The end of ‘Just get it done’?

For generations, one of construction's most valued attributes has been its ability to solve problems. Buildings rarely arrive on site exactly as drawings suggest they will, products become unavailable, services clash and programmes leave little room for delay. Experienced contractors and engineers find solutions, adapt and keep projects moving.

At the BESA Annual Conference 2026, however, it became increasingly apparent that the regulatory environment created in the wake of the Building Safety Act is challenging some of those established ways of working. The Act featured heavily throughout the conference, but the discussion extended well beyond compliance with a new piece of legislation. Questions about competence, responsibility, ethics, contractual liability and the ability to demonstrate why decisions were made repeatedly surfaced across sessions.

For building services contractors in particular, the implications are considerable. The industry is being asked not simply to employ competent people, but to understand what competence means for particular roles and tasks, demonstrate how it has been assessed and maintained, and ensure that people do not stray into responsibilities for which they are neither competent nor authorised. At the same time, businesses are operating within a construction market where cost and programme pressures remain intense and where the instinct to solve problems quickly is deeply embedded.

Perhaps the clearest message from the conference was that this is not an issue confined to higher-risk buildings (HRBs). The Gateway regime may have provided the most visible expression of the new building safety framework, but the wider dutyholder and competence requirements affect building work much more broadly. For contractors still regarding the Building Safety Act primarily as an HRB issue, that distinction matters.

What does competent actually mean?

One of the difficulties facing the industry is deceptively simple: defining competence. During a session asking whether contractors could defend their competence systems if challenged by the regulator, Nick Mead of Laing O'Rourke argued that competence management needs to move beyond qualifications and certificates. Organisations need to understand the role somebody performs, where that role touches safety and whether the individual has the necessary skills, knowledge, experience and behaviours to carry it out.

That places the emphasis on the system surrounding the individual as much as the individual themselves. A qualified pipefitter, engineer or manager does not operate in isolation: their ability to perform competently is influenced by what has been designed and procured, the information available to them, how work is managed and the decisions they are expected to make. Competence therefore cannot simply be established at recruitment and filed away as evidence that an organisation has discharged its responsibilities.

BESA legal specialist Tyler Felix highlighted the increasing contractual implications. Competence requirements are appearing more frequently within construction contracts, including warranties that organisations are competent and will remain so. Yet there is no single, simple definition that allows contractors to demonstrate compliance by ticking a prescribed set of boxes, and important aspects of the new regime remain untested in law.

The practical challenge for businesses is consequently substantial. They need systems capable of identifying the competencies required for different roles, assessing whether individuals meet them and maintaining evidence that those assessments remain valid. For larger employers and supply chains containing many different specialist functions, this potentially becomes a significant management exercise.

It also makes competence a commercial issue. Where contractual obligations require specified levels of competence to be maintained, failure to demonstrate that requirement may ultimately affect more than regulatory compliance. It could become relevant to contractual disputes, liability and payment.

When problem solving becomes design

Against that wider background, one discussion provided a particularly vivid illustration of how the new responsibilities can collide with established construction practice: the risk of becoming an inadvertent designer.

The regulatory definition of a designer extends beyond architects and consulting engineers. Contractors and subcontractors may also assume design responsibilities where they prepare or modify a design, or instruct somebody else to do so. That means relatively routine decisions made during construction can carry implications that may not previously have been fully appreciated.

Building services work provides plenty of examples. A duct cannot follow its intended route because the opening is in the wrong place, so the installation is altered. A specified fixing, joint or product is unavailable and another is substituted. A site team encounters a clash and finds a practical way around it. On repetitive floors, work may historically have proceeded on the assumption that an earlier drawing remains applicable rather than waiting for another detailed design.

These are familiar examples of construction adapting to reality. The difficulty is determining the point at which practical problem solving becomes design and, if it does, whether the person making the decision is competent, authorised and appropriately insured to take responsibility for it.

Change therefore needs to be treated with greater care. Mead noted that even an apparently straightforward product substitution can have consequences elsewhere, potentially affecting wiring, spatial requirements or the performance of another element of the system. Brian Hughes of Derry Building Services similarly emphasised the need for people to recognise when they should stop and refer a decision rather than simply find a way to keep work moving.

That is a significant cultural challenge for an industry in which initiative and problem solving have traditionally been valued. The answer cannot realistically be to prevent people solving problems; construction is too complex for that. What is changing is the expectation that changes are controlled, their wider consequences understood and the appropriate people involved in deciding what happens next.

The conference discussion also exposed an awkward commercial question: will clients pay for fully detailed designs? More complete information before construction begins costs money and takes time. So do formal processes for managing changes once work is under way. If projects continue to be procured and programmed on the implicit assumption that contractors will resolve incomplete design as they build, the industry's new responsibilities risk colliding with the commercial conditions under which it is expected to deliver.

Evidence becomes as important as assertion

A common thread across the building safety discussions was the growing importance of evidence.

It is no longer enough for an organisation simply to state that its workforce is competent or that a change was made safely. Increasingly, it needs to be capable of showing how competence was established, who had responsibility for a particular decision, whether they were authorised to make it and how changes were assessed and controlled.

