BESA President Adrian Hurley reflects on a tumultuous 2024 and looks ahead to potential business growth in 2025 despite extremely challenging economic conditions.
BESA’s 120th anniversary year has been extraordinary and has pitched the Association and its members into the heart of some of the country’s most pressing issues.
How about this for a list of major topics that all gathered pace during 2024?
- Major weather events highlighting the climate crisis and the need for net zero
- The Building Safety Act and the Grenfell Tower public inquiry report
- The collapse of ISG and its impact on supply chains
- The growing skills shortages – and the pressing need to engage with the next generation
- Rising alarm over the role of indoor air quality in a UK health and wellbeing crisis
- The huge growth in heat pump installations and the rapid expansion of heat networks
- Government commitment to Minimum Energy Efficiency Standards for all rental properties…and its plan to build 1.5 million new homes.
- The transformation of refrigerant use in air conditioning and refrigeration
The closure of coal fired power generation in the UK (ahead of schedule) was also a significant milestone. This happened at a time of intense focus on rising domestic energy bills and the very real threat of fuel poverty faced by many families, but a major part of the UK’s response is to deliver long-term energy security by moving more rapidly than most other countries towards a future powered by renewables.
This has huge implications for our sector.
Everything on our list also highlighted the importance of retrofitting buildings. We cannot build our way out of trouble as we replace buildings at the rate of less than 1% a year. We simply must improve what we already have.
The UK has 30 million existing buildings…most could do with an upgrade, not just to improve their energy performance, but also to make them healthier indoor spaces for people.
Poor indoor air quality, damp and mould contributes to thousands of premature deaths and tens of thousands of cases of respiratory illness and heart problems.
BESA members have a big part to play in tackling this problem and I am proud that we are in the forefront of this. The recent World Ventilation Day, an initiative launched by BESA three years ago in conjunction with partners all round the world, is one example of our desire to lead on both the technical and public awareness fronts.
We are also driving the building safety agenda forward.
The Grenfell Tower public inquiry published its final report into the disaster which raised some serious questions about the competence and compliance of our industry. We are in the full glare of public scrutiny and BESA is determined that we do not shirk our responsibility to ensure buildings are safer for the future.
Our ‘Play it Safe’ initiative and guidance were designed to cut through some of the complications for contractors and help them step up to their responsibilities.
The launch of this campaign also took us into the exciting world of Virtual Reality with our specially adapted headsets launched at our national conference in October They are now touring the country to help people visualise what building safety legislation means to us all.
However, an industry-wide survey carried out by AMA Research on behalf of the Association, found that we have a long way to go. Very few contractors are taking meaningful action to comply with the new legislation. Although 88% of respondents showed some awareness of the Act with almost a third claiming to be “fully aware”, only 9% said they had actually done anything about it.
Pleasingly, there were higher levels of awareness among BESA members than the industry as a whole, but detailed understanding of roles and responsibilities is mixed and vary by building and project type.
Compliance and legal understanding of the legislation, which came into force in 2022, are proving to be the biggest challenges for organisations who told researchers they needed more training and a closer working relationship with the office of the Building Safety Regulator to embed the changes required to improve building safety.
Our aim in commissioning the research was to get a clearer picture of the level of industry awareness, understanding and readiness so we can adapt the services and specialist knowledge BESA provides to support the industry.
The report should also help the Regulator gain a better understanding of the sector’s position and the challenges it faces, so that it can also improve the way it supports compliance.
Economic challenges
However, we need to put lack of progress on this front in a wider context. The current economic conditions for our industry are as challenging as I can remember. We have a new government in place that is making all the right noises about driving growth in construction and reforming planning to speed up development, but margins remain very tight, labour shortages continue to drive up costs and undermine quality, and the dysfunctional nature of many contracts continue to place businesses in jeopardy.
The fact that ISG collapsed just two weeks after the publication of the Grenfell Tower public inquiry report was a juxtaposition that should not be lost on anyone. Attempting to get companies to prioritise quality and safety when many clients continue to push for low cost and speed of delivery is extremely difficult – if not impossible.
In his recent article for Building magazine, industry analyst and campaigner Mark Farmer said construction had repeatedly proved that it was incapable of reforming itself.
“The industry’s trading model of adversarial and layered transactions to maximise risk transfer has been set and established over decades in response to inevitable boom and bust cycles”.
He added that the industry would always find a way to “game the system” and “demonstrate superficial conformity” – whatever that system looked like. You could probably include the multiple late payment ‘codes’ and ‘initiatives’ we have seen over the past few decades that have singularly failed to change much.
“Even a much overdue return to process and competency-driven regulatory oversight in the wake of the Grenfell fire is too little and too late to force a wholesale rethink on business models,” Farmer wrote rather bleakly.
He says it will take a massive legislative effort covering prompt payment, project bank accounts, responsible procurement, self-employment v PAYE incentives, workforce licensing, more stringent building regulations and a consumer rights revolution to force the necessary change at an industry-wide level.
Could we expect to see such an ambitious programme of reform kicking off under our new government in 2025? I think we will need to see some movement on this front because, as our new political leaders will quickly see, their ambitions for growth, for net zero, for a better quality of built environment will be quickly foiled if the industry cannot make its financial models work.
We need to be able to invest in our people, our technologies and our supply chains to deliver better, safer and more sustainable buildings.
We are rightly proud of our history and the impact BESA has made over the years, and we will continue to support our members and attempt to lead the industry into better times. This is all part of how we remain focused on the historic goals of our founders to create a better, safer and more sustainable built environment for all.
That is something that never changes.
Safe havens
We should never lose sight of the fact that our skills make it possible for buildings to be designed, built, and maintained as ‘safe havens’ for people from the threats of pollution, extreme temperatures, noise etc.
This goal is made even more important by the impact of climate change which is manifesting itself through more extreme weather events, overheating in buildings, and damaging air quality.
BESA staff are doing some fine work to help members cope with the myriad challenges we face in 2025 through skills consultations, an impressive array of training programmes, the production of up-to-date technical publications (such as the much-admired new DW145), competitions like WorldSkills, groundbreaking initiatives like the Play it Safe campaign and World Ventilation Day – all brought together and highlighted in our hugely successful annual conference and industry awards.
These events get better and better each year and are highly valued throughout the industry.
We must get better at engaging with future generations – and that will be a priority for the Association in 2025. We have already seen very rapid take up of the free places we provided on BESA’s School Engagement and Engineering Discovery (SEED) Programme to give members the skills they need to inspire children to follow us into built environment engineering.
The growing membership and influence of the NextGen Network is another exciting development on that front.
With the emergence of new modern methods of construction, processes revolutionised by the digital age through AI and other smart tools, we must support these, our emerging generation…who will lead us into a new era of building engineering services.
As we face up to another period of major transition, the Association is, once again, providing leadership, guidance, and expertise to ensure members can seize the opportunities for growth and diversification that are essential to the future of our businesses and the people we employ.
And…we never lose sight of the fact that engineers have a particular responsibility to always do the right thing for the greater good.
Merry Christmas, Happy New Year…and all good wishes for 2025.