Jobs or net zero? Public buildings don’t have to choose.
Updated: Aug 19
Paul Inch, MMC advisory, OSKOP Alliance
The government has decided you can only have one. Last week it pulled net zero, along with diversity and modern slavery reporting, out of the rules for public contracts, and told firms chasing taxpayer money to prove one thing above all others: that they create jobs. On the larger contracts, that social value test now carries twice the weight it used to, and from January 2027 the environment sits outside it.
I understand the instinct. More than a million 16 to 24 year-olds are out of education, work or training. “Growth in every postcode” is a good line because it answers a real problem, and I don’t want to argue against jobs.
I want to argue against the trade-off buried in the decision, the quiet assumption that carbon is a luxury you drop when times are tight. Greenpeace made the same point from the other side: protecting the environment and getting young people into work help each other, and neither should be bought at the other’s expense. They’re right. Schools are where I can show you why.
Think about what a new school actually has to deliver. Since Grenfell, fire safety leads every design conversation, as it should. But fire is only part of the job. The structure has to perform, the acoustics have to be right or children can’t learn, and the thermal envelope has to keep them warm in winter and, more and more, cool in summer, with SEND impact testing needs to exceed severe . Underneath all of that sits embodied carbon, and the risk of reducing one hazard by quietly raising another. Budgets are tight. The school and NHS pipelines are both squeezed while demand keeps climbing.
After Grenfell, a lot of the sector reached for pure non-combustibility, which usually means heavy, carbon-heavy materials, often shipped halfway round the world. There’s a third route. Start with non-combustible insulation, linings and sheeting boards to protect the structure and the people inside, then test the whole build-up rather than trusting one material on its own. That’s the thinking behind OSKOP: an open, product-led platform for designing and delivering public buildings. Instead of every project starting from a blank page, it gives you a validated set of proven components, systems and delivery processes that get reused and improved from one job to the next. It’s system-agnostic, so it doesn’t lock a client or a designer into one proprietary system or one factory. It sets the performance requirements, the interfaces and the rules, and lets multiple suppliers plug into the same platform.
That last part matters for a practical reason. No single factory can afford to fund all the testing now needed to prove a public building is safe. Share the validation and the evidence across a group of UK factories building hybrid panelised systems, and the cost of proving performance gets spread, and it becomes independently scrutinised.
The build-ups get tested in depth, and to exceed the standard rather than scrape past it. You end up knowing more about how the building behaves in a fire, not less.
The carbon numbers are where the argument gets hard to wave away. Our most recent study measured the embodied carbon of a whole school against the emerging net zero targets. The 2030 target for schools is 395 kgCO₂e/m². Our building came in at 222, which is the target set for 2037. Being twelve years ahead of a standard that hasn’t landed yet is worth stopping on, especially when a traditional build of the same school sits above 560.
This is usually where cross-laminated timber comes up, and it deserves the respect. CLT is a genuinely good product for the climate problem, we are not critically of it, just where it is made. It raises two issues for UK public buildings, though. Exposed CLT is combustible, it chars and will eventually burn out , so you either board it out fully, which hides the timber that made it appealing in the first place, or you engineer around it. The bigger problem is cost. CLT is a lot more expensive at exactly the moment budgets are thinnest. Independent data shows the OSKOP platform approach costs markedly less while delivering the same carbon saving in the superstructure.
Now bring it back to jobs. Almost all CLT is made in mainland Europe. So most of the money funding the superstructure of a British school or hospital leaves the country, and the employment and social value of making those panels lands in Germany or elsewhere, not here. There’s freight carbon on top, every finished panel trucked to a UK site at a cost of around 1 tonne per delivery.
A platform built on British factories does the reverse. Those factories exist now, and with demand they’ll build more. Using them keeps the superstructure spend, and the jobs and skills that come with it, in this country. That is a direct answer, available today, to exactly what the new rules ask contractors to prove: local employment, training and opportunity, delivered while beating the carbon and social targets rather than trading them away.
So the honest answer to the government’s challenge is that jobs and net zero aren’t two bids for the same 20%. Build public buildings on an open, tested, British platform and you get both. The information is open and free to anyone who wants it.
OSKOP isn’t claiming to be better. It’s different from how MMC usually gets procured, and UK production isn’t a preference, it’s the point. The jobs, and the money staying in local postcodes instead of being exported, are the by-product of safer public buildings that more than halve embodied carbon at a budget we can actually afford.
Our ask is simple. Get in touch, and let us put the data on your project.