This is one of the more profound shifts created by the new regulatory environment because it moves responsibility away from informal assumptions. Experience remains enormously valuable, but experience that cannot be related to a defined role or demonstrated when challenged may no longer be sufficient on its own.

For building services businesses, this raises questions about record keeping, training and continuing professional development, but also about organisational structure. Competence needs to exist at the point where decisions are made. A company cannot necessarily compensate for an individual operating outside their competence simply by having somebody more qualified elsewhere in the organisation.

The challenge will be to create systems robust enough to provide that assurance without reducing competence management to another administrative exercise. A collection of certificates does not necessarily prove that the right person made the right decision at the right moment. The purpose of the system must remain the quality and safety of the building rather than the production of paperwork.

Responsibility cannot stop with the subcontractor

The conference also placed the industry's changing responsibilities within the much more difficult context of the failures exposed by Grenfell.

Dr Barbara Lane, independent chair of the Building Advisory Committee for the Building Safety Regulator, argued that Grenfell demonstrated systemic industry failings rather than an isolated failure. She pointed to the continuing presence of unsafe cladding on buildings and stressed the need for integrity and rigour in both improving existing buildings and delivering new ones.

That led into the question of what happens when people encounter something they believe is wrong. The SectorScope asked Lane about whistleblowing and the position of subcontractors who may recognise unsafe or unethical practice but fear the commercial consequences of challenging businesses further up the supply chain.

Her response went to the heart of the industry's accountability problem. Responsibility cannot simply be pushed downwards to the individual subcontractor, particularly if speaking out places that business's livelihood at risk while others within the project structure avoid responsibility. There are whistleblowing mechanisms within the building safety framework, but relying on individuals to put themselves in commercially vulnerable positions cannot be the industry's principal safety mechanism.

The issue connects closely with competence. A competent person needs to be able to exercise judgement, challenge decisions and raise concerns. Organisations therefore need not only people capable of recognising problems but commercial and management structures in which those concerns can be voiced and acted upon.

That takes the debate beyond technical competence and into organisational behaviour and ethics. The safer industry envisaged by the post-Grenfell reforms depends on people being accountable for their decisions, but it also depends on businesses creating conditions in which responsible decisions can actually be made.

Regulation meets commercial reality

All of this is happening against a difficult economic backdrop.

The conference's market discussions identified substantial opportunities for building services contractors. Data centres and AI infrastructure, power and grid investment, healthcare, defence, water infrastructure and retrofit all offer potential areas of growth, while the return of PFI assets to the NHS could generate further demand for upgrading and maintaining existing buildings.

But speakers also cautioned against confusing an impressive project pipeline with work that will necessarily reach contractors. Power constraints, skills shortages and supply chain pressures remain significant obstacles, while cost inflation continues to affect project viability. Businesses were encouraged to be selective about the work they pursue, with particular concern around the risks associated with long-term fixed-price contracts in an uncertain cost environment.

There is a revealing tension between these commercial conditions and the regulatory direction of travel. Contractors are being required to introduce more rigorous competence systems, document decisions, control changes and be clearer about where responsibility lies while simultaneously being asked to compete on price, maintain programmes and absorb considerable commercial risk.

Those requirements should not inherently conflict. Indeed, better design information and clearer responsibilities ought ultimately to improve project delivery. But they will conflict where procurement models rely on incomplete design, unrealistic programmes or the expectation that problems can simply be resolved informally once work reaches site.

The Building Safety Act could therefore have consequences well beyond regulatory compliance. If its principles are applied as intended, they are likely to influence the way projects are designed, procured, priced and programmed and the allocation of risk between clients, designers, main contractors and specialist subcontractors.

A different definition of getting the job done

The BESA Annual Conference did not present an industry that has completed this transition. If anything, the discussions demonstrated how many questions remain.

Competence is becoming more important at precisely the point when businesses are discovering how difficult it can be to define and evidence consistently. Contractors need greater clarity over their design responsibilities, while routine practices such as substitutions and site modifications require more careful consideration. Individuals are expected to exercise judgement and challenge unsafe decisions, but the commercial structures surrounding them do not always make that easy. Meanwhile, the industry's economic pressures have not disappeared simply because its regulatory responsibilities have increased.

What is emerging is a different expectation of how construction demonstrates that it is in control of its work.

The ability to solve problems will remain essential. So will experience, initiative and the practical knowledge of specialist contractors. But those qualities increasingly need to sit within systems capable of showing who was competent to make a decision, what authority they had, what information they considered and how the consequences were assessed.

For an industry accustomed to proving itself through the finished building, that represents a substantial change. The Building Safety Act is requiring construction to demonstrate not simply that it reached the right result, but that the people and processes that produced it were competent, accountable and capable of standing up to scrutiny.

The challenge now is to make that level of rigour part of normal construction practice without allowing it to become an exercise in compliance paperwork. If the discussions at the BESA Annual Conference are any indication, the industry understands that change is under way. The harder task is working out what it means in practice — and ensuring that the commercial environment allows people to do what the new regime increasingly expects of them.