, then it doesn't say much for the challenges we face as a nation."
Tony McNulty, the employment minister, responded: "It shows how out of touch Grayling is that while Gordon Brown is in Brussels leading European efforts to tackle the global economic crisis, his first thought is to trivialise an initiative that is aiming to get people into work and has helped 3 million people cut their fuel bills.
"This really is a shallow comment from a shallow man and I fail to see how this fits in with the constructive opposition which his leader has promised."