President’s Column: March 2026

Getting it right.

The BCSA has recently sent out a request for volunteers to help establish a Quality Group as it has been acknowledged that a lack of focus on this key discipline represents a gap in support for members. Ultimately, membership of the BCSA should equate to best in class quality within the structural steelwork sector, with an emphasis on competence, integrity and value. Within the wider construction industry, we are witnessing an enhanced focus on supply chain competence and the hope is that this specialist group will provide benefit to all our members.

There is always the danger that once a particular quality audit has taken place and the appropriate certification received an element of complacency can take over. Also, when working in an atmosphere of cost constraint, the question as to whether something is necessary or just “a nice to have” is often raised. However, as described in BS EN 9001, within any quality management system there should be an emphasis on continuous improvement.

In the distant past health and safety was probably viewed in the same manner but through new initiatives, retraining and continual refocus of effort, year on year improvements have become the norm. Also, reduced accident frequency and safer systems of work have in turn improved productivity. Both the health and safety, and quality standards are written around the same core processes to show that a commonality of approach should be adopted in their implementation. The similarities are intentional and as structural steel fabricators we shouldn’t forget that we are manufacturing safety critical components on a daily basis. However, on the plus side, it has been demonstrated that delivering a quality product also delivers a better bottom line.

The Construction Products Regulations and CE marking were introduced in 2014. With their introduction, many of us took the chance to upskill our workforce and improve our standards, while the BCSA made adherence a condition of membership. As always, some avoided the costs involved and with a lack of regulatory enforcement, they have not been incentivised to do otherwise. It is perhaps more surprising that consultants and contractors are still prepared to engage fabricators without the appropriate EN 1090 certification when they are clearly legally obliged to do so. It is pleasing to see that DBT have set up a project to tackle this issue but this practice should have been stopped in the first place. Hopefully, now that the control of CE/UKCA marking is falling under the remit of the Building Safety Regulator a fairer system will emerge where those that try to do the right thing are not penalised in the marketplace.

However, CE marking only actually demonstrates the ability of an organisation to manufacture a component to a defined technical standard and is not a quality mark. Our end clients want to know that when they engage a structural steelwork contractor that they have the competence in design, production and erection required to ensure the delivery of a quality product on their site. To this end, the best industry-wide measure of an individual steelwork contractor’s capabilities is the RQSC assessment for both bridgeworks and building structures. I’m of the opinion that this existing assessment process should be further enhanced to ensure that it is the de-facto badge of quality for the structural steelwork sector and thereby further reinforce the confidence of our end clients.

The BCSA is also supporting the Get It Right Initiative (GIRI) which estimates that the average cost of quality issues within construction is 21%. The formation of our own Quality Group complements this initiative and it will be to the benefit of all our members if we get this right.

Chris Durand
BCSA President