Industry View: Why renovation and retrofit are the real prize for scaffolders
The housing market matters to scaffolding contractors and not just those working directly for housebuilders. It's a signal for the wider economy, and the policies shaping it today will define where the sector's work comes from for decades.
In this month's Scaffolding Insider, Rico Wojtulewicz, Head of Policy and Market Insight at the National Federation of Builders (NFB), gives his expert Industry View on the state of the housing market and what it means for scaffolding contractors.
His verdict on new build? Tough, but don't panic. While 2026 sales have improved slightly on last year, housebuilders are contending with rising material costs, the incoming Building Safety Levy, mandatory solar panels and a raft of policies pushing up the cost of building new homes. Rico's message to scaffolders is not to worry too much about new build yet; projects will be built out, the solar mandate arriving in March 2027 creates a considerable pipeline of work at height, and the Government is enabling councils to build to keep supply coming.
There is a longer-term shift to watch however. The Future Homes Standard is nudging the biggest housebuilders responsible for around 71% of homes towards timber and steel frame and factory-built volumetric housing, which could make a large share of new build less reliant on traditional scaffolding over the next 25 years. Rico suggests the industry should be thinking now about how scaffolding supports assembly as well as build.
But the real opportunity, he argues, lies in renovation and retrofit. Cladding remediation has barely begun, and the extension of the Defective Premises Act from 10 to 30 years, alongside the Building Safety Act, is turning what were once short remediation jobs into multi-year programmes of work. Add the UK's commitment to retrofit all buildings by 2050, covering some 12.5 million traditionally built homes, and the pipeline for access and scaffolding contractors is enormous. Even the growth of air source heat pumps points the same way: with nine million flats in the UK, someone has to provide the safe platforms for engineers fitting heat exchange units to building exteriors.
Rico's conclusion is clear: new build will bounce back, but renovation and retrofit are the business opportunities of the future and because those opportunities are being created by policy, contractors should keep a close eye on what politicians implement next.
Read the full Industry View in the latest edition of Scaffolding Insider: https://nasc.org.uk/insights/magazine.html