CWCT AGM AND MEMBERS' MEETING 2025 – REVIEW

What a fantastic day!

300 people joined us for our 2025 AGM and Members’ meeting on 25 September, to great success.  It was lovely to see many familiar faces, but also great to see lots of new people joining us for excellent presentations, important dissemination, discussion and networking.

The day started with updates from our Chair, Saverio Pasetto, Head of Facades at Skanska UK, our Finance Director Richard White of RSM, and David Metcalfe, Director of CWCT, who provided a review of CWCT activities over the past year.  We focused on the importance of people, collaboration, feedback and engagement, and spoke about the membership research project that we have recently completed in order to help CWCT better serve its Members.  The nearly 700 responses received are already informing CWCT’s strategic direction.

We also launched our Embodied Carbon calculation tool, in collaboration with WSP, which is now available for Members to download from the Cladding Forum.  This is a really exciting development and we are very keen to hear from users of the tool – please provide your feedback and share your results.  To recognise their contribution, it was announced that WSP will be a honorary Sponsor of CWCT for 2026.  

Finally, we asked some questions to better understand Members’ views and experience of the Building Safety Act (BSA) and the Gateway 2 process in particular.  We received a great response to this, and some very interesting responses.  Gateway 2 is still a key industry challenge and further guidance is required.  Of those in attendance, 43 had been involved in a successful Gateway 2 application, while 20 people’s application had been rejected.  We urge people to share their experiences with us, to help inform our current Gateway 2 guidance.

Following on from our questions, the morning session focused on the Building Safety Act. 

Our first speaker was Neil Hope-Collins from the Building Safety Regulator.  Neil provided a great insight into the Regulator’s experience of Gateway 2 applications and gave some very useful guidance on how to satisfy that building regulations have been met.  This is absolutely key – clearly demonstrating to the Regulator that not only the design is compliant, but that there are procedures in place to ensure the completed building is compliant is essential.  Following Neil’s presentation, we discussed the importance of collaboration between the Regulator and industry to provide further guidance to help solve the current issues, and we will be following this up soon. 

Next, Ben Oram from Buckley Gray Yeoman and Paul Owen from BDP spoke how the BSA is changing the way that buildings are designed, and in particular highlighted the work of the Architectural Technial Leads Group (ATLG) and how they are responding to the new regime.  A key point raised was the need for clear and transparent information from manufacturers regarding fire testing, to give designers the confidence they need to ensure their designs are compliant.

Finally, we heard from Caleb Hewison from Colorminium, sharing their experience of dealing with Gateway 2 from the perspective of a specialist contractor.  One of the key messages highlighted was the need to provide a very clear narrative when completing a Gateway 2 application.  The clearer the application, the easier it will be for the Regulator to understand the submission and be confident that the project is fully compliant with the relevant regulations.

The final session before lunch was something different.  Nick O’Shea, spoke very powerfully and emotionally about mental health in the construction, sharing his story of stress, anxiety, addiction and nearly losing everything.  Following his experience, Nick is now a passionate advocate for improving mental health, and his presentation really resonated with everyone in attendance.  Mental health still isn’t given the significance it deserves, and we all need to what we can to change that.

Our afternoon session focussed on façade access.  Firstly we heard from Silvia Ilardi from Arup who set the scene for the session and gave us a fantastic overview of key access requirements and strategies available, to help ensure that our facades can be safely and effectively accessed for cleaning and maintenance.

This was followed by Ian Hagan and Matt Smith of Clear Line Maintenance, who showed us some of the examples that they have had to deal with when a suitable access strategy has not been considered as part of the building.  Their presentation really highlighted the importance of considering this as early in the design as possible, to help ensure that our facades can be routinely accessed safety, efficiently, and economically. 

We rounded off the day with a panel discussion on the topic.  On stage were Lynn Summerfield from British Land, Daniel Gruesser of Turner & Townsend alinea, Will Bradshaw from Façade Access Solutions and Sean Murphy from WSP.  The panellists discussed topics including cost, conflicts between providing access equipment and roof space and amenity space, different options/strategies available, the role of new technology and so on.  This provided a really interesting end to the day’s proceedings.

The day ended with drinks, further discussion and networking overlooking the river.

Overall, the event was a great success.  Our thanks to all the amazing speakers and to everyone attending for making it a memorable day.

Presentations will be available for Members to download via the Cladding Forum soon.

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