A year to forget? Or the start of something better?

2025 was an exceptionally challenging year that unfortunately saw several well-established building engineering firms forced out of business. However, it wasn’t all bad news, according to Pete Curtis, President of the Building Engineering Services Association (BESA).

Despite the significant financial challenges, 2025 also marked progress in key areas. Efforts were made to improve the culture of construction, enhance the safety and sustainability of buildings, implement long-awaited reforms to late payment legislation, and renew the focus on human health and well-being in construction.

Not everyone embraced these changes, though. BESA’s CEO, David Frise, pointed out that a third of people in construction and related disciplines are not interested in making the industry better, safer, or more sustainable.

Speaking at the Association’s annual conference, he noted that while one third of professionals are highly competent and compliant with legislation and best practices, another third aspire to reach that standard but need support to do so. Unfortunately, the remaining third “simply don’t care.”

David addressed the 300 delegates gathered at The Brewery in London, stating, “We can try to drag them up… or drive them out of the industry. Just doing enough is not sufficient. We need to take control and change what we can to create a better industry. To achieve that, we need competent people.”

Prominent
So, the Association launched its Member Pledge initiative during the conference with several prominent members signing an agreement to put competence and compliance at the heart of their operations and encourage their supply chains to do the same. More BESA members are now following suit.

The push for improved standards in building safety and sustainability is creating a strong incentive for clients to specify BESA members, due to their ability to demonstrate competence through the Association’s technical audit process.

The Association also suspended 14 members in 2025 for failing to pass their technical audit, which might seem a strange thing for a membership body to do, but we did it because membership needs to stand for something. If clients are to have confidence in our credibility, then we need to be robust.

As Lilly Gallafent, director at Cast Consultancy, mentioned at the BESA Conference: “Change needs to start with clients, and we need to persuade them that even if they feel they have ‘won’ now in a contract negotiation, they won’t feel that way in a few years [when all the problems become apparent].

“They need to stop passing risk onto their supply chains; there are better models out there that we are not utilising. We do strive to allocate risk more equitably by analysing it properly, but the client must be willing.”

This penny does seem to be dropping with more clients, and the building safety agenda is prompting more to take an interest in the competence of their supply chains because of increasing awareness of their clear legal responsibilities under the Building Safety Act.

To help this process, BESA’s ‘Clients’ Guide to the Building Safety Act’ will be published in early 2026, following quickly on the heels of the new Guidance Framework for Principal Contractor Competence (PAS 8672) which has already been widely welcomed for addressing a source of growing confusion in the new building safety regime.

The Clients' Guide will emphasise the crucial role clients play in ensuring that only competent and compliant companies and individuals are selected to deliver their projects, and it will highlight the long-term benefits of safe and sustainable buildings for their businesses and reputations.

The Principal Contractor (PC) framework seeks to address the lack of a consistent industry approach to assessing the competence of one of the key professions charged with delivering the requirements of the Act. Clients have been approaching the appointment of PCs in a piecemeal way which has led to considerable confusion and project delays.

PCs themselves are facing increased pressure to provide evidence of competence throughout their supply chains. In response, BESA conducted months of research and cross-industry collaboration to produce a guidance framework that offers a significantly simplified and standardised method for meeting PAS 8672 — the standard used to evaluate PC competence.

The new framework is aligned with BSI standards and cross-mapped to relevant ISO standards along with the Build UK Common Assessment Standard to help all members of a supply chain prove compliance once and avoid having to continually repeat the process for every project. 

Regulated
The transformation of building control into a regulated profession is another profound change that began to make a real impact in 2025. The pile up of unapproved planning submissions at Gateway Two of the new process was, in part, due to poor quality submissions made by companies who still think BCOs will hold their hands and guide them through the process. Those days are gone.

A big part of the competence and compliance challenge is to improve the quality of submissions and then make sure we build what has been designed and approved by the Regulator. That message was clearly starting to get through and will take us a long way down the road towards the better built environment to which we all should aspire in 2026.

The new team running the Building Safety Regulator (BSR) has also made rapid progress on improving the planning process. Since Andy Roe was appointed as the new BSR chair in July and promised to clear the backlog at planning Gateway 2 for higher risk buildings (HRBs) which had stalled the new build housing market, there have been several concrete steps forward.

He quickly created a centralised ‘Innovation Unit’ of planning specialists and a ‘batching system’ to focus on the biggest new build projects, covering nearly 34,000 homes. Most of the 150 plus HRB schemes were expected to clear the system by the start of 2026 as a result.

