Good intentions

President’s Column: April 2026

The regional meetings of the BCSA always contain an agenda item on the state of trade, which often prompts a lively discussion. It’s fair to say that for a long period of time now members have been fairly downbeat regarding future prospects, facing reduced workload and projects just not progressing. However, since the start of this year there have been encouraging signs that the construction market has finally turned a corner and at last, I like many others, was able to report some increased optimism for the coming six months. However, between filling in the report and attending the Irish regional meeting at the start of March, the USA and Israel attacked Iran and everything changed overnight.

During the meeting, several members expressed obvious concerns for the future regarding energy costs and client confidence, but another more pressing issue emerged regarding the actual supply of steel from the rolling mills. The main producers all announced a temporary suspension of the sale of structural sections to the UK and Ireland markets, while they assessed the impact of the war on material and energy costs. It seems inevitable that there will be a rise in section prices coming, but the more immediate impact for ourselves were both supply to existing contracts and the inability to provide price surety for clients on new work. Then, in the middle of March the long-awaited UK Steel Strategy was finally published.

The strategy has the long term aims of both ensuring greater home-grown production of steel with less reliance on imports through the use of quotas and tariffs, while at the same time achieving overall decarbonisation with the adoption of EAF. These aims are laudable and provide reassurance to our steel producers regarding their market going forward and in turn provide the confidence to carry out the investment required in their production facilities.

However, it should be noted that the structural steelwork industry is not confined to the producers alone and at present imported fabricated steelwork will not be subject to quotas. It is hard to foresee a future where steel produced in the UK and EU would be cheaper than imported raw material from elsewhere in the world, so it seems inevitable that the steel bought by UK and Irish fabricators will increase in cost in turn making locally fabricated steel more expensive. This opens two possibilities; developers may decide to build in other materials all together, reducing the overall market share for structural steelwork or they will simply opt to import fabricated steelwork. Another issue is that the product codes describing fabricated steel can be manipulated and evidence from other countries has shown that it is possible to avoid raw material important quotas by delivering material with minimal fabricated content.

There are inherent dangers when an admirable long term intention is put in place without fully considering the potential short to medium term implications for the companies actually working within that market. I recently read an article in The Telegraph regarding the tribulations of a car salesman trying to meet EV sales targets. Again, no one had a problem with the objective of trying to replace ICE vehicles, but the process itself is causing serious harm to the UK and EU car industry. The EU has a deadline stating that from 2035 90% of all new cars sold must be zero emission. Consumers within the UK and EU remain reluctant to change to EVs and as a result car companies resort to heavy discounting to meet their sales targets with prices that are simply unsustainable.

However, in the background China with its lower labour and production costs can build comparable vehicles considerably cheaper and has gone from zero to a 10% market share within Britain in only 18 months, increasing the pressure on local suppliers. While the objective is noble, the process, implementation and lack of flexibility has hurt our local industry and we need to ensure that the Steel Strategy does not go down the same route. There is much that is good here but we must be careful as the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

Chris Durand
BCSA President