Clearly, the Regulator must find a tricky balance between getting projects moving while ensuring safety standards are not compromised – and as a fire officer who attended the Grenfell disaster in person – he is not a man likely to compromise on the Acts fire safety ‘red lines’.

However, there does need to be faster progress on thousands of remediation projects which are also stuck in the planning system. Work on existing buildings is often technically and logistically challenging because of the constraints involved but too many people are living in unsafe and unhealthy buildings – so this needs to be a priority for 2026.

Having a healthy and profitable supply chain is essential to this work so it was heartening that the government promised to finally crack down on late payment and retentions. The Department for Business and Trade consulted in the autumn on a series of measures to be part of new legislation including a possible complete ban on retentions and fines for large contractors who pay their supply chains late.

It said it would create the “strongest legal framework on late payments in the G7” to address a problem which costs the UK economy £11bn every year and closes 38 UK businesses a day.

The consultation, which is part of the government’s Small Business Plan, is backed by Prime Minister Keir Starmer who said: “From builders and electricians to freelance designers and manufacturers – too many hardworking people are being forced to spend precious hours chasing payments instead of doing what they do best – growing their businesses.

“It’s unfair, it’s exhausting, and it’s holding Britain back. So, our message is clear: it’s time to pay up.”

We simply must see progress on this in 2026 because poor payment culture led directly to the collapse of several building services firms in 2025 and continues to undermine the industry’s efforts to deliver a higher quality built environment.

However, the fact that we have an ageing workforce with more people approaching retirement than coming into the industry was identified as another huge threat to prospects for growth by many BESA members during the year.

Dozens of training centres have stopped delivering building services courses because they are suffering from a critical shortage of expert trainers and assessors. This is a fundamental problem that undermines any progress we make in promoting the sector to young people. That is why I made addressing this a priority of my presidential year. We are building on the findings of a detailed study carried out by BESA into the sector’s skills requirements and launched an excellent initiative to grow the number of qualified trainers and assessors supporting apprenticeships: the BESA ‘Skills Legacy’ programme.

This scheme encourages experienced engineers to give something back to the industry by offering their expertise to help with the delivery of apprenticeships. Engineers often undervalue their own knowledge and experience, but it has huge untapped value for both colleges and students – and they can achieve a new qualification to become certified trainers and assessors with financial assistance from the Manly Trust.

We also saw a renewed push for better clean air legislation and action on indoor air quality (IAQ) during a year when the full health threats posed by badly ventilated spaces became even more apparent.

BESA’s ‘Ventil8 Day Exchange’ , organised to celebrate the fourth World Ventilation Day, included a call for a public information campaign about the dangers to health posed by poor ventilation standards from the Association’s IAQ Group chair Adam Taylor.

“The UK had successful campaigns in the past for smoke alarms and carbon monoxide, so why not air quality in homes? It is probably because of the speed at which people die, so it is not given the same urgency, despite being responsible for many more deaths and an epidemic of respiratory illness,” said Taylor.

One solution for the UK would be to impose a legally mandated approach to ventilation system maintenance, like the one in place in Sweden, according to Taylor.

The high-profile air quality campaigner Rosamund Adoo Kissi-Debrah CBE also urged the industry to step up its efforts to improve public awareness of available solutions. She called for the industry to put its weight behind a proposed new Clean Air (Human Rights) Bill, dubbed ‘Ella’s Law’ in memory of her nine-year-old daughter who died because of air pollution in 2013.

Evidence
The proposed law has cross-party support and had its second reading in Parliament in November. It is designed to force the UK to adopt new World Health Organisation (WHO) air quality limits by 2030. It also references new research from the Royal College of Physicians, which provided evidence showing air pollution had a detrimental impact on almost every organ in the body.

“We have been talking about this for years, but now is the time for the industry to produce guidance that clearly sets out what people need to do to reduce the risk in their buildings,” said Kissi-Debrah who is honorary president of the BESA IAQ Group.

New legislation known as ‘Awaab’s Law’, also came into force on October 27, requiring social landlords to address mould and damp in their properties within 10 days. However, some experts are concerned that the law fails to address the root causes of these problems – and could end up with ‘sticking plaster’ solutions that still leave tenants’ health at risk.

This is another key issue where BESA members are trying to raise awareness about proper, long-term solutions and our resources and guidance – freely available here – can help both private and social housing landlords safeguard go beyond the superficial to properly protect their tenants from a growing health crisis.

So, a busy and challenging year but with tentative steps forward on multiple fronts, and growing hope that 2026 will be the year when progress starts to overtake frustration.